Paul Butterfield - by Tyler King
If it weren’t for Paul Butterfield I wouldn’t be here today….
-B.B. King
Back in the 1970s when I was in junior high school, I started playing the harmonica. One day, my mom brought home two albums she’d picked up at K-Mart. One by Big Walter Horton and the other by B.B. King. Besides a John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers album I saw in my older brother’s record collection, they were the first two blues records I had ever seen. More than that, they were two of the first three albums I ever owned - the other was the James Bond 10th Anniversary double album, a birthday present from my friend up the street. This was the start of my Blues journey.
A couple of years later with my older brother on a “you-drive I-buy” mission to a used record store, I bought my first blues album, a used copy of The Butterfield Blues Band Live, released in 1970 on the Elektra label:
Paul Butterfield became an important influence on my harmonica playing; however, when I went to college in 1980, I pretty much forgot about him. By then, my journey started to move away from blues and more into the world of jazz.
When I joined the military and went to the Defense Language Institute at Presidio of Monterey, I started to DJ at KAZU, the radio station in Pacific Grove. I fell in with a great group of DJs who were very hip to the local music scene between Monterey and Santa Cruz. They knew I was a harp player because I had been playing some solo gigs on the air at KAZU. They told me to check out Mark Ford, the harmonica-playing Ford brother from the Charles Ford Band, who in 1972 recorded this classic for the Arhoolie label:
Along with Andy Just, Mark Ford was the top dog harmonica player in the South Bay Area. Whenever the Ford brothers played over in Capitola, we’d all make the trip around the Bay to go listen to them. By the time I got to California, Robben had already left the band and moved on to stardom, but once in a while he’d be in the area and play along with them.
The Ford brothers were big fans of Chicago blues and in particular The Paul Butterfield Blues Band or what they called the “3-Bs” - Butterfield, Bloomfield, Bishop. In fact, Mark Ford bought his first harmonica the day after seeing them play at the Fillmore West. Their dad drove them all the the way down from their home in Ukiah, California to see the concert. Many years later, in 2001, they recorded A Tribute to Paul Butterfield, on Pat Ford’s Blue Rock'it Records.
On the back cover of the album, there’s Robben Ford on the far left holding the album that first introduced me to Paul Butterfield. It was during those few years in California, before I was shipped to Europe, that I rekindled my love of Paul Butterfield. This week on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll look at The Butterfield Blues Band, one of the first racially integrated blues bands.
The connection Paul Butterfield had with Chicago Jazz players is deep. I first learned about it through reading Pete Welding’s Down Beat column Caught in the Act. In 1962, Welding moved to Chicago and, inspired by Bob Koester’s Delmark Records, founded Testament Records in 1963. His focus was on blues and Black folk songs.
It was Welding who helped record a single 45-rpm that marked the start of Nick Gravenite’s long career as a composer, musician, and record producer, a career that continues to have a profound effect on the music scene up to the present day. That single was recorded in the fall of 1965. One side, Whole Lotta Soul, included members of the AACM and Sun Ra's orchestra:
Unfortunately, Whole Lotta Soul is not on YouTube, but the other side with Drunken Boat is:
In his book Bad Talkin' Bluesman, Nick Gravenites wrote "...a session at CBS studios in Chicago for his [Jeff Spitz] new label, Out Of Sight Records, a name suggested by Pete Welding, a musicologist and record producer who was living in Hyde Park. We cut two of my songs, Whole Lotta Soul and Drunken Boat. These are the musicians on my first recording session: Nick Gravenites, vocal and guitar; Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, guitar; Paul Butterfield, harmonica; Erwin Helfer, harpsichord; Scotty Holt, bass; Steve McCall, drums; Lester Bowie, trumpet; Julian Priester, trombone; and Roscoe Mitchell, alto sax. We got two bizarre-sounding songs, had a thousand copies made; five hundred got lost in a warehouse somewhere, we gave away four hundred and sold a hundred".
With the “3-Bs”, Roscoe Mitchell, Lester Bowie, Steve McCall, and Julian Priester, this is an amazing mixture of Chicago musicians. It was recorded about the same time as Butterfield’s first Elektra album. Here is Drunken Boat:
The tune's title, Drunken Boat, refers to the poem of the same name written in 1871 by the French poet Arthur Rimbaud. Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat) is a 100-line verse poem that describes the drifting and sinking of a boat lost at sea in a fragmented first-person narrative saturated with vivid imagery and symbolism. It is considered a masterpiece of French Symbolism.
