Boogie Man

  Somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, what we now call the blues began to be heard in the Southern part of mainland America. It was a scion of a whole extended family of musics: the field holler and the ballad, the hymn and the rag, the vaudeville showpiece and the work-song and the chain-gang shanty. In the blues, we hear the raw materials of the master race’s music filtered through the tonalities, textures, rhythms, intonations and agenda which centuries of brainwashing and intimidation had failed to eradicate from the collective consciousness of a People inadvertently brought into being by abduction and slavery. It was sung on back porches and in taverns, in work camps and in urban theatres, in tents and jails. It was played on whatever instruments were available: here on pianos and trumpets, there on drums and mandolins, elsewhere on fiddles and saxophones and, in the South, most of all on the guitar, an instrument which – in a singular and felicitous example of cultural synchronicity – was ready for the blues around the time that the blues was ready for the guitar. Slowly evolving from a series of families of stringed instruments, the guitar had eventually divorced itself from the mandolin family by abandoning the notion of a variable number of ‘courses’ (sets of paired strings) in favour of six single strings, tuned (from low strings to high) E-A-D-G-B-E. This instrument emerged in France and Italy during the last years of the eighteenth century, but revealed its full potential most dramatically in Spain, where gifted luthiers refined and strengthened its structure and, through the medium of flamenco, gypsy musicians began to explore its expressive range.

  By contrast, its earliest years in America recalled the courtly tradition of the instruments which were the guitar’s immediate predecessors, rather than the flamboyant duende of the flamenco guitarists. The typical American guitar of the nineteenth century was a small-bodied, short-necked, gut-stringed instrument: fragile of construction, low in volume, easy on the fingers and essentially delicate in nature. It was therefore considered to be a ladies’ instrument, ideally suited for boudoir and parlour; a very different beast from the ‘special rider’, an itinerant Southern bluesman’s powerful, resilient travelling companion. The transformation of the genteel ‘parlour guitar’ into something that could travel unscathed in a boxcar and still holler like a bird the next night came at the hands of a couple of innovators and a host of popularisers. In the early 1890s, Orville Gibson applied principles derived from violin-building – principally a carved, arched top and specially tooled steel strings – to his guitars; by 1900, the C.F. Martin company (founded in the 1830s by C.F. Martin himself, a recent immigrant from Germany) had combined Gibson’s steel strings with the reinforced necks and bodies which they had been developing for their gut-string models since the 1830s. The result was a flat-top guitar sturdy enough to take steel strings: a template for the majority of acoustic guitars constructed since. Other major luthiers followed, and so did a host of mass-production houses who flooded the nation with cheap but highly serviceable guitars. Thousands of customers who weren’t fortunate enough to live in a town which could support its own music store ordered guitars made by Stella and Harmony from the mail-order catalogues of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward: in 1908, you could pay anything between $1.89 and $28.15, and have yourself an instrument. To be precise, a new instrument: fundamentally related to an older one, but essentially an instrument which had never before existed; exactly what was required in order to conjure into existence a music which had never before existed.

  Were it at all possible to rob a human being of absolutely everything that makes someone human, to transform a human being into nothing more than a dumb beast of burden, the aforementioned treatment would have done it. What the blues tells us is that humanity is indestructible. When everything that can possibly be taken away is indeed taken away, the blues is what’s left: the raw, irreducible core of the human soul.

  The first known account of the music we now call Delta blues is a description, by the pianist, composer and entrepreneur W.C. Handy, of a guitarist whom he encountered while waiting for a train in a Mississippi railroad station in 1903. It has been frequently quoted, and quite rightfully so: it is perhaps the first truly significant American cultural signpost of the new century, so – with your indulgence – here it is again.

  A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags, his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularised by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song too, struck me instantly. ‘Goin’ to where the Southern cross the dog.’ The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.

  Virtually everything Handy tells us has a specific significance. First of all, he notes the guitarist’s obvious signs of destitution. The travelling bluesman was the poet and entertainer of an underclass within the underclass. Delta people were considered hicks and peasants by the more educated and sophisticated blacks who had established themselves in the cities; and within those rural communities the bluesman was, in turn, frowned upon by the upwardly mobile. Specifically, he was hated and despised by the black churches, who believed his trade to be the Devil’s Music, a living reminder of all that evil African stuff they were supposed to have left behind as part of their painful induction into the social mainstream. With his workshy ways, his never-ending perambulations, his bawdy, earthy songs and his fatal attraction to normally respectable women, he was an outlaw, a virtual pariah. Even when a bluesman was popular and successful, with a smart suit on his back, rings on his fingers and a fistful of money to buy a round of drinks, rather than poverty-stricken and ragged like Handy’s avatar, he was still a virtual out law among the devout and respectable. Maybe our faceless, nameless vagrant was a professional musician down on his luck, waiting for transport to somewhere offering richer pickings to an itinerant entertainer; or maybe he was just a working man on his way to where the work was – to a levee camp, a construction project, or simply day labour on a plantation or farm – whiling away the time with a meditation on his circumstances.

