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Butterfield and fellow blues fan Nick Gravenites began hanging around the Chicago clubs and playing informal gigs at local college campuses. It was only when he got a knee injury as a teenager that he began to fully devote himself to music – in particular the local blues scene. By high school he was studying with the Chicago Symphony, but a running scholarship at university was always the likely career route. His athletic prowess made him a regular on the track team at school, where he also studied classical flute. There’s some truth in the fact that he could be distant and maybe too hard for people, but I really wouldn’t define him either way.”īorn into a liberal enclave of Southside Chicago in December 1942, Butterfield was an attorney’s son who excelled from any early age. “I don’t know if anybody ever got to know Paul on a personal level,” says Elvin Bishop, who played alongside him for most of the 60s. Or it could be down to his elusive nature: he was a private man for whom the term ‘enigmatic’ seems entirely apt. Perhaps it’s due to his lack of a signature tune, a ready identifier. Thumb through the usual roll-call of those who made that leap – from BB King and John Lee Hooker to Clapton, Hendrix, Page and Beck – and it’s odds-on that Butterfield’s name is absent. Yet history has consigned his role in the great blues crossover to that of a marginal figure. He could hit a single note and make it sound like a full orchestra.”īutterfield jammed with Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton in his prime, led his band at both the Monterey and Woodstock festivals, and fetched up at The Band’s The Last Waltz. The Band’s Levon Helm, with whom Butterfield played in his later years, called him “one of the best harp players alive. He’s right up there with Benny Goodman or Nelson Riddle.” “I believe he was one of the greatest bandleaders this country has ever had. “Butterfield was the genuine article, feeling the blues,” observed Paul Rothchild, who was to achieve greater fame as producer of The Doors, Love, Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley and Neil Young.
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Under his tutelage, his racially integrated band took the traditional form of the black neighbourhoods and blasted it with electric rock’n’roll, free jazz and, as the 60s wore on, Eastern classical music. For Butterfield it was a universal idiom to be adapted and expanded. Not only was he a consummate singer and harmonica player, but he was also a bandleader whose deep feeling for the blues went way beyond mere slavish reverence. Paul Butterfield was arguably the first authentic white bluesman to emerge from the US. And the two had never really got together.”
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“We were at the right place at the right time, because there was this huge, beautiful body of music – the blues – and a huge white American audience. “I don’t know how many people have told me over the last 50 years that it was the Butterfield Band that got them into music,” adds Elvin Bishop. “It was in our generation that the reverence for blues artists and their music swept into the white world.” “I knew that it was a historical movement,” explains keyboard player Mark Naftalin, who joined the band that September. More importantly, they were the first to introduce black blues to a white American mass market. Before the arrival of Love, The Doors or The Stooges, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were the first people to go electric on what was, until then, primarily a folk-based label. They became the new darlings of the college circuit in the US. But there’s a fair argument that the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s performance that weekend was just as influential as Dylan’s.Īlready signed to Elektra Records, their song Born In Chicago became the highlight of the label’s Folksong ’65 compilation released that September, prompting sales of 60,000 in its first month. Irked by Lomax’s disparaging comments, Dylan decided to go electric, even using Butterfield’s band to back him during his headlining set that Sunday – a decision that changed the singer’s career forever. One of the people who chanced upon the group that weekend was Bob Dylan. He’d keep getting more and more intense until he got them going. And if he got in front of a crowd, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. “He gave us high standards to reach for and operate under. “Paul had a very strong way about him,” recalls Butterfield Blues Band co-founder and rhythm guitarist Elvin Bishop. This was blues spat out loud on electric instruments living blues from the urban sidewalks of Chicago’s South Side. This was blues all right, but not the slow-moan version of the Mississippi Delta. Afterwards, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band is all people can talk about afterwards.