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Paul Vaughn Butterfield (December 17, 1942May 4, 1987) was an American blues harmonica player, singer, and bandleader. After early training as a classical flautist, he developed an interest in blues harmonica. He explored the blues scene in his native Chicago, where he met Muddy Waters and other blues greats, who provided encouragement and opportunities for him to join in . He soon began performing with fellow blues enthusiasts Nick Gravenites and Elvin Bishop.
In 1963, he formed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which recorded several successful albums and was popular on the late-1960s concert and festival circuit, with performances at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, the Fillmore East in New York City, the Monterey Pop Festival, and Woodstock. The band was known for combining electric Chicago blues with a rock urgency. and for their pioneering jazz fusion performances and recordings. The band was also among the first racially integrated blues groups. After the breakup of the group in 1971, Butterfield continued to tour and record with the band Paul Butterfield's Better Days, with his mentor Muddy Waters, and with members of the roots-rock group the Band. While still recording and performing, Butterfield died in 1987 at age 44 of an accidental drug overdose.
Music critics have acknowledged his development of an original approach that places him among the best-known blues harp players. In 2006, he was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. Butterfield and the early members of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2015. Both panels noted his harmonica skills and his contributions to bringing blues music to a younger and broader audience.
In the early 1960s, Butterfield met aspiring blues guitarist Elvin Bishop. Bishop recalled:
Eventually, Butterfield, on vocals and harmonica, and Bishop, accompanying him on guitar, were offered a regular gig at Big John's, a folk club in the Old Town district on Chicago's near North Side. With this booking, they persuaded bassist Jerome Arnold and drummer Sam Lay (both from Howlin' Wolf's touring band) to form a group with them in 1963. Their engagement at the club was highly successful and brought the group to the attention of record producer Paul A. Rothchild.
The band's debut album, The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was released in 1965, reaching number 123 in the Billboard 200 album chart. On March 28, 1966, Butterfield appeared on the CBS game show To Tell the Truth. At the end of his segment, he performed "Born in Chicago" with the house band. In August 1966, the band released their second album, East-West, which reached number 65 in the album chart.
In England in November 1966, Butterfield recorded several songs with John Mayall & the Bluesbreakers, who had recently finished the album A Hard Road. Butterfield and Mayall contributed vocals, and Butterfield's Chicago-style blues harp was featured. Four songs were released in the UK on a 45-rpm Extended play, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers with Paul Butterfield, in January 1967.
The Butterfield Blues Band changed its lineup, with Arnold and Davenport leaving the band, and Bloomfield going on to form his own group, Electric Flag. The band added bassist Bugsy Maugh, drummer Phillip Wilson, and saxophonists David Sanborn and Gene Dinwiddie. This lineup recorded the band's third album, The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw, in 1967. It was Butterfield's highest-charting album, reaching number 52 on the album chart. Most of this lineup performed at the seminal Monterey Pop Festival on June 17, 1967.
The band's next album, In My Own Dream, released in 1968, continued to move away from the band's Chicago blues roots towards a more soul-influenced, horn-based sound, with Butterfield singing only three songs. It reached number 79 in the Billboard album chart. By the end of 1968, both Bishop and Naftalin had left the band. In April 1969, Butterfield took part in a concert at Chicago's Auditorium Theater and a subsequent recording session organized by record producer Norman Dayron, featuring Muddy Waters backed by Otis Spann, Mike Bloomfield, Sam Lay, Donald "Duck" Dunn, and Buddy Miles. Such Waters warhorses as "Forty Days and Forty Nights", "I'm Ready", "Baby, Please Don't Go", and "Got My Mojo Working" were recorded and later released on the album Fathers and Sons. Waters commented, "We did a lot of the things over we did with Little Walter and Jimmy Rogers and Elgin Evans on drums an ... It's about as close as I've been to since I first recorded it". To one reviewer, these recordings represent Paul Butterfield's best performances.
The Butterfield Blues Band was invited to perform at the Woodstock Festival on August 18, 1969. The band performed seven songs, and although its performance did not appear in the film Woodstock, one song, "Love March", was included on the album , released in 1970. In 2009, Butterfield was included in the expanded 40th Anniversary Edition Woodstock video, and an additional two songs appeared on the box set .
The album Keep On Moving, with only Butterfield remaining from the original lineup, was released in 1969. It was produced by veteran R&B producer and songwriter Jerry Ragovoy, reportedly brought in by Elektra to turn out a "breakout commercial hit". The album was not embraced by critics or long-time fans. It reached number 102 in the Billboard album chart.
