I started listening to some Howlin’ Wolf last week for the first time. (Yeah, yeah, hold back your judgement – we can’t all have listened to all the blues ever.) I cranked it up, he was howlin’, and it was all going great. Until he started sounding an awful lot like Little Walter, the harmonica virtuoso who was singin’ the blues around the same time as the Wolf.
So I called up my dad, my go-to go on all matters blue, and asked him if these folks just had one standard blues riff back then because my favourite Little Walter ditty sounded a whole lot like what Howlin’ Wolf was just singing. My dad said yeah, he wasn’t too sure how they worked out the copyright issues back then because “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy” did sound totally the same.
This is “Hoochie Coochie Man”:
And this is “Mannish Boy”:
The funny thing is, when I called up with this question, I was actually talking about these two songs:
“My Babe” by Little Walter:
“Little Darling” by Howlin’ Wolf: (covered by The Stones – I couldn’t find Howlin’ video unfortunately)
I suppose you could counter with “who the hell cares, at least someone was making this great music” but you get what I’m sayin’ now, don’t ya?