Boogie Man

by Charles Shaar Murray

  ‘They called it Black Bottom, on the east side of Detroit,’ continues Paul Mathis, ‘but it was a mixed neighbourhood. It had Mexicans, Polish, Italian, but we all went to school together and got on like an house on fire. We had our little scraps, but wasn’t no such thing as prejudice. We used to go to they house, have a sandwich, and they would come to mine, have a sandwich, you know. It was a good neighbourhood, really. There were seven of us: four boys and three girls. My brother Frank got called to the army – he was the only one in the army at that time goin’ to war – and the other brothers was workin’ in the factories. I’m the youngest, and Maude. They used to do what they called keno games and house parties, and I can’t really give you a true picture of how it all came about, but I do remember that this Saturday night the party be at my mom’s house; the next Saturday night it would be at Lucinda’s house; the next Saturday night it would be at Anna Lou’s house . . . like a circuit. Gamblin’ and sellin’ beer and booze and hamburgers and fish sandwiches and things of that nature. After the gamblin’ was over, they’d start the party. This particular night, John and a friend of his came by. It was Broomstick Charles. John had this little small guitar, and he was playing and Charles was beatin’ on the floor with this broomstick, you know, keepin’ time. It sounded quite nice, really.’ He laughs at the memory. ‘Then John . . . I don’t know where he was livin’ at the time, but he moved on the same street that I lived on, Fourth Street. A lady called Miz Simms had a small rooming house, and John just got friendly with my family. I don’t know how this came about, but he did get friendly with my family. And then he got even more friendly with my sister Maude.’

  Today Maude Hooker is a formidably stolid church lady of imposing mien and impassive reserve, but the positively impish grin which occasionally breaks through suggests a very different younger self, and she still giggles when she thinks back to her early encounters with John Lee Hooker. ‘I was 16 when I met Johnny. You know, he used to play music, play his guitar in different places, houses. I don’t know exactly how we met, but any way he’d be playing at different houses and he met my parents and then he started coming to the house, you know, back and forth. He was living just down the street from us at the time when we met.’ So what specifically attracted the lively 16-year-old Maude to the quiet 27-year-old John Lee? ‘Oh God!’ she laughs. ‘He used to just, you know, buy me nice little things. He was a very nice person and he would buy me nice little gifts, and so that’s the way we met. Didn’t anything happen like we fell in love with each other, it was just one of those things that happened. A girl and a man, that’s all there was. That’s the way it was. A young girl and a man, so that’s what happened.’

  Paul Mathis is rather less coy. ‘And, you know, they carried on carryin’ on, and Diane was born. He was just part of the family, really, and mom would always fix him some black-eyed peas and cornbread cooked whenever he came by, because that was his thing, black-eyed peas and cornbread. Miz Addie, you know. She used to jump on his case, because being as young as I was, I was having it off with an older woman . . . she used to jump on his case, man, she used to give him a bollocking, you know. I’m always being called the baby, you know. “You know what my baby’s doin’!” “I-I-I-I don’t know, Miz Addie.” He used to stutter profusely, you know. Oh, he get kinda little excited, he couldn’t say a word. Every time he come by . . . “Is Addie home?” “Yes, she is.” “Well, I be back.” “No, c’mon in here.” That was my mom, God rest her soul. As it happened, John just be came a part of the Mathis family, and he’s been a part of the Mathis family from that until this.’

  John and Maude’s first child, Diane, was born on 24 November 1946. The couple set up their first home in a rooming house on Madison Street. By this time, with the war long since ended, the boomtime was officially over. ‘Well, all the men come back home, most of them, and some of them didn’t have jobs,’ remembers John Lee. ‘They come back and there was still work, but not enough work for everybody. After the war, things got rough.’ Maude recalls: ‘I remember my brother Frank was in the service, and he came out of the service and he couldn’t get a job, so he went back in the Air Force. It was very hard to get a job there for a while.’

