Boogie Man

  John Lee Hooker is easily the most famous person ever to come out of Vance. Indeed, he’s the only famous person – ’nuff respect both to Snooky Pryor, a fine musician if not exactly a household name, and to Andrew ‘Sunnyland Slim’ Luandrew, a founding father of Chicago blues piano – the poor burg ever produced. As such, the locals are keen to claim him as one of their own, even though their reminiscences – such as they are, having been filtered through half a century of local folklore – are vague to the point of utter insubstantiality. The church where Rev. William Hooker used to preach, has long burned down. Some of those as yet undesecrated graves near St Mark’s carry the names of members of the families whom Hooker recalls as his childhood neighbours: Cage, Hardman and Johnson, plus one or two Pryors from Snooky’s clan; but ‘Hooker Hill’, where John Lee’s family was buried, has long since vanished into Mississippi limbo; dumped into the bayou during the late ’60s. If we could magically materialize John Lee Hooker at our sides, there’s nothing here, other than the imposing English-style mansion that dominates the virtually empty landscape, which he would recognize.

  Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, Jim Crow displaced in its turn by a statutory equality which nowadays means little more than the right to share an endemic poverty side by side. The old South has gone, taking with it both the institutionalized racism of old, and the warm, yeasty sense of family and community which enabled the descendants of kidnapped Africans to withstand the depredations of a society explicitly constructed not only to keep them under but to discourage them from ever looking up. The new South which was supposed to replace it may have manifested elsewhere in the region – in the proud metropolis of Atlanta, for example – but it never arrived in Mississippi. It wasn’t until 1995 that the state finally got around to passing the anti-slavery laws into the statute books.

  ‘John Lee’s from Mississippi,’ says Archie, in case anyone should need reminding. ‘Most people that came from Mississippi want to forget it . . . or escape. It’s like a bad nightmare, and most of ’em want to try and sleep it off, sleep it away.’

  ‘Leaving a place when you’re fourteen [sic], it’s pretty hard at my age to say, “It were right there.”’ confesses Hooker. ‘Things change so. Back then, the big white man had all the land, acres and acres and hundreds of acres and stuff like that. Now it’s all cut up and sold, and all them farmers ain’t there no more. It’s farming, but everybody got they own thing. Everything is equal down there now. It is equal, so it’s cut up, the land is taken. If I went to Detroit now, I’d get so turned around with all these buildings tore down . . . Mississippi probably worse, because they done took all the land from all the big old rich people, and the government took it and made everybody equal, cut it up and said, “This is yours, build on this.” The mules, they gone. They got tractors, they got different things. It’s so turned around down there. It’s a different world. All that’s tore down. There’s apartment buildings where them old houses used to be. People done say, “Mr Hooker, you wouldn’t know where nothin’ at, you went down there now.” I was down in Greenville, Mississippi, and everything was so different. I played down there: Greenville, Dublin, Drew-Mississippi, Jackson . . . it’s built up, and there ain’t no big fields, no cotton belts down there. It’s fields, but everybody got they own little patch, sharecroppers got they own land. So all them old houses are gone. Them old houses? Shoot, man, they gone. It’s history.’

  Vance remains helplessly suspended between a painful past and a threatening future. If it was my hometown, I wouldn’t want to go back there, either. Neither would you. Maybe this goes some way towards explaining why, whenever a movie about the Deep South – be it Gone with the Wind, The Color Purple or Mississippi Burning – shows up on television, John Lee Hooker reaches for the remote control, and switches channels.

  3

  THE REAL FOLK BLUES?

  The Mississippi Delta is land both created and shaped by its river. Ambiguous union of fluid and firm, the delta is a liquid land where life responds to both tidal and freshwater urgings. The processes of creation have been going on for a long time here . . . there is about the delta something original, primeval. We look to the delta for many of the oldest continuing life forms . . .

  Barbara Cannon, from Mississippi River:

  A Photographic Journey

  [The blues is] the only thing after all these years that still sounds fresh to me. The serious old blues guys get it from somewhere else, it seems to me, and that’s what I want to know about.

