Boogie Man

  So Hooker, led by his libido, enlisted in the US army. Stationed just outside Detroit, he spent the next few months a mere spitting distance from the Ford Motor Company’s famous River Rouge plant. Half a century later, he still has fond memories of what turned out to be an extremely brief taste of military life. ‘I didn’t get too far with basic training; I mostly stayed around the camp. We would come into town every weekend. I would play on the barracks, go out, work in the kitchen. I never would even go out on the shootin’ range. I never would do that, just work ’round the barracks. They liked’ed me in there. I would play in there, and they all crazy ’bout me in there.’ Hooker’s sunny disposition enables him to enjoy, at five or so decades’ remove, a rose-coloured view of race relations within the US army of the ’40s which is entirely uncorroborated by mainstream con temporary accounts. Ask him if he experienced the army of that time as segregated and he answers in a firm negative. ‘No. Not in Detroit. If they did I didn’t know it. They loved’ed me in there, white, black and everybody. They didn’t allow that stuff [segregation] in the army. They maybe do it on the sly, but all I can tell you that I didn’t feel it. We all was together.’

  This would have come as something of a shock to President Roosevelt and to his Assistant Secretary of War, Robert Patterson. In 1940, in answer to repeated urgings from black community leaders, Patterson published a position paper which amounted to a formal statement defining government policy on racial matters within the military. Six of its seven clauses were, broadly speaking, positive: they established the rights of ‘Negroes’ to receive training in areas, like aviation, from which they had hitherto been barred, and – radical step, this – to assume ranks and positions for which they had actually qualified. The seventh, however, was the cruncher: it stated that ‘the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organisation’. A clarifying statement from the office of the Adjutant General insisted that the army would not be manoeuvred into taking ‘a stand with respect to Negroes which is not compatible with the position attained by the Negro in civilian life’. In other words, the army would remain officially segregated until further notice: until 1950, in fact, when President Truman signed a military desegregation order as America entered the Korean War. Pandering to populist prejudice rather than biological fact, even blood supplies were segregated during World War II.

  Sadly, Hooker’s military idyll didn’t last long. In his enthusiasm to don the khaki and get his leg over, he had blithely ignored the then-current proviso that enlisted men under 21 required the consent of a parent or guardian. A year or so shy of his formal majority, he had temporarily solved this vexing little problem by scoring himself some fake ID which claimed him to be three years older than he actually was. Hooker hiked his birthdate from 1920 to 1917, creating a miasma of ambiguity and confusion concerning his age which persists to this day. Having cited his elder brother William as next of kin, he was more than somewhat peeved to find William blowing the whistle on him to the army authorities. ‘They were good to me because I played guitar and they liked it. They liked’ed me ’til they found out I was too young to be in the army. I went into the army on false pretence, and they found it out real quick. I was in there four-five-six months. When they found out I lied, they kicked me out. They asked my brother [William], and he told ’em the truth. He didn’t lie. He told ’em how old I was, and they yanked me out. He was very honest. He was a minister too, but at that time he wasn’t . . . he told me I shouldn’t lie about my age. The army is strict, you know, they got to go by the rules no matter what they think of you. They called me into the office and said, “You know you lied about your age. You lied, kid.” And I said, “What can I say? I wanted to serve my country and I wanted to be part of it.” And that kind of got to him when I said that. They didn’t know what I really wanted. “Yeah.” he said, “I’m gonna have to let you go on a dishonourable discharge, but everybody round here really love little Hooker. Everyone round here love you, they love your music, kid.” They let me went . . . but they let me keep the uniform.

  ‘And that’s the story. I said, “Can I keep the uniform?” The guy says yeah. I wore it around town a bit, and the girls were thinkin’ I was in the army until they found out I was kicked out and I wasn’t a soldier anymore.’ Which was probably just as well. As the recipient of a dishonourable discharge, Hooker was ineligible for the draft introduced later when, in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, America finally entered the war. This meant that he could spend the war years safe in Detroit, working on his music and enjoying his pick of home-front factory jobs, instead of being sent overseas to be shot at by foreigners. ‘Yeah, and I’m glad I got out, because if I’d stayed in I probably wouldn’t have been famous. When you that age, you don’t think. You not scared of nothin’. You don’t even think about that, because you thinkin’ of the glory and the fun, what you gonna do then, right then, how these army suits gonna bring you fun and joy with the women. You don’t think they’re gonna send you over there and kill you. I just settled in Detroit, right. No, I didn’t go anywhere from the army but back to Detroit, where I didn’t leave any more. Just stayed right there. When I come out, that’s when I started my research on trying to get on record, on a label, playing around, stuff like that.’

