Boogie Man

  Hooker recalls being one of ten children, but as his nephew Archie gleans from his own studies of the family history, ‘I always thought there was thirteen of ’em, but some died. See, what happened was . . . stillbirth you don’t count.’ John Lee’s older brothers were William, Sam and Archie; the younger boys were Dan, Jesse and Isaac; and John Lee’s sisters were Sis, Alice, Sarah and Doll Baby.

  ‘Doll Baby’s name was Mary,’ opines Archie. ‘One of them’s supposed to have been blind. I think it was Aunt Mary. I think she was the last sister that died. She was the oldest child. They wouldn’t use names. They would use nicknames. Sis might be Mary.’ Minnie kept on having children until she was nearly 50; this, according to Archie, was not uncommon. ‘Womens were different [then]. They could have kids and two days later be back in the fields. More kids you had, the more crops you could produce. Simple. And every one of them had big families.’

  The family lived and worked on what Hooker remembers as ‘a big farm, close to a hundred acres’, which would put the Hookers into whatever passed for the middle classes of the Delta. Slightly more than half of the farms in the region were 80 acres or smaller, while 30 per cent were over 300 acres, and the very largest spread to as much as 2,000 acres. ‘It was an old wooden house with a tin-top roof, but we was comfortable, you know, we had a lot to eat. I never been hungry a day in my life. We had cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, farmland . . . he had people working for him. Down South there was merchant people who saw him as being in the same category. He had a few Spanish people working for him, not many, maybe a couple. Two Spanish, Mexican, my older brothers, four or five more black people. He was a sharecropper, you know.’

  The practice of sharecropping meant that the larger plantations managed to keep the majority of the black workers on the land, substituting economic ties for forced labour. A tenant farmer would take responsibility for a certain area of land and would work it, together with their families and any sub-tenants and day labourers, with equipment and cash advances supplied by the ‘boss’. When each year’s crop was harvested, the farmer and the landlord split the proceeds, and if the farmer and his team had worked especially conscientiously, there would indeed be a profit after the boss deducted his advances. If the crop failed, or if, for any other reason, sufficient profits did not materialise, the tenants began the following year in debt. Given a few bad years, a sharecropper could easily fall so far in debt that it was impossible ever to break even again. Once that happened, the ’cropper would virtually be enslaved all over again, and entirely legally. William Hooker must indeed have been a skilled and conscientious farmer: the records of the S.N. Fewell Company, based on the Fewell plantation close to nearby Vance (where the Hookers moved a few years after John was born) show that in 1928 ‘Will Hooker Sr and Jr’ made a profit of $28.00. By the standards of the time, this was a more than respectable sum.

  The work was back-breakingly hard, and getting it done was entirely down to the muscle-power of humans and animals. In the rural Mississippi of the ’20s and ’30s, the twentieth century hadn’t quite arrived. Since cars and tractors were still comparatively rare, horses and mules did double duty as agricultural implements and personal transport. Country backwaters like the Mississippi Delta weren’t yet wired up for electricity; Hooker remembers that it wasn’t until his mid-teens, when he first travelled to sophisticated, progressive Memphis, that he saw his first electric light. (For the record, Buddy Guy – nineteen years Hooker’s junior and raised in rural Louisiana – tells substantially the same story: he, too, had to go to Memphis as a teenager to see a lightbulb for the first time.) ‘When I was there [in the Delta],’ Hooker says of electricity, ‘it wasn’t there.’ The telephone was another piece of hi-tech exotica: something that folks had in the city and which you could occasionally see at the movies. The phonograph in the family parlour was ‘the Victrola, the kind you wind up’, where the energy of a weighted pulley drives the turntable and the sound is amplified acoustically through a large horn. There was also an old crystal radio, on which they would listen to Amos And Andy, and ‘music from a radio station in Helena, Arkansas’.

  ‘Sacred’ music only, though. William Hooker was a part-time preacher, a pastor at a local Macedonian church, and family life revolved around farm, church and school. ‘We had,’ says John Lee, ‘to work.’ They also had to sing in church, as Hooker’s nephew Archie, son and namesake of John Lee’s immediate elder brother, explains: ‘He’d been singin’ for, like, years. If you’s ever been a minister’s son, you gonna have to participate in church. They made him go to church, and if you go to church, you gonna learn how to sing basic hymns, so it stuck. It stuck to him, and when he be workin’ he would always try to sing.’ As Hooker himself proudly recalls, ‘I used to sing in the church when I was nine or ten. I was a great gospel singer. Macedonian, where my father was a pastor. It was in the country. I was a very talented young man, and everybody round in the county looked up to me and said, “Oh, that kid is somethin’ else, he can sing better than anybody I ever seen.” When I come into the church everybody look round, and when I started singin’, people start shoutin’ and hollerin’. I had such a tremendous voice. I was nine, ten years old.’

