Story Source: ClarionLedger.com
Story Author: Billy Watkins
Published Date: May 4, 2008
Finger-lickin’ good: Blues Hall of Fame welcomes Hubert Sumlin
Hubert Sumlin had never seen so many guitars. American brands. Japanese. German. The walls were covered with them.
It was near midnight in April 1970 at Clapton’s home. They had just finished what would come to be known as The London Howlin’ Wolf Sessions, a studio jam that included the Rolling Stones, Ringo Starr, Steve Winwood and Klaus Voorman.
“I can’t take no guitar from you, Eric,” Sumlin said.
“I want you to,” Clapton insisted.
Sumlin then spotted a guitar case on the floor and opened it. He pulled out a black mid-1950s Fender Stratocaster. He ran his fingers up and down the neck a few times, cradled it against his belly.
“This one … I’ll take this one, Eric,” Sumlin said.
The words made Clapton’s whole body tremble. “No, Hubert, not that one. Please, man. Not that one.”
Clapton had just recently purchased it in a small music store in Nashville for $100. It was the guitar of his dreams, the way it played and spoke.
“This is the one, man,” Sumlin said.
Several minutes passed. Sumlin kept playing. Clapton kept shaking.
“OK, Hubert,” Clapton finally said. “But if I want this guitar back one day, can I buy it from you?”
Sumlin shook his head. “Naw, man, I’m gonna play it a while, and then I’ll give it back to you. You ain’t gotta buy it.”
After he returned to the U.S., “I think everybody in Eric’s family -including his butler - called me about that guitar,” the 76-year-old Sumlin recalls now. “But I told them the same thing I told Eric. ‘I’ll give it back one day.’ ”
Hubert Sumlin, one of the Top 100 guitarists of all time according to Rolling Stone magazine and scheduled to be inducted Wednesday in The Blues Hall of Fame at ceremonies in Tunica, grew up on a plantation just outside Greenwood.
There was one thing he couldn’t pick: Cotton.
“My daddy told me I was the worst he’d ever seen,” says Sumlin, small as a child and only 5-foot-3, 140 pounds as an adult. “I couldn’t pick 50 pounds in a day.” His 12 brothers and sisters could pick that much by mid-morning.
So his daddy, John Wesley Sumlin, put him to work in the wagon, stacking the cotton and helping haul it to the gin.
When the work was done, he would sit and watch his oldest brother, A.D., play a contraption nailed to their house that resembled a guitar. Sort of. It consisted of baling wire and one of his mama’s snuff cans. He used a Coke bottle as a slide.
“Man, the sound he could could get out of that … that boy ought to been recording.
“He finally put four strings up there and started showing me how to play.”
But one day A.D. came home and found one of the strings broken. “I didn’t break it,” Sumlin says. “It came unwound from the nail. But he thought I did. And that boy hit me so hard, it knocked me up under the house. I saw stars.”
Sumlin picked up half a cement block. “I was gonna hurt him,” he says. But when he raised it to hit A.D., the weight of the block settled against Sumlin’s frail chest and slowly pushed him to the ground.
A.D. stayed around long enough to remove the block off his 7-year-old brother, then took out running. “He was gone three days,” Sumlin says, laughing. “He knew my mama was gonna get him for hittin’ me.
“She told me that evening, ‘I’ll get you something to play.’ ”
His mother, Claudia, worked at a funeral home in Greenwood for $8 a week. She walked four miles there, four miles back.
Sumlin met her on the gravel road one day as she was headed home. She was carrying a guitar.
“Spent her whole week’s pay for it,” he says. “And just when she gave it to me, it started raining. I took off for the house, hoping the water wouldn’t ruin it.”
He kept that guitar for nearly 20 years. But he got caught with it in a rainstorm, again, and the guitar popped like a balloon the first time he strummed it.
Sumlin kept the neck. It’s in a bank vault. “Might be worth something some day, who knows?” he says.
He can’t remember not loving the blues. The sheer raw sound of it didn’t seem to enter his ears. Instead, it went straight to his heart, then bounced around inside him like a crazed pinball. If he was holding a guitar, it came out his fingers.
When he was 10, he learned that one of his heroes, Howlin’ Wolf, was playing a small club near his home.
“I knew I had to see Wolf some sort of way,” he says. “So I stacked Coca-Cola crates up near a window and just stood there and watched him. Someone came along and snatched them out from under me, and I grabbed hold of a big exhaust fan right inside the window.”
