NEW YORK, NY.- Sam Lay, a powerful and virtuosic drummer who played and recorded with Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, was a founding member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and backed Bob Dylan when he went electric at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, died Jan. 29 at a nursing facility in Chicago. He was 86.

His daughter, Debbie, confirmed the death but said she did not know the cause.

Lay’s exuberant, idiosyncratic drumming was known for its double-shuffle groove, which he adapted from the rhythms of the handclaps and tambourine beats he heard in the Pentecostal church he attended while growing up in Birmingham, Alabama.

“The only way I can describe it is, you’ve got three different drummers playing the same beat but they’re not hitting it at the same time,” Lay said in “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” a 2015 documentary directed by John Anderson that took its name from an album Lay released in 1968.

Harmonica player Corky Siegel, a longtime collaborator, said the double-shuffle groove was part of Lay’s broader ability to do more than keep the beat.

“He just made you fly,” Siegel said in a phone interview. “He wasn’t held back by the concept of groove and time.” He added: “People think he played loud. No, he played delicate, but he used the full dynamic range, and when you do that, and you get to a crescendo, it’s powerful, like a locomotive coming toward you. But with Sam, it was like five locomotives.”

After arriving in Chicago in early 1960, Lay played in bands led by harmonica player and singer Little Walter and singer Howlin’ Wolf, with whom he recorded songs that became blues standards such as “Killing Floor,” “The Red Rooster” and “I Ain’t Superstitious.”

Once, after being fined by Howlin’ Wolf for wearing pants without a black stripe on them, Lay argued that no one could see his pants behind his drum kit. When their dispute persisted, Lay pulled a Smith & Wesson gun and held it to Howlin’ Wolf’s face.

Lay left Howlin’ Wolf to join the Paul Butterfield Blues Band in 1963, lured by the prospect of making $20 a gig, nearly three times what he had been earning. Led by Butterfield on harmonica and vocals, the band — which also included guitarists Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield, bassist Jerome Arnold and keyboardist Mark Naftalin — was racially integrated, a rarity at the time, and bought the blues to a white audience during an intense period in the civil rights movement.

The band played at the Newport Folk Festival on July 25, 1965. Hours after their set, Lay, Arnold and Bloomfield were part of Dylan’s backup band when he stunned the audience by performing an electric set, which began with a bracing version of his song “Maggie’s Farm.”

Soon after that, Dylan asked Lay to back him on the title track of his album “Highway 61 Revisited.” In addition to playing drums, Lay played a toy whistle on the song’s memorable opening. (Organist Al Kooper has said he was the one who brought the whistle to the studio.)

“I blew it and it sounded like a siren,” Lay told the Chicago Sun-Times in 2004. “Bob said, ‘Do that again.’ So I did it again.”

Later in 1965, the Butterfield band’s first album, called simply “The Paul Butterfield Blues Band,” was released. One track, “I Got My Mojo Working,” featured Lay on lead vocal.

An illness caused Lay to leave the band in late 1965.

Samuel Julian Lay was born March 20, 1935, in Birmingham. His father, Foster, a Pullman train porter who played banjo in a country band, died when Sam was 17 months old. His mother, Elsie (Favors) Lay, cleaned Pullman cars.




Growing up, Lay listened to country music; as a teenager, he took drumming lessons from W.C. Handy Jr., the son of the composer. He dropped out of high school (which ended his dream of trying to run faster than the Olympic champion Jesse Owens) and in 1954 moved to Cleveland, where he worked in a steel mill and started to discover his musical path.

One day, he stopped into a wine bar after hearing the sound of a harmonica being played by Little Walter, who asked him to sit in when he learned that he played drums. In the late 1950s, Lay joined the Thunderbirds, a blues and R&B group.

When Little Walter was shot, Lay helped nurse him back to health. Once in Chicago, he joined Little Walter’s band. But he didn’t stay long; he was soon hired by Howlin’ Wolf.

Lay was a slick dresser who wore elaborate capes and hats and carried a walking stick. He styled his hair for a while after Little Richard’s. And he brought his windup 8 mm camera to clubs in the 1960s. It didn’t have sound, but he captured images of Little Walter, Howlin’ Wolf, Waters, Albert King, Buddy Guy and others onstage.

“As soon as Howlin’ Wolf knew that a camera was watching him, you’d think he was possessed in some kind of way,” Lay said in Anderson’s documentary.

Footage he shot was used in Anderson’s film and in Martin Scorsese’s 2003 public television series, “The Blues.”

In 1966, after he had begun to play with harmonica player and singer James Cotton, Lay heard from Waters that an enemy of Cotton’s, who had shot him years before, had just been released from jail and was going after him. Lay rushed to his house, got his Colt .45, drove to the club and prepared to defend Cotton.

But while Lay waited for the gunman (who never came), his gun went off, he told Phoenix New Times in 1999. He shot himself in the groin.

“I’m still recuperating,” he said in the interview.

In 1969, Lay was part of the all-star band, which also included Waters and Butterfield, that recorded the album “Fathers and Sons.” It reached No. 70 on the Billboard chart.

Over the next 50 years, he performed with Siegel’s ensembles the Siegel-Schwall Band, Chamber Blues and Chicago Blues Reunion, as well as leading his own blues band.

But the blues did not pay all of Lay’s bills. For many years, he moonlighted as a security guard.

Lay was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2015, as part of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, and into the Blues Hall of Fame three years later.

In addition to his daughter, he is survived by four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. His wife, Elizabeth (Buirts) Lay, died in 2017. His son Bobby died inn 2019, and his son Michael died last month.

Lay did not lack self-confidence.

“I don’t know nobody in the world who can follow a band as good as I can, specifically if it comes to blues and that old-time rock 'n' roll,” he said in Anderson’s documentary. “The secret is paying attention to what everyone else is playing and keeping your eyes open, and your mind.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.