  And there was farm-work, though John Lee was neither physically nor mentally suited to the toil of agricultural labour. He just flat-out didn’t like working in the fields, and down there working in the fields was all there was. ‘My daddy,’ says Archie Hooker, ‘was more a mechanical type. He worked with his hands, and Uncle John didn’t.’ However, there was also play. In the rural South, you either made your own entertainment, or else you got very, very bored. ‘There was this old mule we had, an old mare mule, and she was very stubborn, but she was a gentle old mule and she know us kids. She was a very wise old mule. She wouldn’t hurt us, and she really cared about us. We’d ride her back and she’d let us ride ’til she get tired, and then she rub up against a barbed-wire fence. You know what a barbed-wire fence is? She’d just swing you right into the barbed-wire fence and scratch you and you’d have to jump right off her back! You’d get so mad with her you’d start bitin’ her lip and be cussin’ her: “You bitch! You . . . !” There’d be one behind kickin’ her, bam! Right up against the barbed-wire fence! Whoo! Whoo! Old Kate, that was her name. She’d drag you right into a barbed-wire fence! You had to hop right off her or get stuck with the wire! Yeah! She’d see us comin’ and if she didn’t want to be bother, she just lay down, get on her knees and lay down. Old Kate. Hell of an old mule. She knew when twelve o’clock come and we’d been workin’ in the fields, when time to eat she started hollerin’ Whoo! Whoo! and she wouldn’t go no further. She lay down in the middle of the field ’til she knew that you were gonna take her and get her somethin’ to eat. A lot of memories in that old mule.’

  Chicago drummer S.P. Leary, a veteran of the Muddy Waters Band who worked with Hooker on the 1966 sessions for The Real Folk Blues, would certainly agree on that: ‘Everyone I worked [with] taught me something but John Lee Hooker. Me and him fell out. You have to watch your p’s and q’s with John Lee; he’d tear a house up, he’d tear the top off a house. If you make him mad, you talk about a mule . . . ha ha. I think a mule showed John Lee a hard time.’

  And then there was the usual kid stuff.

  ‘I met a midget once. Did I tell you about the midget? There was some pretty little girls around, and I was the big bully of the town. I was a bully. There was a little midget, ’bout this high. There was about four or five little girls around, and he was peekin’ on one girl, and I said “Leave him to me.” I was showin’ off for the girls. I was nine years old, and I thought I was gonna walk all over him. They said’ – Hooker shifts his voice into a taunting, little-girl falsetto – ‘“We gon’ make John whup your ass. John, will you hold him for us?” I said’ – roughening to a stylised ‘tough’ voice – ‘“Yeah, I’ll take care of it.” And I slap him, pow! And he said, “Don’t hit me no more.” I say,’ – toughly again – ‘“What y
ou say?” Bop! He say, “I said don’t hit me no more.” I say, “You little short thing, I’m gonna whup the piss outcha.” He said, “Y’all don’t hit me no more.” I hit him again, and, boy, he grabbed me. He was a tough ’un. He whupped me and he tore off all my clothes, and the girls was there: “Get up, John! John, get up! Get him! Don’t let him getcha! John, get up! Get up! Get up! Get him off the ground! John, he on top of you!” We get up and he say, “Now, I don’t wanna hurt you, so don’t slap me no more.” I said, “I’m gonna see you again, and the next time I see you I’m gonna be ready.” And Loreen – the girl – said,’ – in falsetto – ‘“John wasn’t ready then!” But I never jumped on another midget. Yeah, he showed me!’

