Boogie Man

  Only if you’re in first class, John.

  The present-day Hooker, resplendent in his living room, laughs. ‘Yeah, first class. That’s your heaven. You’ll never get it through to people, because the church has got ’em brainwashed to death, the ministers, the preachers. I believe in a Supreme Being, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t believe that there’s a hell that you’re gonna be tortured in. I believed in all of that, then I grew up and realized, and I wrote the song: “Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell/where you go when you die, nobody can tell.” Nobody knows. Nobody come back and tell you, “Hey, it’s all right, c’mon down.”’ He laughs again, louder this time. ‘It ain’t all right. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m wrong.’

  ‘Burnin’ Hell’ was a song Hooker first recorded in 1949, at the very outset of his career. Set to the remorseless, foot-stomping beat of Will Moore’s primal boogie, it takes as its point of departure the line quoted above, which first cropped up on record as the second verse of Son House’s ‘My Black Mama (Part 1)’, which House originally recorded in 1930. Its folk origins are undisguised, but both its form and its agenda are uniquely Hooker’s. Accompanied only by the piercing harmonica of Eddie Burns – originally from the neighbouring community of Dublin, Mississippi – Hooker chants his credo of defiance to the church and its philosophy of endurance on earth to earn rewards in heaven. But the song is no simple hymn to secular values, no straightforward rejection of the spiritual life: in its own way, it is an affirmation. In its central section, Hooker goes down to the church, and falls down on his knees. He asks the preacher – ‘Deacon Jones’, the folkloric archetype of the black divine – to pray for him. He prays all night long, and having thus paid his respects, in the morning he goes on his way freed from the constraints of belief, but a believer nonetheless. ‘Ain’t no hell! Ain’t no hell!’, he shouts triumphantly; even if there is a hell for others, it can no longer claim him. He has traded the promise of salvation for freedom from damnation; thus liberated, he can make his own way in the world. It is one of the most powerful works in his extensive catalogue and – revisionist though the notion may be – I’d argue that the 1970 remake (recorded with the late Alan Wilson, of the blues-rock band Canned Heat, replacing Burns on harp) – is more powerful still: if only because, during the two decades which separate the recordings, the original version’s slight tentativeness has been burned away by Hooker’s increased confidence in both his hard-earned artistic powers, and in the validity of his philosophy. In purely musical terms, it is a perfect example of Hooker’s ability to link the deeply traditional with the startlingly radical; while its content demonstrates how, time and time again, he can dig deep into his personal history to produce a universal metaphor for the contradictions of belief. It is where the adult John Lee replies to his father, restating both his challenge and his love. Finally, it is yet another variation on a perennial Hooker theme: the need to respect one’s past whilst still reserving the right to define one’s own values, write one’s own future, and find one’s own way in the world.

  So Moore’s notion of a loving and compassionate Supreme Being displaced, in John’s vision, Rev. Hooker’s vengeful Old Testament deity; just as the Rev. Hooker himself was replaced in John’s life by Will Moore. In other words, having visualized God in Rev. Hooker’s image, John remade him in Will Moore’s. And it is Will Moore’s Supreme Being in whom John Lee continues, to this very day, to believe. ‘As years go by, I learned more and more about the world. The world growed, and I growed with the world and learned more about the world. When I was in Mississippi, I was strictly in a spiritual world. When I was with Will Moore and my mother, my mother was spiritual, but she didn’t object to me playing the blues. I was restricted to a lot of things I couldn’t do there, but when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I filled up with all these things. I could do what I wanted to do.’

  And thus, armed with everything which Will Moore could teach him, John Lee Hooker was ready to take his third key decision, which was to leave. As we’ve seen, he had already figured out that there was nothing in Mississippi which could further his ambitions and desires. He knew full well that all of the great Mississippi blues singers had had to go elsewhere in order to make their names and to do what John most wanted to do: to make records. Mississippi had no record companies, no recording studios, no booking agents. All it had was an abundance of talent, the kind of talent he had, and the kind that Will Moore had. However, Moore had stuck with his farming and rarely left the Delta, and had thus been denied the opportunity to have his music heard across the Southland, let alone across the nation, and – most especially – across the world. So in 1933, at the tender age of fifteen, only a year or so after he first began to learn his future trade at the knee of his mentor, John Lee Hooker made his third life-changing decision. He grabbed his guitar and some clothes, and upped and split for the bright electric lights of Memphis, Tennessee.

