A generation after his death, and a half century since he and his eponymous blues band forever changed the mosaic of the international musical scene, the legend of Paul Butterfield stands as an archetypal pillar of American folk-lore.
“He Was Music”
-Virginia Butterfield
With a collection of collaborators that included, over the course of his diverse (but tragically shortened) career, every giant of the first wave of American Urban Blues—Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, James Cotton and B.B. King, to name but a fraction— to the groundbreaking Paul Butterfield Blues Band and the brilliant interplay of members Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, Mark Naftalin, Sam Lay, Billy Davenport and Jerome Arnold; to later recordings that featured Muddy Waters, Bonnie Raitt, Levon Helm, Maria Muldaur, Nick Gravenites, Amos Garret, and David Sanborn; to impromptu performances and concerts across the country with Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers, Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton, Rick Danko, Levon Helm and many others; to featured billing at the Newport Folk Festival (1964), Monterey Pop (1967), Woodstock (1969) and the Band’s Last Waltz (1973), Paul Butterfield’s virtuoso harmonica playing, soulful vocals, inspired song-writing and brilliant band-leadership moved the burgeoning youth culture of the mid- and late- 1960s to an appreciation of blues music that transcended racial, economic and political lines. Without the benefit of ever coming close to a hit record, without a gimmick- laden stage show (save Mike Bloomfield’s occasional pre-KISS fire-eating act), without glamour, hype or bowing to trends, Paul Butterfield brought the music he loved to millions of Americans, who, all these years later, still stop his surviving band members to reminisce about the potency, power and purity Paul Butterfield and the various incarnations of his Blues Band brought to the concert stages, night clubs and festival grounds of a young nation, war-torn, reeling from the assassination of its president yet hopeful and full of youthful vigor.
“Paul Butterfield turned sixteen the year that the Russians launched the first space ship, but for Paul Butterfield the most important thing that happened that year was when he went to hear Muddy Waters for the first time at Smitty’s corner, 35th and Indiana, one of the honky tonk’s growing out of the razor-poor soul of the Black Blues Belt on Chicago’s South Side…”
-Alfred G. Aronowitz
Liner Notes, In My Own Dream, 1968
Born in Chicago in 1942, Butterfield’s first exposure to music was through his father, a successful attorney who would gather the family together to sing and accompany themselves instrumentally on a regular basis. Paul would play flute and his brother clarinet at these family jam sessions. Some of Paul’s earliest memories were of these sessions and of the wealth of music played in the various neighborhoods of his hometown by the people who settled there from all parts of this nation, and the world. In addition to the black immigrants from the deltas and cottonfields of the Deep South, there were refugees from Eastern Europe, “hillbillies” from the mountainous regions of Kentucky and Tennessee, Jews and Poles, Russians and Puerto Ricans. As a child driving with his family through these wards that made up one of America’s great cities, young Paul was affected by not only the variety of the music, but by the various tonalities. As his friend and band-mate Michael Bloomfield would later say, “It all sounded like it came from the same place. Ghetto musics of the world are sort of related to each other. Musically, even the scales. Suffering don’t know no color, don’t know no nationality.
SAM LAY:
“White, black Paul plays the blues and I’m gonna play with him. I was there with him, I helped him open the door. A lot of the white clubs wasn’t high on blues. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band came on the scene working out of Big Johns on Wells Street. We were originally a quartet, but we hooked up with Mike Bloomfield at Big John’s and it took off from there. There was never a racial issue. Look at Butterfield’s personnel: it was half and half.“
“We were playing the black music “Negro Music” — we couldn’t get into white clubs. When Butterfield came on the scene, they started to hire bands. Places that didn’t even have bands were hiring blues bands. Butterfield opened the door for blues and he was the cause of a lot of blacks playing cause he swung the doors wide open for blues. Now they got places they call the House of Blues. I was there with him.“
Years ago, even as late as back in the fifties when all this rock and roll came out, they were saying ‘Rock and roll has got to go’ and the djs were smashing the records right over the turntable. Just prejudiced people. Elvis Presley took Junior Parker’s Train I Ride Is 16 Coaches Long, people hired him, though they didn’t want to.
Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters…Folks wouldn’t allow their kids to listen to it. If they had a janitor or maid or housekeeper and they had a radio going, they would make them cut that radio off. ‘I don’t want my kids listening to that ni**er music.’ Somehow or another, Butterfield was playing, making the club owners happy on both sides of town.“
“He started over at the Blue Flame. Paul was walking in the rain, playing his harmonica. Smokey (Smothers) gave him a ride and let him jam with him. There was nothing in that place but blacks, it was a black club over on Lake Michigan. Paul come in that night and the owners the next week asked Smokey Can you get that white boy? Then the crowd started askin’ “Y’all gonna have that white boy down there tonight? That’s the way they were saying it. Every week there’d be a few more whites in the audience; people would be coming in just to see Butterfield.“
“We were making seven dollars a night with The Wolf. That’s what we were making when President Kennedy was killed. So Paul got an offer to play on the North Side at a place called Big John’s, which had been, up to then, a folk club. I knew Paul from when he used to sit in over at the Blue Flame where I worked two nights a week with Howling Wolf, getting $12.50. a night. I had been with Wolf six years and Butterfield came in and said “I know where we can make twenty dollars a night for four nights.” We put the band together with no rehearsals. I went for 20 dollars a lot more than the $12.50.
Then we started recording. Everywhere we would go, it was amazing to me that things just bloomed for us so quickly. At Big Johns, we always had a job. As long as we were in town, nobody could play Big Johns. We drew a crowd every night. I’m glad I was a part of it. They looked up to me like I was their daddy, I only knew what I learned from Wolf and Little Walter. It was good for us both, they honestly listened to me.”
MIKE BLOOMFIELD:
“It was just beautiful to be in that environment and to be accepted in- to that environment as a man on the terms of those people was a flattering thing. If you shucked you had no business being there. You’d not only be a white kid, you’d be a fool. And Paul by that time, he was a specialty act. It was a freak show. Our White Star. Irish white guy plays the blues. Man, he had horns. He held his own, my God man, he’d walk in a place and Little Walter and Junior Wells would put down their harmonicas they’d put ’em down and say, ‘Get that cat up there.’
“I knew Paul and was scared of him because he was so so accepted, so much a part of that scene. I would sit at a table with Muddy Waters and Cotton and they’d be looking at Paul and they’d be just beaming at him. ‘That’s my boy, that’s my boy,’ that’s what their eyes were just shining out and saying.”
ELVIN BISHOP:
“In 1960 I came from Tulsa Oklahoma on a Fulbright Scholarship to the University of Chicago. At that time only a handful of white people were into blues and we gravitated together pretty quick. Mostly the folk thing was on then and blues was considered part of folk music and you could go and meet these people who were crazy about blues. I met Butterfield the first day I was in Chicago. Sometimes I’d see Nick (Gravenites) with Paul and we all played in different combinations before we got the Butterfield Blues Band together.“
“When I first came to Chicago, I was square as a pool table and twice as green.”
“Hound Dog Taylor, JT Brown, Junior Wells, Smokey Smothers all were on the scene. I met Smokey amd he was a real nice guy. He taught me how to cook in the kitchen and later on the bandstand. He gave me a real appreciation soul food. We kinda shocked a lot of college kids by just doing what we were interested in doing and hoping somebody would go for it. For me it was a culture shock coming to the big town of Chicago from Tulsa but I wanted to do it — the music — real bad. I just played guitar 24 hours a day when I got with Butterfield. We played the same club six nights per week six shows per night and seven on Saturday. It was a Lucky time, the 60s, because things were so much more wide open, not a formula thing. There was a nice window of opportunity for a lot of people to get started. It was a real good learning experience playing with Sam and Jerome and Paul. We all from totally different backgrounds, musically and personally. Bloomfield was a city boy, a definite rich boy playing in bands since he was 13, 14. He knew a million notes and lots of music I didn’t know. As I said, it was a good learning experience and we all basically got along real good. A lucky situation for me to be in.
