Remembering the influential, ebullient Chicago blues drummer Sam Lay, dead at 86

CHICAGO — The last time I talked to Sam Lay it was late at night and he was on the road and on the telephone, driving back home to Chicago from Cleveland where he has just been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as a member of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band.

He said that night in 2015, “I hope you can hear me,” and I could then and realized how many times I had heard him in person, on recordings and in films. And seen him on stages, where he delighted with his drumming and singing, with his buoyant personality and flamboyant dress, often decked out in matching suits, shoes, hats, capes and canes.

One of the most influential and esteemed drummers in the history of popular music, Lay was by then accustomed to accolades. He had already been inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in Memphis, Tennessee, and the Jazz Hall of Fame in Los Angeles. Though the word “legend” is tossed around so cavalierly these days that it is applied to winners of televised dance contests, Lay was the real thing and a vital link to the history of the blues.

As his longtime friend and collaborator and Chicago’s own Corky Siegel told me, “Sam does not just play the drums. He sings the drums.”

Lay died Jan. 29 at a Chicago nursing home, where had been taken from his West Side home after suffering heart troubles. He was 86. He is survived by daughter Debbie Lay, four grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. He lost his wife of 51 years, Elizabeth Buirts Lay, in 2017 and was preceded in death by sons Bobby and Michael Lay, who died in 2019 and last month, respectively.

He is also survived by friends and fans such as Siegel who rightly said, “If you wanted to know the history of the blues, talk to Sam Lay. He knows it because he was there.”

Samuel Julian Lay was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on March 20, 1935. His parents worked on Pullman train cars and his father played banjo in a country band but died before Lay was 2. Lay was ever playing music and moved to Cleveland in 1954 to work at a steel plant and began playing drums in jazz clubs. It was there, he would often recall, that he heard a blues harmonica inside a bar, being played by Little Walter, who asked him to sit in with his band.

It was a fortuitous match and when Little Walter moved to Chicago in 1960, Lay joined him, later nursing Walter back to health after he suffered a bullet wound. He would go on to play drums and sing with every giant of the blues: Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed, Hound Dog Taylor, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, James Cotton … the list is long, as is that of the number of recordings featuring or starring Lay.

When he was 80, he was the subject of a wonderful documentary, “Sam Lay in Bluesland,” that had its world premiere here as part of the Chicago International Movies & Music Festival.

His stories were fantastic, his manner warm. He was funny and wise, and undeniably cool. In reviewing the film long ago I called it “exuberant and stirring … the irresistibly enchanting Lay at its center.” Among the highlights were the color movies Lay shot with his 8 mm camera that he often took with him to clubs here and on the road. Some of those clips were also featured in “The Blues” (2003), a documentary series produced by Martin Scorsese.

Siegel is in the “Bluesland” film, joined by Charlie Musselwhite and many others who sing Lay’s praises. Iggy Pop says in the film, “Sam Lay was my original ‘I wanna be him.’”

We hear a great deal from Lay too and meet his family members and his barber of 25 years in his shop in the city’s Austin neighborhood.

At the film’s center is what is Lay’s now most legendary gig, playing drums for Bob Dylan when he famously and controversially “went electric” at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. It was a concert that was shaped the night before, when Dylan asked the Butterfield Blues Band to be his backing musicians. They rehearsed the night before and opened the concert with an electric and raucous version of “Maggie’s Farm.”

“Man, all hell broke loose,” Lay would recall.

Later that year, Dylan asked Lay to drum on the title track of his “Highway 61 Revisited” album. The two men enjoyed a respectful relationship. When Lay was awarded a Legends and Heroes Award by the Recording Academy in 2002, he received a telegram from Dylan that said, in part: “Congratulations. … It’s good to be recognized. … It’s so well-deserved. … you are second to none — your flawless musicianship and unsurpassed timing, maestro with the sticks and brushes.”

Siegel had known Lay since the mid-1960s, when the drummer played the bygone Big John’s on the North Side as part of the Butterfield Band, which Siegel has called “the best band I ever heard in my life.”

Lay and Siegel first shared a stage in 1969 with the Siegel-Schwall Band and later with Corky Siegel’s Chamber Blues, and shared stages and music and good times ever since. In that car ride from Cleveland to Chicago, Lay told me, “Corky is just a great cat all the way. Not just in music but in life itself. He’s a blessing in every way.”

A few days after his friend’s death, Siegel said, “Sam loved and lived and shared his life, squeezing every drop of rhythm, articulation, dynamics, tone, and melody out of it, with every cow bell and whistle, and all he could muster. Too much — never enough. Music completes what words fail to say and Sam said it all. With cane and cape, like a superhero, he brought so much joy to the world.”

Siegel said that he had asked his wife, Holly, “What’s the one word that would describe our life with Sam?” Holly responded immediately: “Laughter.”

“So, that’s it,” Siegel said. “Joy, laughter and drumming like no one else in the world.”

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