There’s only one way for a young man to learn true blues: from older men. This sort of teacher-student relationship is rather common today, or at least it has been since the blues gained such popularity with the seemingly ever-fickle young white audience. One of the most popular of the young blues men is Paul Butterfield. But Butterfield is old hand at the blues, having drunk from the deep well on Chicago’s South Side several years ago. This spring, he and guitarist Michael Bloomfield were reunited with one of their main teachers – singer/guitarist Muddy Waters and pianist Otis Spann. The reunion took place in the Ter-Mar Recording Studio at Chess Records, and for three nights, a rather remarkable recording session rolled from one artistic peak to another. Following the last night, Butterfield, Waters, and, later, Spann discussed the session and the ways they learned the blues. What follows is an edited version of that conversation with Don DeMichael.
DeMichael: Paul, when was the first time you sat in with Muddy?
Butterfield: About 1957.
DeM: How old were you?
PB: About 18. The stuff I play now…my bands’ got horns and things, and we do a lot of different stuff, ‘cause I got guys in my band who can really play – but they can’t play that old stuff. It’s just a certain thing I came up in, that I learned, and what I was really listening to – and I mean live; I ain’t talking about listening to records – was Muddy. He had a real good band then. You had Pat Hare on guitar…
Waters: Willie on drums.
PB: No, it wasn’t Willie
MW: Then it had to be Francis Clay.
PB: No.
MW: Was it S.P. Leary?
PB: No.
MW: Then it got to be Clay.
PB: Then it was Clay. And Little Walter used to come and sit in.
MW: Magic Sam, Otis Rush, all those boys used to come and sit in. They all sat in because I’m not the kind of guy who’ll hold the bandstand for myself. I’m not like a lot of the older guys who’ve been in the business a long time, ‘cause I’m not jealous of nobody – you play what you play and I’ll put you on my bandstand.
DeM: How did you get turned on to the blues, Paul?
PB: I’ll tell you the truth, man. My brother, my family used to play a lot of blues records. Old 78s. They used to listen to people like Muddy, Gene Ammons, Charlie Parker…It was more jazz than blues, but the feeling I got was from blues. So I got it early. There used to be WGES, and they used to play nothing but blues from 11 to 12 o’clock at night. And in Nashville, Tenn., John R. used to play nothing but blues. We used to hear it when I was 10 years old. My brother started buying blues singles when I was out playing baseball. I don’t know what turned me on, but I just liked that kind of music better than any other kind of music. I like a whole lot of different kinds of music, but that was the music that really got me interested in playing.
DeM: Interested in playing harp?
PB: Naw, I never thought about playing the harp. I just started playing the harp. I just enjoyed playing it. I didn’t have no plan, or say "I’m gonna learn how to play the harp like so and so or learn how to do this or that." I just started playing it. I mess around with any instrument I can get next to.
MW: In music of this kind, everybody got to be influenced by somebody.
PB: I was influenced a lot by Little Walter, and when I got to play some more, by Sonny Boy, the second. Then a little after that I started getting influenced by Gene Ammons, Stanley Turrentine…
MW: After you’ve mastered our instrument, you can go the way you want to go at that particular time. When I began I was influenced by Son House and Robert Johnson. That doesn’t mean you have to be exactly like them, ‘cause when you get out there, you learn other people’s work and you put more of your own material in it and then you’re on your own.
PB: There isn’t any musician in the whole world that isn’t inf