  Then Handy describes the guitarist playing slide, fretting his instrument with a knife. Since he cites the ‘Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars’, we can presume that in this particular case the guitar was played flat on the lap, rather than in the conventional guitarists’ position used by those who played with a glass bottleneck, or a short length of metal tube, on one left-hand finger. Nevertheless, while the technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and ’90s, the sub stance and content was an unmistakable African retention. One traditional practice which predated the cheap mass-produced mail-order guitar – and in fact survived well into the mid-twentieth century among those for whom even an instrument costing a buck eighty-nine was an inaccessible extravagance – was the trick of nailing a length of wire to a barn wall and using a piece of glass or metal to change the pitch. Known as a ‘diddley-bow’, such contrivances provided a first experience of plucked-string instruments for many a wannabe guitarist, including the young John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Under the influence of the slide or the hand-bent string, the rigid, tempered European scale melted to reveal all the hidden places between the notes: the precise, chiming instrument giving forth a liquid African cry.

  If we were doing this as a TV movie, or if we had any other motive to milk this event for spuriously augmented dramatic irony, we could cheat by replacing that nameless guitarist with someone with mythic resonance of his own. Charley Patton, the Father of Delta Blues his own self, for instance; or a still more enigmatic figure, like the mysterious, unrecorded Henry Sloan, the bard of Dockery’s Plantation, from whom Patton had learned; or even the sinister Ike Zinneman, who taught Robert Johnson and who, according to Robert Palmer, claimed to have learned to play the blues by visiting graveyards at midnigh
t. If we wanted to be really portentous in a Movie-of-the-Week sort of way, we could go the whole hog and speculate that it might have been Hooker’s stepfather, Will Moore himself.

  Or maybe it was just some ordinary guy who happened to play a bit of guitar, some working stiff eking out his survival on the road, someone completely unknown outside of his own community, one forgotten drifter amongst many. Whoever he was, whatever he happened to be doing in that particular station on that particular night, wherever he was going, whatever his story had been, whatever fate finally overtook him along those highways and railroads on those dark spectral Mississippi nights, he stumbled into history that night and never knew it. What Handy heard him playing, right there in the station, was undoubtedly among the first Delta blues, a music that anyone who travelled extensively through the black Delta would end up hearing sooner or later. This was the earliest stirring of one of the most profoundly influential movements in all of the popular culture of the twentieth century, but at that time the sound was still sufficiently localized for Handy to find it strange and unfamiliar. And if this music sounded weird to W.C. Handy, an urban black man and an experienced, gifted professional musician, just imagine what the average turn-of-the-century white person would have made of it.

  Handy’s observation that the singer repeated his one line – ‘Goin’ to where the Southern cross the Dog’ – three times without variation, slides yet another piece of the jigsaw into place. The ‘classic’ three-line blues-verse template, the norm from the mid-’20s to the present day, has an A-A-B structure: statement, restatement and rhymed response. The verse quoted here, which simply goes A-A-A, exemplifies a contemporary form which coexisted with the A-A-B pattern as the music was teething, but by the mid-’20s, when the first rural blues records were made, it was already an archaism which grew progressively rarer with each passing year. The content of the line was a specific local reference to the intersection between two railroad lines: the Southern, and the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley (the latter popularly known as ‘the Yellow Dog’) which met at Moorehead, in Sunflower County. Maybe our man was headed in that direction to work, maybe to play music, maybe to visit family, maybe to see a woman, maybe just to be on the move. Or possibly he was simply whiling away the time, thinking back to some other time that he’d travelled there, reminiscing to himself about what he’d found or possibly about what had found him.

  Crucially, Handy locates this encounter in Tutwiler; just over the Coahoma county line, in the north-eastern corner of Tallahatchee County. Tutwiler is where Highway 49, ten or so miles south-west of Clarksdale, intersects with Highway 3. It’s roughly five miles south-east of Vance.

  Let me propose a working definition of the term ‘folk artist’. Though it applies equally to artists working in any medium you care to name, I’m primarily concerned with the ‘folk singer’: one who draws upon the traditional arts of their community, and uses their mastery of those arts in order to tell the story of their ‘clan’, ‘kith’ and ‘family’; their ‘house’, ‘kindred’, ‘lineage’ and their ‘race’; ultimately, the tale of their ‘people’, and their ‘nation’. In contrast, the bluesman’s vision is, almost by definition, personal. His value to his community – and to the world – is directly contained in his ability to reflect, in a manner uniquely and distinctively and unmistakably his own, his life in particular and, through that personal story, the life of the community in general. The bluesman makes himself the focus of his work; by placing himself at the centre of his art, he is taking possession of his life. He is asserting his right to interpret his own existence, to create his own definition of his own identity; first in his own eyes, in the eyes of his community, in those of the world at large and, finally, in the eyes of God.