  ‘Yeah, I left home then. I went to Memphis because it was the closest, about ninety miles from Clarksdale. That was the closest I could go with no money, by the direct route.’ For someone in the Delta who has a mind to travel anywhere else (other than further south, of course), Memphis was – and is – the only place to go. That holds true metaphorically as well as literally; Memphis was a cultural as well as a geographical crossroads; the unofficial capital of the black South, a place where hix-from-the-stix could rub shoulders with their more sophisticated cousins from the Southwest Territories, the gateway to the big Northern cities like Chicago or Detroit. It was also a wide-open town which at one time enjoyed the dubious honour of having the highest per-capita murder rate in America. Its epicentre was Beale Street (‘The Home of the Blues’) but it was still fundamentally a racist Southern town despite its relative enlightenment and sophistication. It was different, but not that different. ‘Oh yeah, a little different. Not a lot, but a little looser. You could spread a little bit more, but then you weren’t allowed to ride on the bus and trains with ’em [whites], but then we had our places we could go and them not go. All the towns down there was like that. Oh, it was rough for years and years. I didn’t go back down there too much after I grew up until all that was over. I played down there after I got famous when I was in my late twenties and it was like that, we had to play in certain places. There was certain places you couldn’t. You couldn’t be flirtin’ with the white; you stay here and they stay there. You could go out with Chinese, with the Spanish, but I never seen what difference that it made. We was the same colour they was.’

  Many wonderful and intriguing stories have arisen surrounding John Lee’s sojourn in Memphis. Some – including Hooker’s own autobiographical lyric to the title song of his 1960 album That’s My Story – place him there for as long as two years. Others depict him as leading a gospel quartet, or attending house parties with the young likes of B.B. King and Bobby Bland. The latter tale, unfortunately, collapses as soon as you consider that B.B. didn’t relocate from the Delta to Memphis until 1947 – by which time John Lee was a full-grown adult husband and father living and working in Detroit – and that even if Riley B. King had been in Memphis in 1933, when John Lee hitched his way into town, he would have been barely eight years old, and Bland still a mere toddler. The truth is somewhat more mundane.

  ‘I had an aunt named Emma Lou – I forget her last name, just Emma Lou – on my mother’s side in Memphis, and she had this big boarding house on a backstreet. The boarding house is long gone now, and she gone too. I worked there [in Memphis] as an usher, you know, seatin’ people in the New Daisy Theatre for about two, three dollars a week. You could live on that: a nickel would get you almost two loaves of bread. You could just about get along on that, it was good. You had five bucks, you had a lotta money. There was two of them: New Daisy and Old Daisy on Beale Street. I would sing and play in my room, and once in a while I would sit outside and do it. She let me stay there about two weeks, and then she called my mother and told her. They could have got the
mail, and they never did tell me how she know. I was two weeks there, so she must have wrote. After so long, they came and got me and I went back to Mississippi.’ This enforced return to hearth and home was most definitely not to John’s liking. He took it for as long as he could, and then he legged it once more. This time he headed for somewhere where the support of his extended family couldn’t be used as a net with which to drag him home.

  ‘I didn’t like working in the fields. I stayed there maybe another two or three weeks, I ran off again. I didn’t go to my auntie because I knew she’d tell on me again. I went on to Cincinnati.’

  When I first started hoboin’

  Started hoboin’

  I took a freight train to be my friend

  Oh Lord . . .

  John Lee Hooker, ‘Hobo Blues’

  Like the Memphis sojourn, the period between John Lee’s departure from the South and his arrival in Detroit has become the stuff of legend, conjecture and romantic embroidery. The liner notes to some of the albums he cut during the late ’50s and early ’60s for the Chicago-based Vee Jay label are full of such myth-making. The text accompanying 1961’s The Folklore of John Lee Hooker refers to ‘a life of drifting and restless traveling’ and goes on to claim ‘The itinerant’s life lasted for sixteen years – during which time John Lee had spent relatively long stays in Memphis . . .’ while I’m John Lee Hooker goes further still. ‘He is an itinerant soul, a body who strayed from the Gulf of Mexico, from Corpus Christi to Brownsville, to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia – and plenty of area in between.’