  Well, it’s a great story, but unfortunately that’s not quite the way it happened. That’s how John Lee told it back when he was claiming to have been born in 1920 rather than 1917, but if one readjusts his birthdate back to 1917, the central premise collapses. When the subject is broached nowadays, Hooker gives a superb impression of a clam. All we can say with any certainty is that Hooker, despite being a healthy man in his twenties with no dependents, didn’t go to war; and that by the early ’40s he was living and working in Detroit. Only John Lee Hooker himself knows the full story, and for whatever reason, he’s not telling.

  Detroit was hardly the most obvious base for an ambitious young bluesman looking to launch a career. Though the bulk of its black population originated in the south-eastern states – from Alabama or Georgia – it had a small pool of the homesick Delta migrants essential to support the career of any transplanted Mississippi bluesman. However, there was a serious lack of the necessary infrastructure: record labels, booking agents, talent scouts and the like. In sharp contrast, over on the other side of Lake Michigan was Chicago, aka Chi-Town or the Windy City, a primary urban focus for black migrants from the Deep South. The city’s South and West Sides were packed with Delta expatriates, and during the 1940s their numbers were swelling literally by the day. The white blues-harpist Charlie Musselwhite, a close friend of Hooker’s whose own journey from Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago to California unwittingly re-enacted the twentieth-century odyssey of the blues, explains it this way. ‘If you look at the map,’ he says, ‘a lot of people in California came out from Texas or Oklahoma. Philadelphia and New York get the Carolinas. Chicago gets people from the Deep South, from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. Highway 51 and Highway 61 both go straight up there.’

  Even before the genesis of the distinctive post-war strain of Windy City amplified ensemble blues most frequently associated with Chess Records, Chicago had been a major regional recording centre for about as long as the recording industry had been in existence, a status it owed, indirectly, to the New Orleans authorities’ decision to close down the red-light district of Storyville in 1917, which in turn prompted an exodus of the city’s musicians to Chicago. Many of the great rural blues artists had also travelled there to make their records and, inevitably, some of them decided to settle in Chicago. Equally inevitably, a distinctive local sound began to emerge. Georgia transplant Hudson ‘Tampa Red’ Whittaker soon became one of the kingpins of the pre-war South Side scene, and Big Bill Broonzy was its primary figurehead, but the Godfather of pre-war Chicago blues recording was entrepreneur Lester Melrose: imagine a combination of Leonard Chess and Willie Dixon, who didn’t actually compose or p
erform, but simply decided who got to record and who didn’t, and who pocketed the resulting income, and you’ve got it. For Chess, Chicago’s leading postwar blues independent label, read Bluebird, the Chicago-based ‘race records’ subsidiary of the formidable Victor label.

  Melrose ran Bluebird as a personal fiefdom: it was he, not the artists, who had the contract with Victor. At various times the Melrose stable of Chicago-based blues stars included Broonzy, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Jazz Gillum, John Lee – the original ‘Sonny Boy’ – Williamson and Washboard Sam. Hooker’s original mentor Tony Hollins was there (albeit running a barber shop), and so was Tommy McClennan, one of the very few blues artists whose recorded work had any audible effect on Hooker’s music. Hooker’s Vance homeboys Snooky Pryor and Jimmy Rogers were there, too. Rogers had been in and around Chicago since 1939, working the Maxwell Street market for tips; a decade or so later, he would eventually join forces with one McKinley Morganfield, a burly extrovert from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, soon to be better known as Muddy Waters, to form the blues band which would end up defining the city’s indigenous postwar blues idiom. ‘A lot of them came up from Mississippi,’ says Hooker today, ‘and most of them upped into Chicago. They were all interested because Chicago was the big blues scene. I didn’t want to go to Chicago because, at that time, I had a lot of competition. At that time there were some heavies there, so I didn’t have no idea for going there and living there. Detroit . . . it was my town when I got bigger.’

