Howlin' Biscuit

The Greatest Blues Man The World Never Knew

By: Jonathan Dwier

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Somewhere in the documented gaps of American musical history, between Robert Johnson's crossroads and every myth that followed it, there is a man named Howlin' Biscuit. You have not heard of him. That is not your fault. It is, depending on which source you consult, the fault of the institutions that failed to document him, the fires that destroyed his recordings, the Library of Congress memo that ends with a senior archivist going home, or the fundamental impossibility of writing down something that arrives in the body before it arrives in the brain.

This book is the attempt anyway.

Written in the tradition of Erik Larson's documentary immersion and delivered in the deadpan register of a researcher who has spent thirty years in the company of material that defies every tool available to them and kept going anyway, Sausage Gravy Blues: The Complete Howlin' Biscuit Archive is equal parts biography, mythology, musicology, and something that does not have a category yet but that a philosopher at Tulane tried to name before being denied tenure in a process the university described as procedural and the philosopher described as not unrelated to the gravy.

What you will find inside: three birth certificates that do not agree on the year, the state, or whether birth is the right framework. A guitar technique described by a session veteran as wrong in every measurable sense and more right than anything measured correctly. A song about peanuts that received eleven pages of academic analysis and a song about a workplace boat team that received none, though it deserved more. Two auditions for the Monkees. Two auditions for KISS. One man who should have been in both and was in neither and has placed both grievances, with full documentary seriousness, in the historical record alongside his recordings, his gravy philosophy, and his complete taxonomy of the misplaced.

You will also find: a Waffle House grease fire that destroyed the only copies of a live album and produced, simultaneously, the best night of business in that location's history, with every customer ordering biscuits and gravy in a way they could not explain. A man in a bait shop with maps to a place that doesn't have an address. A song recorded in 1968 about forgetting to delete your internet search history. A bowl of gravy kept warm in a refrigerator in Greenwood, Mississippi, for twenty-eight years, eaten by strangers who called to say thank you. A note that tells you to eat something. Testimonies from Paul McCartney, Gene Simmons, Jay-Z, Henry Rollins, Lemmy Kilmister, John Lee Hooker, ZZ Top, Slash, Axl Rose, Jello Biafra, Skrillex, and Pat Boone, who stood in the middle of a street in Greenwood in the fall of 1959 and stopped walking and has been different since and didn't know why until now.

This is a serious book about a man who may not have existed in the way that things exist when they are written down. It is also the funniest book about the American blues tradition you will ever read, though neither the author nor the research community will acknowledge that it is funny, because they are being serious, because the material demands seriousness, because Howlin' Biscuit demanded seriousness about everything, including the peanuts, including the gravy, including the gluten free chicken nugget, which a Tulane musicologist has described as the most compressed image of compromised identity in American recorded music, and she has said what she has said.

The archive is complete.

The man is not.

Eat something first.

He planned for this.