  Now, hype is the raw material of which the music business, in all its forms, is built and, as hypes go, this is all good stuff; the kind of rhetorical flourish that’s perfectly suited and highly appropriate for cementing the public image and professional status of the artist whom Vee Jay was successfully marketing as the king of electric downhome blues. The problem is that it’s bullshit. Hooker’s present account is radically different.

  ‘Between Memphis and Cincinnati I was in a little town, I don’t know what you call . . . Knoxville? Stayed there a lttle while.1 Me and a guy called Jerry went there. He was older than I was. I followed him there, and we stayed there about six months, maybe a year. I got no stories to tell you about it. It was about like Memphis. I was about seventeen, maybe eighteen. We left there and come to Cincinnati, and when we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, it was a big difference, you know. Ooh! Much different! You could go wherever you wanted there. You could ride with ’em [whites] on the same buses, go to the same places they go. That felt good. I stayed in Cincinnati a good long time, two-three years, two and a half years. I worked at the Philip Tank & Pump Company up on Walnut Hill. I was working in the plant making rings for cars. I was a helper for one of the people run the machines, and that was way out in the hills. Redd and Rose, this main street that had nothin’ but used cars, new cars, and it was way out there, so we had to take a bus out there every day. I finally got an old car, an old Ford, and I thought I had somethin’. An old ’37 Ford! But it run good; I thought I was livin’ in heaven. I had an old guitar I played, and I stayed in a little restaurant called Mom’s Place, was workin’ as a janitor, dishwasher before I got a job sweepin’ and janitor at the old Philip Tank & Pump Company plant. I was always smart. I never did like to sit around. I always had me a job to pay my little rent, any kind of little handy job I would do. I would make about ten bucks a week. Oh, that was big money then. The Depression never did bother me. I never did feel it. My daddy always had a lot of food; it never did bother any’us.’

  In Cincinnati, the once-sheltered boy began taking his first serious steps into adulthood. He began to mingle at the kind of house parties and blues dances of which Rev. Hooker had disapproved, and from which Will Moore had excluded him. And, for the first time, he began to play his guitar to others. Nothing ambitious at first – ‘Aww, it was routine stuff, just songs in general. Nothin’ that I wrote too much. Oh yeah, I was playing “King Snake”, stuff that I’m playing right today, stuff that I come up on’ – but his social life was beginning to pick up. ‘Mom, she had a daughter called Coon.’ You’re kidding, John. ‘No!’ Hooker laughs uproariously at the memory. ‘Daughter named Coon! They called her Coon, and they had this big house where she would give house party on the weekends in Cincinnati, and I started playing at the party for her. Boy, I wasn’t quite into women then because I was younger, not quite twenty, but she was so good to me. Everybody would love me and like me because I was a malleable kid. I was very intelligent, I had class, and I knew how to treat older people and young people, so everybody would take a liking to me. I would play there for her on a Saturday night and weekends, and do janitor work, you know. And I would work in theatres, seating people. Wasn’t making much money, but it was good money.’

  Nevertheless, John wasn’t quite ready to shoot for the big time. ‘Cincinnati was a good town. There was more happenin’ in Cincinnati than in Memphis or Mississippi, that was for sure, but as far as record companies . . . there was a big record company there [King Records, a small but hardworking label dealing in both R&B and country music, later became best-known in the ’50s and ’60s as the musical home of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul], but I wasn’t known, wasn’t even thinkin’ about it. I didn’t have a chance then.’

  As far as John’s family – or, to be more precise, his families – back in Vance, Mississippi, were concerned, their boy had simply disappeared back in 1933. John Lee Hooker had ‘just vanished out of the world’. As far as John himself seems to have been concerned, so had they. There was a desultory exchange of correspondence over the years, mainly to reassure them that he was alive and well, but John Lee never saw William Hooker, Will Moore or Minnie Ramsey Hooker Moore ever again.

  ‘I never met grandmother when I was little,’ says Archie. ‘I only knew what my mom and dad told me. They said she had long pretty hair. Said she was on a bed of affliction when I was born. That meant she only lived eight, nine months after I was born, and I was born in ’49. That meant grandmama had to die in ’50. That meant she was dead when [John Lee] came back [to Mississippi]. I seen John when I was four years old. He had made it.’