  The Detroit John Lee found when he emerged from the army was a roughneck, blue-collar town dominated by the auto industry and the aftermath of Prohibition. Unions were deemed un-American, the local chapter of the FBI was virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, and it was not considered totally unreasonable for white workers to refuse to man the production lines alongside blacks. Thanks to its close proximity to the Canadian border, the city became such a reliable source of fine imported whiskey that bootlegging was considered second only to cars among the linchpins of the city’s economy. The end result was a city with a thriving gang culture and an eminently bribable police force. It was also a deeply racist town with an extremely active Ku Klux Klan, not to mention a chapter of the Klan’s elite group, the Black Legion. Admittedly, Detroit was something of an improvement over Mississippi, but then that’s not saying very much. Cops were recruited not only from the Irish and Italian communities, but from among white Southern migrants with necks of deepest red; these latter, often not unsympathetic to the Klan, were then sent in to ‘police’ the black community. The city authorities required a minimum IQ of 100 from potential recruits to the Fire Department, but a rating of 65 was considered sufficient qualification for candidates for the police force.

  As the city’s heavy industry ramped up, housing became progressively more and more scarce, particularly for black defence workers. It was this issue which ripped Detroit apart during John Lee’s early years in the city. A housing project – named, ironically enough, after Sojourner Truth, the nineteenth-century heroine of the fight against slavery – had been designated specifically for black workers until somebody noticed that the resulting homes, in an area generally considered ‘white’, were actually going to be quite nice. The project was then reassigned for white occupancy, with the promise that some new homes for blacks would be constructed . . . at some unspecified point in the future, and outside the city. Blacks attempted to occupy the building anyway. Whites, led by the Klan, picketed City Hall. FBI agents ‘detected’ pro-Axis agitators among the white opponents of black occupancy. Liberal whites lined up alongside the blacks, and the reassignment of Sojourner Truth to white occupancy was overturned. On 27 February 1942, the Klan burned a cross outside the project. The first black families arrived to move in the following morning, but were barred from doing so by approximately 1,200 picketing whites, some of whom were armed. The result was a pitched battle in the streets which required 200 police to quell. Of 104 people arrested, 102 were black. It was the first of a series of riots, not as celebrated as the legendary ‘Burn Baby Burn’ conflagrations of 1967 but no less significant. Three months later, the building was finally occupied and – surprise surprise – the black occupants and their new white neighbours ended up getting along just fine.

  When America entered the war, Detroit underwent a magical transformation: all of a sudden it became the Arsenal Of Democracy. Henry Ford refused to deliver aeroplane engines directly to the British on the grounds that it was against his principles to supply military equipment to active belligerents, despite the fact that both his British and German subsidiaries were already busy cranking out war materiel on behalf of their respective host countries as fast as was physically possible. John Lee contributed to the war effort in his own inimitable way: ‘All the men went off to the war, and the women did the work. Worked in the steel mills, drove the buses, street cars . . . I was working in plants: Ford, General Motors, CopCo Steel, making stuff for the war. Somebody had to do it. I was on the lines, or I was the janitor. I did that mostly. I was a common labourer, but a janitor more. They used to catch me asleep, fire me and then rehire me when they needed people, and they needed people bad then. They fire you: you could walk across the street and get you another job. I’d be up all night playing my guitar, I’d sweep and then go in the corners and fall asleep, and they’d catch me a few times before they fired me. Captain’d wake me up and I’d go back to work.’