A live double album by the Butterfield Blues Band, Live, was recorded March 21–22, 1970, at The Troubadour, in West Hollywood, California. By this time, the band included a four-piece horn section in what has been described as a "big-band Chicago blues with a jazz base". After the release of another soul-influenced album, Sometimes I Just Feel Like Smilin' in 1971, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band disbanded. In 1972, a retrospective of their career, Golden Butter: The Best of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, was released by Elektra.
Butterfield next pursued a solo career and appeared as a sideman in several different musical settings. In 1975, he again joined Muddy Waters to record Waters's last album for Chess Records, The Muddy Waters Woodstock Album. The album was recorded at Levon Helm's Woodstock studio with Garth Hudson and members of Waters's touring band. In 1976, Butterfield performed at the Band's final concert, "The Last Waltz", accompanying the Band on the song "Mystery Train" and backing Muddy Waters on "Mannish Boy". Butterfield kept up his association with former members of the Band, touring and recording with Levon Helm and the RCO All Stars in 1977 and touring with Rick Danko in 1979. A 1984 live performance with Danko and Richard Manuel was recorded and released as Live at the Lonestar in 2011.
As a solo act with backing musicians, Butterfield continued to tour and recorded Put It in Your Ear in 1976 and North South in 1981, with strings, synthesizers, and funk arrangements. In 1986, he released his final studio album, The Legendary Paul Butterfield Rides Again, which was an attempt at a comeback with an updated rock sound. On April 15, 1987, he participated in the concert "B.B. King & Friends", with Eric Clapton, Etta James, Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and others.
In 2006, Butterfield was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Blues Hall of Fame, which noted that "the albums released by the Butterfield Blues Band brought Chicago Blues to a generation of Rock fans during the 1960s and paved the way for late 1960s electric groups like Cream". The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 2015. The induction biography commented that "the Butterfield Band converted the country-blues purists and turned on the Fillmore generation to the pleasures of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter, Willie Dixon and Elmore James".
In 2017, a documentary titled Horn from the Heart: the Paul Butterfield Story premiered at the Newport Beach Film Festival. Directed by John Anderson and produced by Sandra Warren, it won the Outstanding Achievement Award in Filmmaking: Editing. In October 2018, the documentary was released nationally in select US theaters. It has received critical acclaim, including being named a New York Times Critic's Pick, as well as features in Rolling Stone, and The Wall Street Journal.
Butterfield played Hohner harmonicas (and endorsed them). He preferred the diatonic ten-hole Marine Band model. He wrote a harmonica instruction book, Paul Butterfield Teaches Blues Harmonica Master Class, a few years before his death (it was not published until 1997). In it, he explains various techniques, demonstrated on an accompanying CD. Butterfield played mainly in cross-harp, or second position. Reportedly left-handed, he held the harmonica in a manner opposite that of a right-handed player, i.e., in his right hand, upside down (with the low notes to the right), using his left hand for muting effects.
Also like other electric Chicago blues harp players, Butterfield frequently used amplification to achieve his sound. He has been associated with a Shure 545 Unidyne microphone, although producer Rothchild noted that around the time of a 1965 recording session, Butterfield favored an Altec Lansing harp microphone run through an early model Fender tweed amplifier. Beginning with album The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw, he used an acoustic harmonica style, following his shift to a more R&B-based approach.
Producer Norman Dayron recalled the young Butterfield as "very quiet and defensive and hard-edged. He was this tough Irish Catholic, kind of a hard guy. He would walk around in black shirts and sunglasses, dark shades and dark jackets ... Paul was hard to be friends with." Although they later became close, Michael Bloomfield commented on his first impressions of Butterfield: "He was a bad guy. He carried pistols. He was down there on the South Side, holding his own. I was scared to death of that cat". Writer and AllMusic founder Michael Erlewine, who knew Butterfield early in his recording career, described him as "always intense, somewhat remote, and even, on occasion, downright unfriendly". He remembered Butterfield as "not much interested in other people".
By 1971, Butterfield had purchased his first house, in rural Woodstock, New York, and began enjoying family life with his second wife, Kathy Peterson, and their infant son, Lee. According to Maria Muldaur, she and her husband were frequent dinner guests, which usually involved sitting around a piano and singing songs. She doubted her abilities, but "it was Butter that first encouraged me to let loose and just sing the blues and not to worry about singing pretty or hitting all the right notes ... He loosened all the levels of self-consciousness and doubt out of me ... And he'll forever live in my heart for that and for respecting me as a fellow musician."
By the time of his death, Butterfield was out of the commercial mainstream. Although for some, he was very much the blues man, Maria Muldaur commented "he had the whole sensibility and musicality and approach down pat ... He just went for it and took it all in, and he embodied the essence of what the blues was all about. Unfortunately, he lived that way a little too much."
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