  ‘I wrote to [the family] a coupla times,’ says John Lee, ‘wrote ’em a letter an’ we got a good response back. They were glad to hear from me, glad that I was doin’ all right. Very glad to hear from me before she died. She died when I was livin’ in Detroit, thirty-five or forty years ago. I forgot what time it was at. He died before she did. He was way up in age, about ten, twelve years older than my mother. She was seventy-five when she died. My father lived to be a hundred and two. A very strong man.’

  Allowing for John Lee’s shaky maths – neither Reverend Hooker nor Will Moore survived into their eighties – one can only concur that he’d have had to be.

  Today Vance, Mississippi, just about qualifies as a one-horse town. To reach it, you follow Highway 49 south out of Clarksdale, through Matson, and through Dublin. When you reach Tutwiler, turn onto Highway 3 and pretty soon you’re in Vance, on the Quitman/Tallahatchie county line. The post office and the general store are on your left, and the mansion which was once the headquarters of the old Fewell plantation on your right. Then you pass a few shacks and trailers on each side of the road, and the graveyard adjoining St Mark’s Baptist Church, containing those few remaining graves which haven’t yet been ploughed over. A couple of seconds later, you’re out the other side, en route to Lambert, Marks and the junction with Highway 6. John Lee Hooker sighs heavily when he thinks of Vance. ‘Yeah. Zoom-zoom, right through. There’s nothin’ there. It’ll never grow into nothin’.’

  Vance is a town waiting to die, except that it can’t quite summon the energy. The only thing that really qualifies it as a town at all is the fact that it still has its own post office. The official state map – brightly festooned with attractive touristy images of riverboats, Elvis and the Civil War – lists the populations of most of the various towns and cities in Mis
sissippi, ranging from Jackson, the state capital, which can boast over 200,000 souls and actually has its own airport, down to the likes of Learned, in Hinds County, with its registered population of 113. Places with a head count below three figures don’t carry a listing at all. Vance is one of those.

  In blues parlance, Delta landscapes like those surrounding Vance are dubbed ‘the lowlands’. That’s because they’re about as perfectly flat as a landscape can possibly get, and the long straight highways scythe through them to the horizon, decisive grey slashes designed to take you somewhere else as fast as possible. Around those parts, a ‘thousand-yard stare’ implies chronic short-sightedness. Every place you go in the deep country, you see field: cotton, soya, pecans, all growing green or gold wherever the red earth is not puddled and paddied with water. Your line of vision ends only when you sight the light woodlands far in the distance. Away from the comparative bustle of Clarksdale – where any building over three storeys high dominates its immediate vicinity like some Delta equivalent of the World Trade Centre, like the building which houses radio station WROX, where blues and gospel DJ Early Wright spins Little Milton and Bobby Bland records and thunders out community news and commercials for local businesses – everything is quiet, blanketed in a silence so deep it seems to have remained unbroken forever. This is a place with few distractions; a place where people have no option but to face themselves head-on; to come to some kind of accommodation with their thoughts, with their feelings, and their circumstances. Anyone failing to reach such an accommodation has no options other than to go crazy or else to get out.

  This is where you find the richest soil and the poorest people in the USA. The richest soil: a rusty loam sufficiently fertile and welcoming to nourish just about anything you care to put in it. When it’s been raining for a while, the terrain can look as if all the blood spilt there has started bubbling back up. The poorest people: everything in Mississippi is cheap. A shirt, a guitar, a meal, a bottle of beer, a packet of cigarettes, a motel room: they’ll all cost you less than you’d have to pay just about anywhere else in the US. That’s because people around here have proportionately less money than elsewhere in the US. The horses and mules have disappeared, replaced by tractors and BluesMobiles: battered cars with mismatched doors, eczema-scabbed with rust, kept running by faith and ingenuity alone. The shacks which appear so ‘picturesque’ and ‘authentic’ in old photos and on the covers of reissue blues albums look quite different up close on a wet afternoon in Vance. And the spectacle of ten members of one family – three generations ranging from squalling babe-in-arms to wheezing grandmother – crammed into a three-room trailer hoisted up on cinder blocks off to the side of a dirt road makes a complete and utter mockery of the American Dream. These people haven’t failed: they’ve been betrayed.