  Around this time, his musical ambitions received some encouragement from an unlikely source. ‘I never will forget this lady . . . I was a young man then. I went to this big carnival they had in Detroit. I didn’t know her and she walked up to me. I had never made not a record, and she walked up to me and said, “Young man, come here.” She was a gypsy woman or somethin’. She said, “You gonna be famous aaaaall over the world. You gonna become very rich, you gonna become very famous.” We were all just a bunch of kids; we just kinda laughed. I just wondered how. I was just plunkin’ on an old guitar, and it come true. I usually don’t believe in things like that, but she come pick me out and it come true. I never believe in that shit, but I’m just sayin’ what she told me. She might have been just guessin’. She was a fortune-teller and people would give her a little somethin’, but I didn’t have nothin’ to give her. She said, “You ain’t got no money,” and I didn’t. She said, “Kid, you ain’t got no money, but you gonna be famous one of these days.” We was just a bunch of kids; we kinda laughed when she left.’ He shifts into a taunting schoolyard falsetto: ‘“John Lee Hooker gonna be faaaaa-mous! Gonna be faaaaa-mous!” All ridin’ me and ribbin’ me . . .’

  With so many of the city’s able-bodied men away in the Armed Forces, John Lee found that a soldier suit was no longer a necessary prerequisite for success with the opposite sex. ‘You can get married, you can have about five or six wives inside of five years if you really want to. Like the big movie star woman, Elizabeth Taylor, have about nine husbands. The first time I got married it didn’t last long, about two-three months. I was too young. My first wife’s name was Alma Hopes. She was half Indian. I was young and she was young . . . we met at house parties and stuff, at her mom’s house. I used to hang out there, started courting her daughter. She from Dublin, Mississippi. A lot of people in Detroit from Mississippi, but I left there so young I didn’t know none of ’em. She said, “Oh, you from Mississippi!”, like that, and we got talkin’ about different towns. I said, “Oh, that’s my home town.” It wasn’t my hometown, but [Dublin and Clarksdale] wasn’t too far apart. We got to datin’ together, and we got married. Stayed together a few months, then we broke up.’ Alma Hopes relocated to Chicago, where she raised Frances, the daughter who was her only souvenir of her brief marriage. John Lee stayed in touch and visited them whenever his blues career took him to Chicago. Fifty or so years later, he invited Frances to California, first to visit and then to live in his five-bedroom house in Vallejo, which he had va
cated but not sold. ‘She was my first kid ever. She was my first child. She come up from Chicago and she had no place to go. She was stayin’ there, and I said, “Hey, I never did nothin’ for you. I never gave you nothin’. This house is yours, this house.”’

  Most of the time, John Lee claims a total of three marriages. Most of the time. ‘I been married three times. No, four times! I keep forgettin’! I done left one out there. I keep sayin’ three times, but it was four times. Didn’t stay with Sarah Jones long, about a year. We didn’t have no kids and so I hardly ever thinks about her.’ The wife he thinks about most often is the one he generally refers to either as his ‘second’ or ‘main’ wife, the former Maude Mathis, ‘who I got all the kids with. I stayed with Maude longer’n any of ’em. Stayed with Maude about twenty-five years and we grew old together.’

  When Maude Mathis met John Lee Hooker, she was even newer to Detroit than he was. The youngest-but-one of Frank and Addie Mathis’s seven children, she and her family had relocated to Detroit’s Fourth Street from Augusta, Arkansas – ‘a little town in north-east Arkansas, sittin’ on the White River’ according to her younger brother Paul – in 1942. The Mathis family made the acquaintance of John Lee Hooker sometime in late 1944. ‘We were living in an area of Detroit called Black Bottom, which is no more,’ Paul Mathis remembers today. The exact boundaries of Black Bottom shifted by a street or two every so often, but it was broadly definable as the blocks enclosed by Russell and Chene Streets to the east and Van Dyke to the west. Eddie Burns, who was to become one of Hooker’s key musical sidekicks during the late ’40s and early ’50s, places Black Bottom as ‘downtown. It’s all built up now, but it used to be a whole area there. Now it ain’t Black Bottom any more, it’s some of the most modern part of Detroit.’ Next door and extending as far east as Woodward Avenue, was Paradise Valley; its spine was the legendary Hastings Street, though the area at its base was generally considered part of the Bottom. Both the Valley and the Bottom were bounded to the north by the outskirts of suburban Hamtranck, and to the south by the Detroit River, the natural border with Canada. As Burns told blues historian Mike Rowe: ‘Hastings ran north and south and the bottom of Hastings, I would say, was part of the Black Bottom . . . the Valley was off Hastings. It was a neighbourhood of its own, y’know. Something of everything was happening down there.’