"Smokestack Lightning" (Howlin' Wolf)

At some point, I went from being a Muddy Waters fanatic to a Howlin' Wolf fanatic.  Might have been around the time I got a Muddy Waters cassette stuck in the tape deck of my car in college, so every time I turned on the radio, there was always Muddy belting out "Hoochie Coochie Man," live from the Newport Jazz Festival, 1960.  Or maybe it was around age 20, when I bought a Chess Records compilation and heard Howlin' Wolf for the first time and was instantly mesmerized by that voice.  It sounded like liquor, buckshot, and razor blades, thrown in a blender on high speed.  
I loved it.  Still do.
But more than just the sound of Wolf's voice, there was a real earthiness and pain in his delivery.  Unlike Waters, Wolf's songs were less often about boasting or proving his virility and more often about being down on his luck in love: women cheated on him, left him, stole from him, and gave him gasoline instead of water when he was thirsty.  There's something inherently reassuring about a man of Olympic stature (he was 6'3" and nearly 300 pounds) who was as vulnerable as the rest of us mere mortals.
My all-time favorite bad luck song of his is the 1956 single "Smokestack Lightning"—a greasy recasting of his own 1951 song "Crying at Daybreak," which is a lament about his woman leaving him.  
In short, Wolf is watching a locomotive passing in the night, and he's wailing at the sight of the golden sparks coming out of the smokestack (i.e. "smokestack lightning"), knowing that his baby hopped that train and left him for good.  Or, to look at it another way: his woman found a flashy, new man willing to carry her.
Wolf's voice is mournful and haunting throughout the track.  I love his literal howls after each verse; they're as spine-tinglingly lupine as they are train-like.  Also, lead guitarist Hubert Sumlin's prototypical electric blues riff sounds as lonesome and lowdown as Wolf's moan itself.
In short, feeling this bad never sounded so damn good.