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CONSCIENCE OF THE BLUES: HOW HOWLIN’ WOLF GOT CAGED IN OREGON  
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Jeffrey St. Clair
August 9, 2024
CounterPunch
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_ “The Army ain’t no place for a black man,” Wolf recalled
years later. “Jus’ couldn’t take all that bossin’ around, I
guess. The Wolf’s his own boss.” _

, Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair

 

From his locked room, Chester Burnett could hear the trains rattling
up the tracks, one every half hour. They reminded him of home, back on
Dockery Plantation, when he played on the porches of old shacks with
Charley Patton, blowing his harmonica to the rhythm of those big
wheels rolling along the rails. Those northbound trains were the sound
of freedom then.

Now he was in the madhouse, where grown men, their minds broken by the
carnage of war, wailed and screamed all night long. Most of them were
white. Some were strapped to their beds. Others ambled with vacant
eyes, lost in the big room. Chester just stood in the corner and
watched. He didn’t say much. He didn’t know what to say. Sometimes
he looked out the barred window across the misty fields toward the
river and the big mountains far beyond, white pyramids rising above
the green forests.

The doctors came every day, men in white jackets with clipboards. They
showed him drawings. They asked about his family and his dreams. They
asked if he’d ever killed anyone—he had but he didn’t want to
talk about that. They asked him to read a big block of words to them.
But Chester couldn’t read. He’d never been allowed to go to
school.

The doctors asked all the white men the same questions. Poked and
prodded them the same way. Let them sleep and eat together. Left them
to comfort each other in the long nights in the Oregon fog.

Chester would play checkers with the orderlies and sing blues songs,
keeping the beat by slapping his huge feet on the cold and gleaming
white floor. Men would gather around him, even the boys who seemed
really far gone would calm down for a few minutes, listening to the
Wolf growl out “How Long, How Long Blues” or “High Water
Everywhere.” It was odd, but here in the madhouse Chester felt like
an equal for the first time.

The mental hospital at Camp Adair was located just off of the Pacific
Highway on a small rise above the Willamette River in western Oregon,
only a few miles south of the infamous Oregon State Hospital, whose
brutal methods of mental therapy were exposed by Ken Kesey in_ One
Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
[[link removed]]_ Camp
Adair had been built in 1942 as a training ground for the US Infantry
and as a base for the 9th Signal Corps. The big hospital was built in
1943. Its rooms were soon overflowing with wounded soldiers from the
Pacific theater.

Chester Burnett, by then known throughout the Mississippi Delta as
Howlin’ Wolf, had been inducted into the Army in April 1941. Wolf
didn’t go willingly. He was tracked down by the agents of the Army
and forced into service. Years later, Wolf said that the plantation
owners in the Delta had turned him in to the military authorities
because he refused to work in the fields. Wolf was sent to Pine Bluff,
Arkansas for training. He was thirty years old and the transition to
the intensely regulated life of the army was jarring.

Soon Wolf was transferred to Camp Blanding in Jacksonville, Florida,
where he was assigned to the kitchen patrol. He spent the day peeling
potatoes, and slopping food onto plates as the enlisted men walked
down the lunch line. At night, Wolf would play the blues in the
assembly room as the men waited for mail call. Later Wolf was sent to
Fort Gordon, a sprawling military base in Georgia named after a
Confederate general. Wolf would play his guitar on the steps of the
mess hall, where the young James Brown, who came to the Fort nearly
every day to earn money shining shoes and performing buck dances for
the troops, first heard Wolf play.  Still, it was a boring and
tedious existence.

For some reason, the Army detailed the illiterate Howlin’ Wolf to
the Signal Corps, responsible for sending and decoding combat
communications. When his superiors discovered that Wolf couldn’t
read he was sent for tutoring at a facility in Camp Murray near
Tacoma, Washington. It was Wolf’s first experience inside a school
and it proved a brutal one. A vicious drill instructor would beat Wolf
with a riding crop when he misread or misspelled a word. The
humiliating experience was repeated each day, week after week. The
harsher the officer treated Wolf, the more stubborn Wolf became.
Finally, the stress became too much for the great man and he collapsed
one day on base before heading to class. Wolf suffered episodes of
uncontrollable shaking. He was frequently dizzy and disoriented. He
fainted several times while on duty, once while walking down the
hallway.

Barracks at Camp Adair, 1942. Photo: Ben Maxwell (Salem Public
Library).

“The Army is hell!” Wolf said in an interview in the 1970s. “I
stayed in the Army for three years. I done all my training, you know?
I liked the Army all right, but they put so much on a man, you know
what I mean? My nerves couldn’t take it, you know? They drilled me
so hard it just naturally give me a nervous breakdown.”

Finally, in August 1943, Howlin’ Wolf was transferred to Camp Adair
and committed to the Army mental hospital for evaluation. The first
notes the shrink scribbled in Wolf’s file expressed awe at the
size-16 feet. The other assessments were less impressive, revealing
the rank racism that pervaded both the US Army and the psychiatric
profession in the 1940s. One doctor speculated that Wolf suffered from
schizophrenia induced by syphilis, even though there was no evidence
Wolf had ever contracted a venereal disease. Another notation
suggested that Wolf was a “hysteric,” a nebulous Freudian term
that was usually reserved for women. The diagnosis was commonly
applied to blacks by military doctors who viewed them as mentally
incapable of handling the regimens of Army life. Another doctor simply
wrote Wolf down with casual cruelty as a “mental defective.”

None of the shrinks seemed to take the slightest interest in Chester
Burnett’s life, the incredible journey that had taken him from
living beneath a rickety house in the Mississippi Delta to the wild
juke joints of West Memphis and an Army base in the Pacific Northwest.
None of them seemed to be aware that by 1943, Howlin’ Wolf had
already proved himself to be one of the authentic geniuses of American
music, a gifted and sensitive songwriter and a performer of
unparalleled power, who was the propulsive force behind the creation
of the electric blues.

Howlin’ Wolf was locked up for two months in the Army psych ward. He
was lashed to his bed, his body parts examined and measured: his head,
his hands, his feet, his teeth, his penis. The shrinks wanted to know
if he liked to have sex with men, if he tortured animals, and if he
hated his father. He was beaten, shocked and drugged when he resisted
the barbarous treatment by the military doctors. Finally, he was cut
loose from the Army, and discharged as being unfit for duty. He was
probably lucky he wasn’t lobotomized or sterilized, as was the cruel
fate of so many other encounters with the dehumanizing machinations of
governmental psychiatry.

“The Army ain’t no place for a black man,” Wolf recalled years
later. “Jus’ couldn’t take all that bossin’ around, I guess.
The Wolf’s his own boss.”

SOURCES.

Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howlin’ Wolf
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James Segrest and Mark Hoffman

It Came From Memphis
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Robert Gordon

_Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940–1965_
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J. MacGregor

_Camp Adair: The Story of a World War II Cantonment: Oregon’s
Largest Ghost Town_ by John H. Baker.

_This is excerpted from Sound Grammar: Blues and the Radical Truth
(forthcoming from Sitting Sun Press)._

_JEFFREY ST. CLAIR is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is
An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents
[[link removed]] (with
Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: [email protected] or on
Twitter @JeffreyStClair3 [[link removed]]. _

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* Howlin' Wolf
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