The two began hanging out at the city’s numerous blues clubs where they were often the only white faces in the room. It was there that he met Nick Gravenites, a young songwriter/guitar player who shared his love of the blues. The resulting knee injury put an end to the scholarship, keeping Butterfield in Chicago, where he enrolled in the University of Illinois. When Fate Steps inīut fate literally stepped in, when the college-bound high school grad tripped over a rake. Original band member Elvin Bishop recalls that, when he first met him, “Butter”- as his friends called him - primarily played the guitar, but that within six months of picking up the harmonica, he was “a natural genius on the instrument,” getting “way good in a short amount of time.”Īnd yet, a track and field scholarship to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island seemed to be pulling Butterfield in a different direction -away from music, and what was considered to be the urban blues capital of the world. All the time.Īs Trevor Lawrence put it, “He was a real blues guy.” We also learn that he wasn’t into chit-chat, tending friendships, accepting things that were unacceptable or drawing lines in the sand, whether you were talking music or race relations.Īnd he wasn’t out for the glory, which is to say that when it came to blowing his own horn, he wasn’t into self-promotion. More than one person in the film notes that he wasn’t “warm and fuzzy”- their term, not ours. Paul Butterfield was, by most accounts, an imperfect and complicated soul, as many great artists are, and the film’s contributors speak openly about what he was and wasn’t, in equal measure. “You’d know not to bother him,” he says, adding, “He was totally absorbed.” Peter remembers Paul going off on his own, working his way around the harp in quiet seclusion. Those who were around at the very beginning of that relationship recall how totally absorbed he was in learning the ins and outs of the instrument that sang to him. His relationship with the harmonica was different, special. And though the instrument was never a part of the music he would later play on stage or record, there are those who recall him taking his flute with him on the road and playing it backstage or in his hotel room every now and again. Paul took up the flute when he was in high school, taking lessons from a well-respected flautist with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. They lived a comfortable life in the Hyde Park section of Chicago’s South Side, where his parents introduced him and his brother Peter to music at a young age. His mom was an artist, his dad, an attorney. He was born just before Christmas, on December 17, 1942. (See the trailer at the top of this page) Now a documentary film, Horn from the Heart, offers up a wide and glorious assemblage of musicians, friends, neighbors and family members, anxious to share their memories and secure Butterfield’s place in the world of music.