  The idea of John Lee Hooker as ‘the bully of the town’ seems somewhat unlikely. He was small for his age and tormented by a chronic stutter; his only known attempt at a macho act was to slap a midget, and that particular exercise in boyish swaggering ended rather less than gloriously. Singer/guitarist Jimmy Rogers, a veteran of the great Muddy Waters bands of the ’50s and a Chess Records hitmaker in his own right during that time, grew up around the Vance area and counted Hooker and harmonicist Snooky Pryor among his playmates. Rogers paints a slightly different picture: ‘Oh, he was just a youngster just like me and Snooky [Pryor] was, just a young country boy . . . we would play marbles together, play ball . . . there weren’t nothin’ special goin’ on in his life at all, nothin’ different from any other youngster back then. We was kids then, and he was just a regular guy. There weren’t nothin’ special about him that I know of. We just met up, and Snooky knew him before I did. He didn’t mean nothin’ to me; he was just another boy. It’s been so long since I been in Vance; I was a kid then and I’m 68 now. I know he’s a good four, five, six years older than me, at least five.’ It’s hard to imagine ‘the bully of the town’ spending much time playing marbles and ball with kids half a decade his junior without standing out from the crowd. Hooker and Rogers were reunited in Chicago during the 1950s; curiously, while they remained friendly right up until Rogers’ death in 1998 and occasionally spoke on the phone, and Hooker has clear and affectionate memories of their childhood encounters – ‘I knowed him from my little childhood days down there. We’d shoot marbles together’ – Hooker remains adamant that he has no such recollection of Snooky Pryor, who Rogers claims introduced them.

  The ‘bully of the town’ notion definitely doesn’t stand up. If anyone was the family desperado, it was Hooker’s brother Dan, who later killed his wife, and then walked ten miles to turn himself in. ‘I met Uncle Dan,’ recalls Archie. ‘The first time I met him, he was in prison. Doin’ ten years for killin’ his wife. Straight ten years: no parole. I was about five, six. My dad took me down. He was at Parchman, Mississippi. Short, heavy-set man. Cookin’, made trustee. But his violence had to be provoked, because in the process of makin’ trustee, he carried a gun. If a guy was escapin’, he wouldn’t shoot. So that mean for him to really get mad, to hurt somebody, someone had to push him. That mean a woman had to push him. John always said he didn’t have to fight, they always took care’a him. My dad said John was always fragile, never was one to want to be a fighter. He was always kindhearted, and I’m thinkin’, basically, that’s what it is now. John’s not a fighter. That ain’t the way he was raised. He don’t believe in it. My dad didn’t. Unless you pushed him. That’s why his brothers took care of him. They didn’t want him to turn the other cheek. They was tough, they would fight . . . deep down inside, he was more of a minister’s son [than the others]. He might’ve sung the blues for relief, or for money, because you can’t make a lot of money singing spirituals, but deep down inside he always had God in his heart. John may have ran away, true, but he ran away from poverty.’

  According to Archie, there were other pastimes, too: ‘Things like stealin’ a neighbour’s chickens. [John Lee] said, “We couldn’t steal granddad’s chickens”, cause he counted ’em, but you’d go out and get a neighbour’s chickens.’ He didn’t want to do the fields, and him and all the boys, they had nothin’ else to do, so that was they entertainment. They started like . . . his music really was his turnaround.’

  John Lee could conceivably have stayed down on the farm, working in the fields, singing in church and perhaps following his father into the ministry, acquiring some schooling – the year before he was born, the state of Mississippi had finally gotten around to instituting a public education policy – and raising a family of his own to work the land in their turn. Instead, a chance encounter was to change his life. An itinerant bluesman named Tony Hollins took a powerful shine to John’s sister Alice, and soon he was coming round to court her. He ended up making a bigger impression on his adored one’s little brother than he did on Alice herself.

  ‘Oh, I loved him so much, couldn’t he play guitar! I was hangin’ round him like a hungry dog hang around a bone. I was just a little kid, seven, eight. He recorded, but I can’t think of what he recorded. Last I heard of him, he was a barber in Chicago. Whether he’s still around or gone, I don’t know, but anyway he got rid of the first guitar he had, an old Silvertone. It wasn’t no heck of a guitar, but it was a guitar, and that was heaven to me because I had never had no guitar. It could have had three strings, but it was a guitar. I never know what happened to that guitar that Tony give me, but anyway we used to sit on the porch on the pasture by the woods, with the cows and stuff like that with my sister, and he would play for us. One day he said, “Hey kid, I got a guitar for you.” I said okay, and that was my first guitar.’

