Howlin' Wolf — West Point, Mississippi

Chester Arthur Burnett — Howlin' Wolf — was born on 10 June 1910 in White Station, Bolivar County, Mississippi, and grew up in the Delta farming communities of west Mississippi, including the area around West Point. His early life was shaped by the sharecropping world of the Delta: cotton farming, intense poverty, and the music that emerged from that world — the field hollers and blues of the African American communities in the Mississippi lowlands. He reportedly learned guitar from the great Charley Patton at Dockery Farms, and encountered Robert Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson II (Rice Miller) during his formative years.

Howlin' Wolf developed one of the most immediately distinctive voices in the history of the blues — a deep, howling baritone of extraordinary power and expressiveness that gave him his name. His physical presence was massive and his performances were famous for their intensity. He moved to Memphis in the late 1940s and began recording for the Modern label before being signed to Chess Records in Chicago, where he recorded the songs that would make him famous: 'Smokestack Lightning', 'Back Door Man', 'Evil Is Going On', and 'Spoonful', among many others. His work with Chess producer Willie Dixon produced some of the most important blues recordings of the 1950s and 1960s.

Various Mississippi Blues Trail markers document Howlin' Wolf's connections to the Delta. West Point is in Clay County in northeastern Mississippi, outside the main Delta blues region but part of the broader Mississippi landscape that produced the genre. The primary Howlin' Wolf heritage destinations are in the Delta towns — Dockery Farms near Cleveland and the surrounding plantation country — where his formative influences were concentrated.