Standing 1.98 m tall, weighing around 140 kg, with a powerful voice from the depths and a guitar in his hands, Chester Arthur Burnett embodied the primal forces of nature like few others.
An interview with Chris Strachwitz, conducted on April 20, 1967, at the Matrix in San Francisco, the day of the T-shirt poster, survives. When asked about the origin of his nickname—whether it came from another earlier blues singer of the same name, author of Howlin' Wolf Blues—he replied:
“No, no. My grandfather gave me the idea. They used to tell me stories about wolves and the animals in the forest. The way they told it, I thought the wolf was the worst thing there was. I kept getting up to all sorts of mischief, and they’d say, I’m going to get that wolf for you. He’ll be here right away. Every night when I was getting ready to go to sleep, I’d beg them to tell me the wolf story. They kept calling me a wolf, and it made me mad, you know what I mean?”
He was born in White Station, near West Point, Mississippi, on June 10, 1910. He was one of six children in his family. He grew up on a plantation where his parents worked. His father gave him his first guitar when he was eighteen. With the exception of the years during World War I, during which he served in the army, he lived until the age of 38 farming in Arkansas and Mississippi. It wasn't until his father's death in 1949 that he devoted himself entirely to the blues.