  Eric Clapton, interviewed in the Guardian

  I guess all songs is folk songs – I never heard no horse sing ’em.

  Big Bill Broonzy, possibly apocryphal

  In 1966, during a brief hiatus between lengthy stints with the Chicago independent label Vee Jay Records and the New York-based major ABC, John Lee Hooker allowed himself a brief dalliance with Chess Records, to whom some of his Detroit sides had been leased a dozen or so years earlier. The sole product of this union was one album: The Real Folk Blues, a title loaded with ambiguities. For a start, Chess released it as a companion volume to a series of albums by three stalwarts of its 1950s electric-downhome roster: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. However, the Williamson, Wolf and Waters Real Folk Blues entries were all compilations of previously uncollected singles, whereas Hooker’s album was derived from sessions recorded specifically for album release. Moreover, the use of the Real Folk Blues title was little more than a marketing device, since the music on the album consisted entirely of the kind of rocking small-band electric blues which Hooker had recorded between 1955 and 1964 for Vee Jay, Chess’s principal Chicago rival, providing them with hits like ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’ during the late ’50s and early ’60s. The Waters, Wolf and Williamson collections had assembled 45s recorded for Chess’s traditional core clientele – working-class Southern-born blacks, either relocated to the great metropolitan centres or still resident ‘down home’ – and repackaged them for a newly developing audience: white teenagers whose interest in blues had been piqued by the success of the Rolling Stones and other long-haired, blues-based white acts. Some of these newfound customers perceived and experienced blues as a revered ancestor of rock and others as a subset of ‘folk music’, but both factions were linked, above all else, by a shared craving for ‘authenticity’, for a more profound set of human values and a higher degree of emotional truth than were available from either the white or black pop mainstreams of the time. And since this new audience was considerably more affluent than the blue-collar blacks who were the traditional supporters of the blues economy, what they wanted they got.

  Their desire for authenticity was partially rooted in a rejection of the conformist social norms of the ’50s. Spearheaded by the ubiquity of television, the explosive expansion of commoditized mass culture had threatened the survival of unique ethnic and regional cultures and identities which youthful cultural dissidents deemed valuable and deserving of preservation. This resistance to the seeming homogenization and blanding-out of once-vital forms of popular expression often manifested itself as a fear of pop; or rather, a fear of the implications of a new form of linkage between pop’s two central ideas: the people’s voice and the people’s choice. Broadly speaking, folkies attempted to preserve and protect the former against the remorseless incursions of the latter. They infinitely preferred the art which people made for themselves to the art which they chose to buy once someone else had created it. By the same token, their combination of nostalgic tastes and progressive politics represented no implicit contradiction; both were cut from the self-same cloth. Their notion of a ‘popular’ idiom was one of and by the people; by contrast, the commodity culture defined it as that which was most obviously and demonstrably for the people: i.e. the one chosen by the largest possible audience and voted for with the largest number of dollars. The two cultures had spectacularly collided in 1950, when The Weavers had scored a huge hit with a sentimental version of Leadbelly’s ‘Goodn
ight Irene’; unfortunately, Leadbelly himself didn’t live to enjoy either the success and the money, or the manifold ironies of their spectacularly belated arrival. However, since The Weavers’ overtly leftist cultural and political stance was considered unacceptable in the Eisenhower ’50s, their speedy exile to the blacklists left a vacuum deftly filled by the depoliticised, anodyne Kingston Trio. Their clean-cut collegiate version of the hootenanny defined the mass perception of ‘folk music’ until the liberal but wholesome Peter, Paul & Mary enabled Bob Dylan to infiltrate the pop mainstream via the side entrance by peeling the husk and bark off Dylan songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’, rendering them AM-radio-friendly in a way that their composer never could. The next thing you knew, there was an entire sub-industry called ‘folk-rock’. Purism never stood a chance.

