Newport - Paul Butterfield Blues Band

Paul Butterfield (17 December 1942 – 4 May 1987) was an American blues vocalist and harmonica player, who founded the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in the early 1960s and performed at the original Woodstock Festival. He died of drug-related heart failure.
The son of a lawyer, Paul Butterfield was born in Chicago, Illinois and raised in the city's Hyde Park neighborhood. He attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, a private school associated with the University of Chicago. After studying classical flute with Walfrid Kujala of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra as a teenager, he developed a love for the blues harmonica, and hooked up with white, blues-loving, University of Chicago physics student Elvin Bishop. The pair started hanging around black blues musicians such as Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Little Walter and Otis Rush. Butterfield and Bishop soon formed a band with Jerome Arnold and Sam Lay, both hired away from the touring band of Howlin' Wolf. In 1963, the racially mixed quartet was made the house band at Big John's, a folk club in the Old Town district on Chicago's north side. Butterfield was still underage (as was guitarist Mike Bloomfield.)
Paul Butterfield died of peritonitis due to drug use and heavy drinking on May 4, 1987 Los Angeles, California. Before then, Butterfield tenor sax player Ruben Riera had taken him to Bellevue Hospital in New York City for emergency surgery for perforated intestine. He died at his home in North Hollywood, California. A month earlier, he was featured on B.B. King & Friends, a filmed concert that also included Albert King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Etta James, Gladys Knight, Chaka Khan and Eric Clapton. Its subsequent release was dedicated to Butterfield in memoriam.

In 2005, the Paul Butterfield Fund and Society was founded. It petitions for Butterfield's inclusion in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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