Sam Lay, who drummed for Butterfield and Dylan, dies
Sam Lay, a drummer whose shuffling sound and locomotive power helped propel blues records by Paul Butterfield, Howlin’ Wolf, Little Walter and Muddy Waters, and who laid down the beat when Bob Dylan went electric during an epochal performance at the Newport Folk Festival, died Jan. 29 at a nursing facility in Chicago. He was 86.
His label, Alligator Records, confirmed the death in a statement but did not cite a cause. He died two days before another veteran Chicago bluesman, guitarist Jimmy Johnson.
Lay was part of a group of musicians who helped fuel a blues-rock explosion in the mid-1960s, bringing a hard-edged Chicago blues sound to American popular music. While many of the singers and guitarists he performed with became household names, some concertgoers found that Lay – with his dynamic range and rollicking stage presence – was at least as engaging as the headliners he backed.
“Sam doesn’t play the drums. He sings the drums,” his friend and musical collaborator Corky Siegel once told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It is
very melodic and changing. It’s not about holding the groove and playing a certain rhythm. It’s about going where you need to go.”
Raised in Birmingham, Ala., Lay grew up attending a Pentecostal church where the sanctuary was filled with the sound of hand claps, tambourine beats and electric organ lines. The rhythm of the hymns inspired his signature “double shuffle groove,” which he employed on songs including “I Got My Mojo Working,” from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band’s self-titled 1965 debut. (Lay, who also sang and played guitar, performed the track’s gruff vocals.)
“To hear it, you think he’s got six hands, but somehow he’s all over those drums,” said filmmaker John Anderson, who directed a 2016 documentary about the drummer, “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” that took its name from Lay’s 1969 debut as a solo artist. He added that the drummer’s double shuffle “gave the blues a different taste, a different color.”
Lay performed at major blues festivals in the United States and Europe, toured with his own Sam Lay Blues Revival Band and recorded with a host of blues masters, including Carey Bell, James Cotton, Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ Hopkins and Magic Sam.
He received some of his greatest acclaim for his work with Butterfield, a singer and harmonica player whose group helped introduce the blues to White audiences. The Butterfield Blues Band was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, with Lay enshrined alongside bandmates including guitarists Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop, bassist Jerome Arnold and keyboardist Mark Naftalin.
Lay and his bandmates released their debut record a few months after the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when they backed Dylan for his first electric concert, a pivotal moment in the folk music world. The concert marked Dylan’s shift from acoustic folk to electric rock, and infuriated fans who saw his use of amplifiers as a betrayal, a retreat from the more outwardly political music he had written as a folk singer.
It was unclear if the set was planned or spontaneous, but by many accounts the performance came together the night before, with Dylan turning to the Butterfield Blues Band for his backing musicians. They rehearsed at a nearby mansion, then plugged in and rocked out on the evening of July 25, 1965, shocking the audience when they opened with a raucous rendition of “Maggie’s Farm.”
“Man, all hell broke loose,” Lay later recalled. Parts of the crowd were so angry, he told the Chicago Daily Herald, he thought the band was “going to get a whooping on that stage.”
Later that year, Dylan recruited Lay to drum on the title track of “Highway 61 Revisited.” The song was punctuated by a siren whistle, which Lay said he carried on his keychain and provided to Dylan, although organist Al Kooper also claimed to have brought the whistle into the studio.
“I joked a lot with Dylan,” Lay recalled. “I made fun of his hair. I told him it reminded me of the Muddy Waters song ‘I Found a Bird Nest on the Ground.’ Dylan didn’t get mad. I would have gotten upset and broke bottles.” The two remained friendly, and when Lay received an award from the Recording Academy’s Chicago chapter in 2002, the singer-songwriter sent him a congratulatory telegram.
“It’s so well-deserved,” Dylan said, according to Alligator Records. “Walter, Wolf and Muddy, they must have known it, too – that you’re second to none – your flawless musicianship and unsurpassed timing, a maestro with the sticks and brushes.”
Samuel Julian Lay was born in Birmingham on March 20, 1935. His parents worked on Pullman train cars, and his father played banjo in a country band and died when Lay was 2. Lay went on to listen to singers like Ernest Tubb and Bill Monroe, and later played country and bluegrass with his band, surprising listeners who assumed he was strictly a blues musician.
Lay moved to Cleveland in 1954 to work at a steel plant, and began playing drums in jazz clubs. As he told it, he was walking down the street when he heard a blues harmonica inside a wine bar, and walked in to find Little Walter, who invited him to sit in with his band.
It was Lay’s first time performing the blues, and the genre seemed to fit. When Little Walter moved to Chicago in 1960, Lay joined him, later nursing Walter back to health after he suffered a gunshot wound, according to Anderson.
He also began backing Howlin’ Wolf, drumming on blues standards and landmark records that included “I Ain’t Superstitious,” “Killing Floor” and “The Red Rooster.” When Butterfield offered him a raise, to $20 a night for gigs at Chicago clubs, he decided to switch bands.
Lay later played on the Muddy Waters album “Fathers and Sons” (1969), which reached No. 70 on the Billboard 200 and became the singer’s biggest mainstream success. As he transitioned from sideman to solo artist, he also began arriving onstage with a signature cape and walking stick, modeling his flamboyant look partly after the elaborate outfits of Liberace and country singer Porter Wagoner.