I first became acquainted with his guitar playing through a blues documentary called "Blues Story" (its excellent if you haven't seen it). He seemed very cool and pretty down to earth. He's also heavily featured in the Howling Wolf documentary "The Howling Wolf Story" and there was a character based on him in the film Cadillac Records.NY Daily News wrote:Hubert Sumlin dead at 80: Guitarist, giant of electric blues, had been nominated for four Grammys
Influenced rock greats Richards, Clapton, Page and Hendrix
BY David Hinckley
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Originally Published: Tuesday, December 6 2011, 2:16 PM
Updated: Tuesday, December 6 2011, 3:48 PM
Guitarist Hubert Sumlin, one of the last giants who shaped the electric blues and therefore rock 'n' roll in 1950s Chicago, died Sunday at a hospital in Wayne, N.J. He was 80 and the official cause of death was heart failure.
Sumlin had been in declining health since he had a cancerous lung removed in 2004, but he continued performing almost until his death.
Blues fan Mark Ransom, who saw him in Connecticut in May, said he was frail and using an oxygen tank, but that he performed a half-dozen vintage blues numbers "and there were echoes" of his ferocious and highly influential guitar work.
One of the songs he played in his final performances was "How Many More Years."
Sumlin was best known for playing rhythm and then lead guitar behind Howlin' Wolf, whose band he joined around 1953 and with whom he played until Wolf's death in 1976.
Their personal relationship had its own ferocity, Sumlin later said, but it also had an artistic connection that produced some of the most powerful and enduring Chicago blues of the 1950s and 1960s.
Sumlin played the stinging, precise guitar on Wolf classics like "Spoonful," "Smokestack Lightning," "Wang Dang Doodle," "Back Door Man" and "I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline)."
Known as a quiet, unassuming man in the sometimes rowdy world of the blues, Sumlin made a few solo recordings in the 1960s, but didn't really step out until after Wolf's death.
He made a number of records in later years and was nominated for four Grammy awards. He won numerous blues awards and was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 2008.
His biggest boosters were the musicians he influenced, which included almost every guitarist in the British blues invasion. Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page and Jimi Hendrix are among those who have cited the influence of Sumlin's playing on their own.
When the Rolling Stones played Madison Square Garden, Richards had Sumlin come on-stage with them.
Sumlin was born in Mississippi in 1931 and raised in Arkansas. He got his first guitar at the age of 6, and he said the $5 instrument cost his mother a week's pay.
He also said he first met Wolf before he was a teenager when he stood on a crate outside a club where Wolf was playing. After Wolf moved from Arkansas to Chicago around 1953, he asked Sumlin to come north and join his band.
Except for a brief stint with Wolf's fellow blues giant Muddy Waters, Sumlin stayed with Wolf from then on.
Sumlin in later years said his personal relationship with the intense Wolf was at times tempestuous, but that they shared an artistic connection neither wanted to sever.
Toni Ann Mamary, Sumlin's manager who also became his caretaker after the death of his wife, called him "a lovely person . . . the gentlest soul I ever knew."
A viewing will be held at Festa Memorial Home in Totowa, N.J., Sunday 2-4 and 7-9 p.m.
dhinckley@nydailynews.com
Him telling the story about his playing on Wolf's "Shake For Me" was one of the most entertaining moments of the "Blues Story" doc.
RIP.