Howlin’ Wolf heard the ruckus. He went over and pulled Sumlin through the window, told the club manager to give him a chair but nothing - not even water - to drink.
Sumlin and a buddy, James Cotton, began playing in local clubs early in the evening, before the large crowds arrived. Sumlin and Cotton were underage, but their music was good. People tossed nickels and dimes into their open guitar cases. Wolf heard about them, then went to see them perform.
In 1954, Wolf hired the 22-year-old Sumlin to play guitar in his Chicago-based band. Wolf paid for Sumlin to take lessons at the Chicago School of Music. “My teacher … only man I ever saw who could play opera on a guitar,” Sumlin says.
Over the next 22 years, until Wolf’s death in 1976, Wolf became like Sumlin’s second father.
Along with the love came discipline.
“The man fired me in front of 700 people one night,” says Sumlin. “This was right after I joined the band. Told me I was playing too fast with my pick, that I was running off and leaving him, wasn’t giving him time to get his words out.
“Then he said, ‘You’re fired.’ ”
Sumlin wondered if it was really him or if Wolf was starting to slow down a bit. After all, he was twice Sumlin’s age.
“But I took his words to heart,” Sumlin says. “I put my pick down and started playing the guitar with my fingers until they were so sore I couldn’t play no more.”
He slept with his guitar that night, his hands wrapped around the neck.
“Something came to me,” Sumlin says. “A voice said, ‘You can do this. Just be yourself.’
“I got up out of the bed. My fingers weren’t sore no more. And I started playing. I could feel the notes. I could feel the love. I could feel everything by playing with my fingers.
“Wolf was right.”
Music history changed that night. Sumlin’s new finger licks became the trademark of Howlin’ Wolf’s records.
“Hubert’s style really came to define the later Howlin’ Wolf,” says blues historian Scott Barretta. “Hubert became so inventive, so unpredictable as a guitar player. It was Hubert’s guitar that drove all those later recordings.” Songs like Killing Floor and Shake For Me and Hidden Charms.
But the truth is, only the hard-core music fans know that’s Sumlin playing the licks.
“Those sidemen to the major acts … there’s not a lot of information about them,” says Jim Brewer, founder of the Mississippi Musicians Hall of Fame. “You can’t even go to libraries and read about these people. A guy like Hubert, I know his guitar playing but I don’t know who he is.”
Sumlin has more stories than any book has pages.
In 1964, he crossed the Berlin Wall, into communist-run East Berlin, to record his first solo tunes in a studio where East German soldiers carried machine guns. It was quietly arranged by Horst Lippmann, a wealthy West German musician who owned a string of hotels.
“The man gave me a sack full of cash,” Sumlin says, “and I spent every bit of it.”
He was on stage in Liverpool one night when a dude strolled from the audience and gently took the guitar from Wolf’s hands and began playing it with his teeth.
It was Jimi Hendrix.
Just five years ago, Sumlin was a guest performer with the Rolling Stones at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Clapton and the Stones’ Keith Richards played on Sumlin’s 2005 Grammy-nominated album, About Them Shoes.
Sumlin is called a “genius” in a tribute written by established blues musician Bob Margolin on Sumlin’s official Web site.
Sumlin, who resides in Austin, Texas, but still plays frequently in Mississippi, says he’s just been “lucky and blessed.”
He is not taking lightly his induction into the Blues Hall of Fame. “I never thought this would happen when I was still alive,” he says. “You know how it works. Man dies, then people talk about how good he was. I just can’t thank the people enough. This means everything to me.”
Just like he promised Clapton, he gave the guitar back.
“I kept it a couple of weeks,” Sumlin says. “I knew we were gonna be playing Montreal at the same time, so I went over to his hotel. Police led me to his room, and Eric met me at the door. He grabbed me. Hugged me. He said, ‘Anything I can ever do for you, you just let me know.’ ”
Clapton went on to play and write most of his greatest hits on that guitar, which became affectionately known as “Blackie.”
It was donated by Clapton in 2004 to the Guitar Center in Corona, Calif., for auction, with proceeds going to Clapton’s Crossroads drug and alcohol rehabilitation center in Antigua.
Winning bid: $959,000.
But who can say what a guitar is really worth?
“I’ve been married three times,” Sumlin says. “But right after we got married, my first wife up and asked me, ‘Which do you love more, your guitar or me?’ Why didn’t she ask me that before we got married?”
Sumlin answered her, honestly.
“My guitar,” he said.
The marriage lasted three days.
To comment on this story, call Billy Watkins at (601) 961-7282.
