One of the boys in his band messed up, you know. And she went out and searched the bus before he gets back. Well, somebody left her underwear in this bus. “Some potatoes, tomatoes, and all this stuff. “She sent him to the store to get some food, about a half block up the road,” Sumlin recalled.
While he was gone, though, she searched the tour bus for evidence that Wolf had been fooling around on the road. She at the peak of doing it, and you got away now.” He paused, then added, “You know people have wished they was dead–you been treated so bad that sometimes you just say, ‘Oh Lord have mercy.’ You’d rather be six feet in the ground.”Īccording to Sumlin, when Wolf arrived home in West Milford, Arkansas, from a lengthy tour, Helen sent him to the corner store with a promise to cook him a welcome-home feast. “She went out of her way to try to kill you. “Down on the killing floor–that means a woman has you down,” Sumlin continued. This woman, oh man, he wrote that song about her! Reason I know it is every song he wrote, they was real.” She shot him with a double barrel shotgun with buckshot. “No, not really,” Sumlin told me during an interview backstage at Chicago B.L.U.E.S. Some scholars have asserted that in “Killing Floor,” Howlin’ Wolf was referring to the filthy, bloody floors of Chicago stockyards and slaughterhouses, where many African Americans who migrated North from the Delta found employment during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. To be down on the killing floor is to be feeling very depressed, according to guitar legend Hubert Sumlin, whose licks on Howlin’ Wolf’s legendary 1964 single “Killing Floor” are building blocks of electric blues guitar. Also available as an eBook from Amazon Kindle. Grab a signed copy of Devi’s award-winning blues glossary The Language of the Blues: From Alcorub to ZuZu (Foreword by Dr. And when I think about the size of all down there - I want to cease to exist.This is the latest installment of our weekly series, The Language of the Blues, in which author/rocker Debra Devi explores the meaning of a word or phrase found in the blues. Soon the Monster will grope its way through the black gates. People's words cannot describe that Thing and an abyss of screams and insanity. The hideous stone city of R'lyeh, the monolithic fortress, hides the great Cthulhu and his horde in muddy tombs. We live in ignorance on the seas of infinity Listen to this slice of musical fan-fiction, so to speak, at the bottom of the page and read the lyrics below. To subscribe to Less' YouTube channel, head here. Vocally, there's shades of James Hetfield obviously in play, but Less doesn't try to be a clone singer and instead walks the line between clean singing and a gruff, more thrash-typical approach which works well.
YouTuber Less, who alerted Loudwire of his daring undertaking, really put in a ton of effort, and wrote a bit of a short story of his own for the lyrics (nearly 350 words), which stretch across the nearly 10-minute song, including spoken words parts that enhance its epic scale.
Lovecraft's famous short story, Call of Cthulu, which was published in early 1928. It's an imposing song for any seasoned band to even cover, much less write original lyrics for the track inspired by horror fantasy/science fiction writer H.P.