Annie Leibovitz | Courtesy of Hubert Sumlin

Annie Leibovitz shot this portrait of Hubert Sumlin at the Maple Leaf Bar in New Orleans for her 2003 book, "American Music."

BRIAN SMITH/Courtesy Howlin' Wolf Blues Museum

Hubert Sumlin (left) with Howlin' Wolf at Manchester, England's American Folk and Blues Festival, 1964.

See the show

Hubert Sumlin and The Nighthawks

• When: 9 p.m. Friday
• Where: 202 Market, 202 Market Square, Roanoke
• How much: $15 in advance; $18 at the show
• Info: 202market.net; hubertsumlinblues.com

Audio

From our interview with Hubert Sumlin

• Talking about Bo Diddley
• His brother and guitar
• First meeting with Howlin' Wolf
• Getting fired, and getting rehired
• The secret to great playing

Jukebox

Hubert Sumlin with Howlin Wolf

• Spoonful
• Smokestack Lightning
• Built for Comfort
• Killin' Floor

Blog

Sumlin show review, and more music info

• Check it out at cutnscratch

Guitar icon Hubert Sumlin's path to the Blues Hall of Fame began atop a stack of wooden Coca-Cola crates.

The 10-year-old Sumlin had sneaked off from home and into West Memphis, Ark., to see Chester "Howlin' Wolf" Burnett. He said he was too young to get into the club Wolf was playing, so he snagged the crates lying around behind the joint, stacked them, climbed up and peeked inside an exhaust fan window.

"And me and the fan fell over on Wolf," Sumlin said. "And Wolf caught me and the fan."

But Wolf wasn't angry. Not only did he let young Sumlin stay right by him onstage through the performance, but he also drove him home when it was over.

"He ... told my mother, 'Please don't whoop him, because I may need this young man one day,' " Sumlin recalled.

Turns out, Wolf did. He hired Sumlin around 12 years later in 1954. The two would play together for more than two decades -- an association that played a large part in Sumlin's induction earlier this year into the Blues Hall of Fame, in Tunica, Miss.

Sumlin, 76, brings his mess of blues guitar licks and groove to 202 Market, where he'll play and sing with his touring partners, the Nighthawks, on Friday.

"I'm really looking forward to it," Sumlin said in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home, near New York City. "When I play with them Nighthawks, what a group! ... It looks to me like they're getting better and better."

The legend of a blues idol

Sumlin lost his mentor, Wolf, in 1976. Only three months ago, Sumlin's brother and earliest guitar inspiration, A.D. Smith, died at 87. The day before this interview, his old friend and onetime Chess Records labelmate, Bo Diddley, died.

"He was one of the legendary guys, man, he was," Sumlin said of Diddley. "And not only that, he was a nice guy. Nice personality, good musician and everything.

"He was just a year older than me!"

Sumlin is one of the last surviving links to the first generation of players who used electric instruments to transform Mississippi River Delta blues into Chicago blues.

It wasn't easy getting there. Sumlin has suffered lung cancer and had a lung removed. He has suffered a stroke and at least one heart attack. He has since given up drinking and smoking.

"But I'm OK now, man. I come to find out that everything is OK, right now," he said. "And I feel good!"

That's good news for music fans. Guitarists such as Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Keith Richards, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jimmy Page have claimed him as an idol, citing his work on "Killing Floor," "Smokestack Lightning," "Shake For Me" and others as essential ingredients of rock 'n' roll.

Bob Margolin, a onetime Muddy Waters sideman and a friend of Sumlin's, calls him "a unique and magical guitar player."

"Other guitarists are inspired by him, but nobody else sounds like him," Margolin wrote in an e-mail last week.

Despite the love and accolades Clapton, Richards and other have heaped upon Sumlin, most people don't know about him, he said.

"Hubert's guitar style blends heartbreak and humor, often at the same time," Margolin wrote. "While he's playing his guitar, nothing else matters and nothing hurts, both for him and the audience."

Honing his style required change, and Sumlin had to be kicked off the stage to make it. Eight years into their association, Wolf decided that Sumlin was drowning him out.

"He fired me," Sumlin said. Wolf told him to " 'Go home and put that pick down, please. And don't you come back unless ... you've showed me you can play with your fingers. That's what it's meant to be anyway.'

"That's what he told me. Sure enough, man. I did."

It was a lesson that would benefit any musician, in any style, he said.

"That was the best firing I ever had in my life," Sumlin said. "By him firing me, oh man, I went home and I found myself. I found everything -- my own tone, my own sound, my own everything."

Before long, he was back with Wolf, at Silvio's, on Chicago's west side. Wolf called him up for the last song of the night and reminded his audience that this was the guitar player he had recently fired -- it was time to find out what he had learned.

"And the house was full of people," he said. "Man, I played 'Smokestack Lightning' so good till it hurt me."

Getting his due

Margolin wrote a touching biography for Sumlin's Web site -- www.hubertsumlinblues.com. He writes there that Sumlin has gotten more love than money out of his lifetime in the blues. Fame and fortune aren't necessarily synonymous in the blues world, he added in last week's e-mail.

"The real world result of this is that even venerable legends can't afford to retire and enjoy the pride in their achievements. They will have to play to eat until they drop or die, and then the blues world will do its best to generate benefits for their medical expenses or families."

None of which has made Sumlin a bitter man. He and another blues legend, B.B. King, share the talent of supreme social grace, Margolin wrote.

"The two of them are the nicest humans I've ever had the honor to meet," he wrote. "That's even more rare than musical genius."

On May 7, Sumlin joined King -- who plays Roanoke Performing Arts Theatre on July 29 -- as a member of the blues hall. The same week, Mississippi placed a marker in Sumlin's honor on its statewide Blues Trail, in Greenwood, where he was born and spent his earliest childhood.

Sumlin said he loved joining the blues hall, but seeing the marker in Greenwood really got him.

"People were from Germany, from everywhere ... for the dedication of the thing, at the foot of this river where my mother used to fish," he said. "What a time. What a day that was.

"Lordy, what a week for me! I thought I was gonna have another heart attack."