He looked up in the window and she pulled the trigger. They picked shots out of him for a whole week. “She did shoot him, too, full of buckshot. And she found these things in the bus and she thought it was Wolf. 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. 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.

Killing floor song lyrics