Howlin' Wolf

This Chicago blues great inspired the guitar playing of such musicians as Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton. His electric blues and his deep voice shaped rock and roll. Raised on a cotton plantation, he learned guitar as a child. The imposing six foot three and three-hundred-pound Wolf appeared at blues and rock festivals in the late sixties. He received an honorary doctorate from Columbia College in Chicago and lived the last years of his life in Chicago's crumbling South Side ghetto. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991.