  And whether that life is easy or hard, happy or sad, comic or tragic, what the bluesman tells us is, first and foremost, that his life is his, and that his self is intact. If the folk-singer tells us ‘this is how we lived’, and the bluesman’s message is ‘this is how it is for me’, then what could John Lee Hooker’s music possibly be, other than ‘the real folk blues’?

  4

  FRISCO BLUES

  ‘Whuh-whuh-whuh-where the car at?’

  Anybody who tells you an anecdote about John Lee Hooker as a young man – and Buddy Guy is the current champ, by a very short head indeed, of the Hooker Impressionists’ League – will inevitably end up mimicking his characteristic stutter. Bernard Besman, who recorded Hooker’s early hits in Detroit during the late ’40s and early ’50s, claims to this day that his primary reason for deciding to record the young bluesman in the first place was that he was intrigued by the notion of a man who stuttered when he spoke, but not when he sang. In a puckish spirit of self-parody, Hooker himself employs an exaggerated version of it when telling stories against himself. In 1953, recording a bunch of tunes in Cincinnati for producer/entrepreneur Henry Stone, he improvised ‘Stuttering Blues’, a classic monologue on that very subject wherein he appears, against the background of one of his primal riffs, in the role of a stammering seducer making a determined play for a hot babe even though his passion renders him so shivery that he can barely speak. ‘Oh, when I fuh-fuh-first saw you’, he murmurs, ‘you almost nuh-nuh-knocked me off my feet. I couldn’t hah-hah-hardly play, I was lookin’ at you.’ Mock-artlessly, he piles up the compliments, pretends that he’s trying to conceal the effect that she’s having on him, slips a request for her address and phone number (‘s-s-s-so I can c-c-c-c-c-caw-caw-call you up’) into the conversation so casually that she’s giving up the info before she even realises he’d asked. And then comes the pay-off. ‘Ah, excuse me baby . . . I can’t g-g-g-g-geh-geh-get my words out just like I want to de-de-de-zi-zi-zide to get ’em out . . . but I can get my lovin’ like I want it.’ The guitar stops. A moment’s silence. ‘I’ll call you tomorrow.’ Against all the odds, he’s scored, and he hits one last triumphant chord on his guitar – yesss! – to celebrate his victory.

  One of his old Detroit buddies recalls a real-life incident which tells pretty much the same story: ‘I know one day we was talkin’ and some ladies was here, and the lady kinda crackin’ on John a little bit. He was bangin’ about goin’ out with him and so she would never give him the okay, but she say, “You know, you can’t talk at all”, just like that. He say, “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-man, I can’t talk but I can get my point across.” She says “Yeah, okay.”’ Hooker’s vulnerability is a vital ingredient of his strength: what may superficially resemble weakness is actually the secret of his success.

  Relaxed and self-confident as he is, John Lee Hooker rarely stutters these days. When he does, it’s the equivalent of an Early Warning System: the first giveaway sign of incipient confusion or distress. Like right now: John Lee is growing steadily more and more agitated. It’s a warm early December afternoon in San Francisco, and Hooker is standing on a downtown street corner, sucking fresh-squeezed orange juice through a straw and waiting for his ride home. He’s just completed a radio interview in a small, cramped studio high above the city, promoting a couple of shows he’ll be doing in the city later that week even though they’re both foregone sell-outs. The station staff had practically abandoned their work when he arrived, downing tools as soon as he walked through the door, blocking corridors, queuing up to meet him and shake his hand . . . gently though, of course. The interview itself was no problem at all. Hooker hardly stutters once, and his formidable charm and spontaneity carry him through even though radio chat isn’t really his forte. Unlike his old pal B.B. King, who actually put in a few years as a deejay on WDIA in Memphis before his records got huge and the road swallowed him up, Hooker never cultivated the particular skills and mannerisms necessary to give good radio. The art of radio-friendliness demands that pitch and pacing and volume are all smooth and even, that syntactical structure is coherent, diction is clear and that the interviewee never ceases to be aware that the host and his microphone merely represent a bridge to those wonderful folks out there in radioland. Ho
oker doesn’t deign to address himself to a radio microphone; rather, he talks to the person behind it as if the two of them were sitting together in his living room, chatting intimately. He shifts in his chair in mid-sentence, he drops his voice into a murmur occasionally, he allows lengthy moments of silence to elapse while he considers his answers, he emphasizes his points with gesture and eye contact, and he never modifies his accent to suit anybody else’s convenience.