Spoonful is a blues song written by Willie Dixon, who credits himself with both music and words. Howlin' Wolf first recorded it for Chess in Chicago in June 1960, and it was released as a single in July 1960 with "Howlin' for My Darling" on the B-side. It also appears on the 1962 Chess album Howlin' Wolf. The backing musicians were Hubert Sumlin, Freddie Robinson, Otis Spann and Fred Below, with Dixon on bass. The song is loosely based on Charley Patton's "A Spoonful Blues" (1929). Otis Rush was first offered the song, after which it passed to Wolf and then to Etta James. Etta & Harvey's version was a hit in 1961.
It is a one-chord modal blues in the key of E, with eight-bar vocal sections and twelve-bar choruses at a medium tempo. Cream recorded a famous version in 1966, released as a single on 9 December 1966 on Fresh Cream, and stretched it to nearly seventeen minutes live on Wheels of Fire (1968). It is one of Dixon's best-known and most interpreted songs. It appears in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll, ranks No. 154 on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs (2021), and was placed in the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame's Classics of Blues Recordings in 2010.
