Photo by Michael Collopy
Sumlin was born near Greenwood, Mississippi, and grew up across the river in Hughes, Arkansas, where he took up the guitar as a child; by his teens he was playing for local functions, sometimes with the harmonica player James Cotton. The first time Sumlin saw Wolf in action, as he told Living Blues magazine in 1989, he was too young to get into the club, so he climbed on to some Coca-Cola boxes to peer through a window; the boxes shifted and Sumlin fell into the room, landing on Wolf's head. After the gig, Wolf drove him home and asked his mother not to punish him. "I followed him ever since," Sumlin said."Wolf had a gravelly, hypermasculine voice and Hubert a jagged, unpredictable guitar style," Wolf's biographer Mark Hoffman wrote; "the two combined musically like gasoline and a lit match." Contained within the two and a half minutes of a 45rpm single, these small explosions resonated around the world. Sumlin's lissome solo, as much rock'n'roll as blues, on the endearingly silly Hidden Charms, and his spiky phrasing and strikingly vocalised tone on more heavyweight early-60s recordings such as Back Door Man, Built for Comfort, Tail Dragger and Goin' Down Slow, ignited the imagination of trainee blues guitarists both at home and overseas. Spoonful was reworked by Cream, Killing Floor by Jimi Hendrix. "I love Hubert Sumlin," said Jimmy Page recently. "He always played the right thing at the right time."
Tony Russell / The Guardian
Hidden Charms - Hubert Sumlin
Howling Wolf - Hidden Charms
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