Song · Howlin' Wolf
“Spoonful” by Howlin' Wolf
From the album The Howlin’ Wolf Album (2011)
“Spoonful” by Howlin' Wolf appears on 2 radio countdowns from 2 stations between 2001 and 2020. It was first released in 2011 on the album The Howlin’ Wolf Album. Its best result is #671 on the WFPK 2001 Greatest Songs of All Time. In the combined RockLists rankings it is #2,644 indie & aaa song of all time.
Willie Dixon wrote "Spoonful", and Howlin' Wolf was the first to record it, in 1960: a stark one-chord blues that sits on a single modal groove at a medium lope in E, eight-bar vocal sections giving way to twelve-bar choruses. It belongs to the same family as "Wang Dang Doodle" and "Back Door Man", Dixon songs cut from the same cloth for Wolf, and Wolf's own "Smokestack Lightning".
Dixon built it loosely on Charley Patton's "A Spoonful Blues" from 1929, and the lineage runs back further, through Papa Charlie Jackson's "All I Want Is a Spoonful" in 1925 and Luke Jordan's "Cocaine Blues" in 1927. The spoonful stands in for whatever a man craves, and will fight for, with listeners hearing sex, love and drugs in it, and it has become one of Dixon's best-known and most covered songs. It is included on The Howlin' Wolf Album.
Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
RockLists rankings
Indie & Adult Alternative
All Rock Formats
All-time and decade countdowns
| Year | # | Station | Countdown | of |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2001 | 1798 | WFPK | WFPK 2001 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2000 |
| 2001 | 671 | WFPK | WFPK 2001 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2000 |
| 2020 | 1564 | WXPN | WXPN 2020 Greatest Songs of All Time | 2020 |
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