  ‘Folk-rock’ of the white variety essentially consisted of two wings and a centre. On its nominal left, there was an attachment to traditional instrumentation (acoustic guitar, particularly the exotic and resonant twelve-string beloved of Leadbelly and Blind Willie McTell, banjo and mandolin) and melodies as settings for radical new lyrics; on its new right, a blend of actual traditional and original neo-trad material performed with the instrumentation of the post-Beatles rock band. Byrds founder Jim (later Roger) McGuinn virtually invented that new centre by flitting from one wing to the other. Armed with an impeccably traditional 12-string acoustic guitar, he initially livened up his folk-club appearances by injecting Beatles songs into the standard hootenanny repertoire; later, he and his Byrds colleagues, including David Crosby, sweetened the new electric Dylan just as Peter, Paul & Mary had softened his earlier, acoustic incarnation. In other words: folk-rock was a juggling act involving new wine (post-Dylan singer-songwriterisms) in old bottles (trad instrumentation and melodies) and old wine (folkloric materials) in new bottles (electric guitars, drum kits, serious amplification). By contrast, the Rolling Stones – the matchmaking middlemen who made by far the most profound contributions to the rapprochement between electric blues and ’60s rock – were themselves self-identified blues purists. As far as they were concerned, they weren’t softening the music at all: they were playing it just as authentically and sincerely as they knew how to do. However, since they happened to be ugly-cute lower-middle-class English boys who sounded exactly like who they were despite their best efforts to the contrary, they ended up sweetening it anyway.

  The Stones’ eclectic repertoire included material borrowed from soul contemporaries like Otis Redding, Wilson Pickett and Marvin Gaye, which was displayed alongside their trademarked blues items gleaned from Slim Harpo, Jimmy Reed or Muddy Waters. However, even their more modern songs were performed in a style derived from their primary source: Chess Records from the ’50s, complete with harmonica and slide-guitar riffs assiduously learned from Muddy Waters’ records; prominent maracas and judderingly reverbed rhythm guitar on loan (metaphorically, at least) from Bo Diddley; plus, of course, the Chuck Berry guitar licks that inspired Keith Richards to take the first steps on the path which ultimately led him to formulate one of the most idiosyncratic guitar stylings in all of rock. In this context, the application of the ‘folk’ tag to Chicago blues provided an index of the extent to which perception of the music had shifted since its commercial heyday in the 1950s. To academics and purists who considered acoustic rural blues the only acceptably authentic form of the music, the likes of Waters, Wolf and Hooker were apostates selling a noisy, commercialised dilution of the pure milk (or maybe that should be ‘a watering-down of the pure whiskey’) of the blues. The notion that ‘Chicago blues’ – the rumbustious, clamorous soundtrack of the urban world of Delta migrants transplanted to the big cities – had cultural value equivalent to that of the downhome rural forms was an entirely new one, and not entirely unfree from controversy. In Britain, harmonicist Cyril Davies and guitarist Alexis Korner were sufficiently inspired by a live album cut by the Waters band at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival to form a band of their own which was, quite possibly, the first white electric blues band in the world. After one of their earliest attempts to perform in public resulted in their expulsion from a London jazz club for the heinous crime of bringing in amplifiers, Davies and Korner started their own club; and it was that club which gave the Stones their first real platform.

  The standard dogma had stoutly maintained that the genuine folk artist remains, by definition, unaffected by the demands of either High Art or the vulgar mass market. The innate fallacy of this argument is that the majority of the pre-war rural bluesmen (and women) of the ’20s and ’30s had been hustling the vulgar market – or, indeed, any market they could find – virtually as soon as they had gained sufficient mastery over their instruments to be able to perform in public without being pelted with rotten fruit. Many got their start on street corners, singing what passers-by wanted to hear, be it blues, popular ballads, vaudeville songs, hillbilly songs or gospel. They were recorded not by idealistic philanthropists seeking to preserve and protect the People’s Art, but by grasping small businessmen who knew that there was money to be made by issuing records of rural blues artists, and they wanted to release and sell as many records as possible while spending as little money as possible. In other words, they were in the pop business, and – as far as they were concerned – they were making pop records.