Here is Le Bateau ivre displayed as a wall poem in Paris
Gravenites also mentions "Oo-Bla-Dee," a reference to a Mary Lou Williams composition recorded by Dizzy Gillespie (and not the McCartney tune recorded several years later by the Beatles):
Nick Gravenites was born in 1938 and grew up on Thirty-fifth Street in the Brighton Park area of Chicago. He lost his father when he was eleven years old and soon after his mother sent him to St. John’s Military Academy at Delafield, Wisconsin. A few weeks before graduation he was expelled for fighting. He returned to Chicago to get his high school diploma at Central Day Y.M.C.A. high school in the loop. Through connections, he was encouraged to apply and accepted into the University of Chicago, where he first met Butterfield. According to Gravenites:
Folk musicians started performing in coffeehouses and small clubs, and the Folklore Society visited other schools, such as the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. There were seeds being planted here that blossomed into the blues revival, and folk-rock.
It was at a folk music hootenanny that I met Paul Butterfield. It was at a folk music shop that I met Mike Bloomfield. Butterfield was just learning to play the harmonica, and I was learning the guitar. It's been intimated that Paul was a student at the university, but he never was. He was a neighborhood guy, his family lived in Hyde Park, his mother worked for the university, and his father was a lawyer. He went to University High School but not the University of Chicago itself. He was a sixteen-year-old hanging out at the Folklore Society, and we wound up playing a lot together, learning our stuff, working out duets that we could do, sort of like Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry…
By the late 1950s, they were visiting blues clubs in Chicago, where musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, and Otis Rush encouraged them and occasionally let them sit in on jam sessions. The pair were soon performing as Nick and Paul in college-area coffee houses.
Then, in the early 1960s, Butterfield met aspiring blues guitarist Elvin Bishop, who grew up on a farm near Elliott, Iowa, and moved to Chicago to attend the University of Chicago, where he majored in physics. Bishop recalled:
He [Butterfield] was playing more guitar than harp when I first met him. But in about six months he became serious about the harp, and he seemed to get about as good as he got in that six months. He was just a natural genius. This was in 1960 or 1961. By this time Butter had been hanging out in the ghetto for a couple of years, and he was part of the scene and getting accepted.
In the summer of 1963, they formed The Paul Butterfield Blues Band. With Butterfield on vocals and harmonica, Bishop on guitar, and two of Howlin’ Wolf’s rhythm men Jerome Arnold on bass and Sam Lay on drums. They were offered a regular gig at Big John's, a folk club in the Old Town district on Chicago's near North Side. During their engagement, Butterfield met and occasionally sat in with guitarist Mike Bloomfield, who was also playing at the club. Soon, Bloomfield joined the band.
In 1965, the “3-Bs” recorded their debut album, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band:
The album opens with Born In Chicago, written by Gravenites:
The album was an instant classic and in November 1966 the band travelled to England. While there, Butterfield recorded several songs with John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers, who had recently finished their A Hard Road album. In January 1967, Four songs were released by Decca in the UK on a 45-rpm EP, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Paul Butterfield:
From this EP, here is Little By Little:
Later in 1967, AACM musician and member of Roscoe Mitchell’s Art Ensemble, Phillip Wilson joined The Butterfield Blues Band. During this time, Steve McCall introduced Gene Dinwiddie to Butterfield and along with saxophonist David Sanborn recorded the band’s third release, The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw. Dinwiddie recalls, “A year or two later I was playing at Big John’s in Chicago with Otis Rush and Mighty Joe Young. Paul and Elvin Bishop came by. Paul approached me [and] that’s how I got that job.” In his book A Power Stronger Than Itself, George Lewis wrote:
Gene Dinwiddie, an early member of the Experimental band, was one of the first to test his wings. At this time, as Dinwiddie saw it, creative differences were quietly surfacing within the AACM. "Roscoe and Joseph Jarman, they were a little too hip for me. I made an effort. I played with Roscoe, but that just wasn’t something I wanted to do. In the band we had Alvin Fiedler and Malachi Favors, I always wanted to play straight ahead. Roscoe would play his part, and it would be totally different.”
Wilson, Dinwiddie, and Sanborn also played on Butterfield’s 1968 release In My Own Dream and in 1969 at Woodstock:
Here’s one more for the road. Paul Butterfield’s Better Days was released in 1973 on the Bearsville label. It was recorded at the legendary Bearsville Sound Studio founded by Albert Grossman in the Bearsville section of Woodstock, New York. Probably no other song has influenced my playing more than this one. It’s not the hard chargin’ blues I came to know from Butterfield and it’s not my favorite song, but it had that solo - I wanted to sound like that:
As the song says, Paul Butterfield “done a lot of wrong things”, but a life in the blues music business and record business was tough and dirty. In some ways, Gravenite’s song Drunken Boat reminds me of Paul Butterfield’s life - “Whirling here, swirling there, just a fool without care, in a drunken boat…” Unfortunately, in 1987 while still recording and performing, he died of an accidental drug overdose in his apartment in the North Hollywood district of Los Angeles. He was only 44 years old.
Next week, on that Big River called Jazz, we’ll dig our paddles in and explore the world of George Russell.
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