Elvin has gone on to major commercial and critical success way beyond Fooled Around and Fell in Love and has become, as Little Smokey puts it, a wizzard on that slide guitar.“
MARK NAFTALIN:
“Moving to Chicago in 1961 and enrolling at the University of Chicago, Mark Naftalin continued his pursuit of blues piano by sitting in (from time to time) at the campus “twist parties,” where the resident band leader was blues singer and harmonica player Paul Butterfield, whose band featured guitarist Elvin Bishop.“
“After graduating from the University of Chicago in 1964, Naftalin moved to New York City for a year of study at the Mannes College of Music. On September 9, 1965, at a midtown-Manhattan recording studio, he sat in with Paul Butterfield and his band again — playing organ, this time, and sharing solos with Paul and the group’s new lead guitarist, Michael Bloomfield, on a session warm-up song. As the session continued, Naftalin was invited to keep playing, and then to join the band, with whom he toured for two-and-a-half years and recorded four albums, including the classic East-West. The results of that fateful session — including the warm-up song, “Thank You Mr. Poobah” — are on the Elektra album The Paul Butterfield Blues Band which was the group’s first album release.“
“One day at the printing plant,” recalls this writer, “I couldn’t get the piano solo to Get Out Of My Life Woman out of my head and I wrote Mark a fan letter. I found out he was an artist and we published an article about his paintings (Mark Naftalin Paints The Blues by Ralph Musco) and brought him to a quasi-major art dealer who showed the paintings at Artexpo and had a grand piano on hand which Mark played for his adoring public. One thing I strongly recommend are the two CDs he released of live Butterfield shows on his Sounds Like A Winner Label. East West Live features three versions of the cut with one going on for 28 minutes, precursor to Dead & Allman Brothers marathon jams. Strawberry Jam, is also must listening.“
PETER BUTTERFIELD (Paul’s brother):
“Music was a personal quest. He separated from everything else. It was a very private place in his head, something he was doing alone. It almost reminds you of the way so many art students spend so much time studying art history. Blues guys living in isolation evolve a personal style that is very unique. Paul managed to achieve a very personal vision. Little Walter & Sonny Boy influenced him and he took it and went off into the woods with it. He wrestled with it and made it his own. A lot of talented players can pick up riffs and sound exactly like so and so, Paul basically went off into the wilderness and found enlightenment, and then brought it back. It comes from inside, as opposed to outside, like the mockingbird. Paul, like Little Walter and Sonny Boy, found his own voice.”
EPILOGUE
I met him at the funeral. He came looking for Paul’s body in the afternoon when only I was there. Sometime before the funeral was over, he told a beautiful story I will never forget. His small son had witnessed it on a public TV show. It’s about hearts. It seems that when a cell is separated from a heart but kept alive in a petri dish it will continue to beat in unison with the heart it came from. If a cell is taken from another heart, it likewise will also beat in unison with the heart it came from. However, if the two cells are pushed together in the petri dish they will immediately begin to beat together. To me it was like describing the conception of children when two people love each other – like Gabriel or Lee.
This was one thing I learned from the funeral. Another one is that as time moves on, so many things happen that we think are insignificant things, but in the final analysis those insignificant things are really very significant after all.
And a third lesson is this. No one person can be everything to someone else and from each person that we have a relationship with, we receive different things. Therefore, it’s really stupid to be jealous. Many people loved Paul and I rejoice that his life was rich this way. I try to send appreciation to the Universe that I was lucky enough for him to have been part of mine.
-ELIZABETH BARRACLOUGH, 1987