  Nevertheless, these artists’ music qualified as ‘folk’ because it was rural in origin and archaic in form. It had also by this time long ceased to be pop, or even popular; long-supplanted first by commercial, ensemble rhythm and blues, and subsequently by the gospel-inflected dance music and balladry which, by the mid-’60s, would be universally known as ‘soul’. In its turn, the ‘electric downhome’ sound of the Chicago bluesmen (and the equivalent music which Hooker had been making in Detroit, on the other side of Lake Michigan) also succumbed, a casualty of the evolution of the self-image of their ghetto constituents as they began to perceive themselves as city-dwellers rather than Delta migrants. Typically, John Lee Hooker’s last appearance in the R&B singles charts was in 1962. Inevitably, he and his fellow titans of ’50s city blues needed to develop a fresh, new audience in order to survive: they sought, and they did indeed find. The pivot point had been that very same 1960 Newport Folk Festival, when Muddy Waters, backed by his full Chicago blues band including James Cotton on harmonica and the great pianist Otis Spann, had headlined a blues afternoon co-starring Hooker himself. It simultaneously marked the music’s formal acceptance by the (mainly white) jazz and folk establishments, and its passing as the indigenous voice of the ghetto. Orphaned, city blues was now up for adoption, first into the ‘folk’ family and then into the community of what was about to become ‘rock’.

  The most crucial, as well as the most frequently overlooked, point about ‘folk music’ is that the constituency whom it most truly represents doesn’t consider it to be ‘folk music’, but simply their music. ‘Folk music’ is, invariably, a term applied from outside the cultures and communities to which it refers. In terms of theory, ‘folk’ music – the traditional set of forms, styles and songs indigenous to a people, a culture or a locale – is radically distinguishable from ‘art’ music, of both the classical and avant-garde varieties, and from ‘popular’ music, mass-produced for and mass-marketed to a mass audience. In practice, it’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart.2 Before the advent of recording, these distinctions were not so much a critical device as a precise description of the class system: which is not surprising, since these are essentially European definitions, and reflect prevailing European social structures. European classical music operates according to a strict hierarchical structure, with the composer (the monarch, so to speak) at the top. The composer’s wishes are interpreted and enforced by the conductor (the general) and carried out by the orchestra (the troops). During their lifetimes, the great composers often also functioned as the featured soloists, but after their deaths their music became fixed and formalized, th
ose who succeeded them rarely inherited their licence to improvise.

  The classic model of ‘folk’ is – as David Evans points out in his invaluable Big Road Blues: Tradition & Creativity in the Folk Blues3 – the similarly formal tradition of the Anglo-American ballads, with their fixed musical structures and set narrative lines. To perform one of these ballads, a singer is by definition required to preserve intact both its storyline and its musical setting. The Anglo-American use of the term ‘folk’ music implies that such music exists, simply and solely, to fulfil the needs of a particular community. They create it by and for themselves over a period of centuries as part of a single collective process, only slightly more personal to any given individual than the shaping of a rock by water. Through oral transmission, it filters down through the generations, serving both as a touchstone of the community’s history and values, and as an index of how its communal life has changed. It is this latter attribute which many traditionalists find alarming or repugnant: for them, the key element is the preservation of a piece’s pure and unsullied essence, and the imposition of an alien style onto a traditional piece is deemed an act of presumption verging on outright heresy: at the very least, it effectively amputates the piece from its native roots. For this precise reason, Bob Dylan was regarded with some suspicion by serious folkies long before he swapped his Martin acoustic for a Fender Stratocaster. Everything he sang, whatever its origin, was thoroughly Dylanised; by the same token, this was exactly why rockers loved him. If the term ‘post-modern’ had existed when Dylan was starting out, it might well have been applied to him. Dylan came to folk music with attitudes formed by teenage experiences of pop (specifically, the rock and R&B of the ’50s), a tradition which is overwhelmingly individualist. Pop is personality-driven; it’s about stars, icons and the Great Man Theory, and, until ‘Good Old Rock And Roll’ was nostalgically revisited in the late ’60s, remained a defiantly forward-looking idiom which refused to admit that it had a tradition at all.