  It’s not hard to second-guess Hollins’ reasoning. Giving an old, worn-out guitar to John meant that he could send the youngster off on his own to practice, and – once the young gooseberry was safely distracted and out of the way – enjoy some precious time alone with the loved one. The acquisition of the guitar created an immediate problem with the loving but stern Reverend William Hooker. ‘Finally, you know, I went to play guitar,’ Hooker reminisces. ‘Had an old piece of guitar and be bangin’ on it.’ The main reason that Tony Hollins had to lurk by the front porch when he came by to see Alice was because of Rev. Hooker’s disapproval of his reckless, hard-travelling, blues-singing ways. Reluctantly, William Hooker allowed John to keep the guitar, as long it never crossed the threshold of the family home. ‘I couldn’t play it in the house, because . . . I had to keep it out in the barn. All the time I was pluckin’ on it, and my daddy called it the Devil. He said, “You can’t bring the Devil in this house.” They all feel like it devil music back then. They call blues and guitar and things the Devil’s music. That was just the way they thought. Not only my father, everybody thought that. The white and the black ministers, they thought it was the Devil’s music.’

  To the Reverend Hooker, it must indeed have seemed like that. Tony Hollins didn’t stick around very long, but his beat-up old guitar did. The second young John Lee got his hands on the discarded instrument, whatever interest he may have had in his schooling went right out of the window. ‘When I was a kid comin’ up, I would pretend I was goin’ to school and hide out in the woods with my old guitar. When the other kids come out of school, I come back along with them like I’d been to school. I hadn’t been to school for a long time, and then they caught me and used to whup me and beat me.’ For John Lee, the choice was absolutely clear-cut. ‘You never knew this, I’m a very, very wise person. I’m a very good songwriter in the blues, but I never got education because I had two choices. Stay, go to school and get a good education, stay down in Mississippi and be a farmer the rest of my life and never be a musician; and I took the choice of leavin’, comin’ North and being a musician. In my mind, I was very smart. I wouldn’t have been a musician, living in Mississippi, farming, sharecropping. I had two choices: going to school, and become a well-known whatever – I never would have been known just working the rest of my life in Mississippi or wherever – or take off and get famous, which is what happened.’

  The Hooker boys were growing up. Archie Ho
oker remembers the boyhood tales told him by his father. ‘My daddy told me about how when they was growin’ up they would swim in the creek, and my daddy was a moonshine maker, they would make corn whiskey. “I made John drunk once – he was just a little boy – from white lightnin’.” Down in the woods, they would go down to the still and let him sample. “That’s how you could tell how good it was. If it made him drunk, it was good.” My dad was a little bit older than Uncle John, just a couple of years. Not a whole lot, but they was real close.’ John Lee, too, remembers his elder brother’s homebrew experiments. ‘He was making home-brew in a little cabin, and the stuff was good, too. We’d cap it, bag it and take it to a party one night, and I had it on my back and the thing goes to bustin’, beer got warm, explodin’. He made the corn liquor too, same thing as whiskey, made outta corn . . .’

  Needless to say, this too contravened Rev. Hooker’s house rules; it’s as well that he never found out what his sons were up to in the little cabin out the back. ‘Oh yeah! Ooohh! Never be caught with a bottle. The Devil in the bottle! It’s funny, but it’s true. The Devil in the bottle. Anything with alcohol, the Devil puts it there.’

  In many ways, the Reverend’s hard-nosed attitude to his son’s musical ambitions backfired. If he had allowed John to play his guitar in the house, John might well have stayed in Mississippi. On the other hand, he might not. ‘I could have stayed home and played, but there wasn’t no producers, radio stations and record companies. Weren’t none of that in Mississippi. I could have stayed down there and played and gotten real good, like so many down there right now are real good, but they never come to be a star because there’s nothin’ there. I could have stayed there like you say. You right. If they ever let me stay there and play, I could’ve become a grown-up musician, a real good musician, but there’s nothing down there like producers, managers, record companies, booking agencies could’ve heard me and discovered me. The country people could’ve discovered me, but . . . I was very wise. I was different from any of my family, as night and day. I was just . . . I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em. The rest of ’em grew up, got educations, stayed down there . . . they all gone now. But from twelve or fourteen I wanted to be a city boy, a musician. I wanted to explore my music. I were very humble, very mellow, very nice; I were raised very good, to be a Christian and respect everybody, love people. But it wasn’t what I wanted in Mississippi. I said I’d never reach my goal livin’ there, goin’ to school, sharecroppin’, come home from the fields . . .’