From Howlin’ Wolf’s 1971 live blues performance at Big Duke’s Flamingo in Chicago. Wolf's music never lost its primal quality: some of his best songs, such as ''Smokestack Lightning,'' ''Commit a Crime'' and ''I Asked for Water, but She Gave Me Gasoline,'' are trancelike one-chord vamps reaching back to African-American music's pre-Western roots. ''That's something I got from the old music,'' he said. But this was a deliberate, even stubborn, artistic choice, as much as Wolf tried to commodify h