Evil Is Goin' On--Howlin' Wolf

Late in his life, Howlin' Wolf left the hospital bed that would be his deathbed to sing at nightclubs in Chicago. While he had cancer, as long as he could, his manager would take him out to sing. And here's what The Wolf had to say a few months before his last time out:

'Well, I'll tell you 'bout this, the conditions what make things like it is today. Conditions. Conditions. You know? When you don't have no money n' no job, no place to stay and no place to sleep, you go to workin' and you go to thinkin' evil, you go thinkin' uhh, mmm, ahh, wrong things, you go to thinkin' evil, just like them people stuck up the bank and shot the po-lice the other day. Them folks say, they din't have no money. See? They tightenin' down on every thing. Well, these folk got to eat. Lawd ya'll see that woman there with the hollow back? Well how she good lookin' and got that powerful thing? "Well, you better bring me somethin' in here, else this cat gonna go out and stick up somebody," you know what I mean? So conditions make these things happen today.'

Rare is the economist today who has as much sense of what makes the world go round.

Correction: My apologies, I was wrong about the timing of this video. It's at the 1815 Club on Chicago's west side around 1970, not 1975. So the Wolf was sick, and receiving kidney dialysis at the time, but it was several years before his death. Not a few months as I claimed above. Hubert is on guitar, Dave Myers on bass, Fred Below on drums, and Sunnyland Slim on piano.