  Increasing competition in the job market provided a progressively greater incentive for Hooker to work harder and harder at his music. Giving up the day-to-day jobs altogether in favour of full-time music was less of an option than ever, though: after all, there were still bills to pay, each and every week. Paul Mathis’ admiration for the tenacity and grit displayed by Hooker in those years remains wholly undiminished by the passing of time. ‘He didn’t sit around and say, “Well, it’s gonna come along one day; I’m just gonna sit here and won’t move, and all of a sudden a bag of gold’ll drop into my lap.” The playing was strictly a weekend thing. Five days a week, he was punchin’ a clock. Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, he was here, there and everywhere. He always had a job. Ushered movie houses, swept floors, pressed steel, helped assemble cars . . . the lot. He did it. It was hard graft. When I say “hard graft”, I mean the finger-bleedin’ type’a hard graft. It was just a rough life. We never had a lotta money, but we always had plenty food. We always had a nice suit’a clothes to wear, but there never was a lot of money. But we always did eat good, and I’ll sit here and testify that in those lean years, John never did falter. Determination kept him going. He was determined that he was gonna make it. He was workin’ the steel mills. CopCo Steel. On Friday nights – which was pay day – we’d have barbecue ribs. He stopped by the barbecue place, meet me at the barbecue place, we’d have barbecue ribs, which was a treat, you know, which was nice. I was throwin’ papers, sellin’ coal and ice, and doin’ odd jobs. Anything anybody wanted to do, I would do it. Lookin’ at John now, and I believe he will verify this, this is the day he thought he’d never see, where John Lee Hooker’s name is universal. Everybody knows John Lee Hooker. But his success hasn’t changed his train of thought, though he’s grown a little less conservative than before his success. He used to hold onto that nickel, you know. But now he’s a successful man and he’s achieved his goals, and he don’t mind givin’ a stranger . . . “Hey, take this twenty dollars and go get something to eat.” That sort of thing, you know. Before that, there was no money. It was very, very, very hard.’

  It was also very, very, very discouraging. ‘I was a hard-working person,’ John Lee insists. ‘I didn’t like handouts. I’d get out there and work, earn a living and stuff like that, but that wasn’t what I was going to do the rest of my life. I knew that. That was a hard road, right up to now. It was a hard road. Many, many, many, many, many times I questioned [what I was doing]. Then my mind was saying, “Don’t go back. You done left there, you made a mistake.” One mind was sayin’ I should have stayed, one mind said no. I was so strong into being a musician. All the rest of my sisters and brothers got good education but me. I could’a had, too. I could’a had number-one education, but I didn’t want that. If I’d’a had that, I’d be down there right now. Maybe might’a been dead. Maybe got old just farmin’ as a share cropper, playin’ an old guitar on the corner or in a roadhouse, but I was such a strong young man. Such determination. I would go out there, pretend I was goin’ to school and wouldn’t go, hide out in the woods with my old guitar and play. I was determined to be a musician, and my parents was determined that they wanted me to sit down and go to school. I had these two choices. I said, “I’m not goin’ to stay out here as a farmer”, and I didn’t. I thought many a time, did I make the right decision? You know I thought about that! I thought that way, sure, but on the other hand, the other mind would say, “You got to work to get up to this. You got to keep doin’ this until you get what you want. You got to keep playin’ here and there in little places ’til you find your goal.” And one mind would say, “I ain’t gonna make it. I didn’t leave home for this.” Two minds: one sayin’ “Keep workin’”; the other sayin’, “This ain’t what you left for, to push a broom.” And
the mind that said “Keep on doin’ it” paid off, but if I had been a little weak, and not strong, I’d’a said, “Aw no, I give up, I’m goin’ on back to Mississippi.”’

  Instead, he got more and more serious about his music. Hooker had always played house parties whenever he had the chance, but now that he was beginning to think seriously about turning professional, he started to practise in earnest, refining the songs he’d brought with him from the Delta in the light of his new urban context. He and Maude had moved house again, this time to a shack behind a larger property on Monroe and Orleans which they shared with another couple, Jake and Bernethia Bullock, who had been fellow residents of the boarding house on Madison. As recent arrivals from Texas, the Bullocks were fairly unimpressed with the social climate of Detroit, not to mention the cramped conditions and squalid housing in the Black Bottom. ‘In 1946 my husband and I moved from Houston to Detroit under the impression that there was no segregation,’ says Mrs Bullock. ‘In Texas we knew that it was segregated. We know that the blacks live on this side of the street and the whites live on that side of the street. We had as nice a home on this side of the street as they had on that side of the street. When we come here, when we moved in – it was nothing. The housing, to me, was horrible. They were needing painting, and most of them had no basements, they just had what you call cellars.’

  The shack was in a lamentable state of disrepair. Before the place could be certified as fit for human habitation, John Lee and Jake had to run water and power lines out from the main house, and exterminate the sizeable congregation of rats who’d taken up occupation. Worse! The shack was directly across the street from an exuberantly odoriferous stable. According to Bernethia Bullock: ‘Whenever we got ready to serve a meal, we had always to close the door if it was windy, because that dry manure would just blow right on into the house. My husband got busy and started working with the horse people, and what he would do on Saturday: he would help them clean the stable so that we wouldn’t get the odour and what-not from it. Maude and I would always wash and wash the floors; we couldn’t just mop, we had to actually put down water and soap and scrub and scrub the floors – the kitchen, bed rooms and everything – and then mop it up.’ Despite their best efforts, the place never quite developed that all-important patina of gentility. Jake Bullock’s family never came to visit, and Maude’s mother, aunt and brother were the only ones who would brave the inescapable essence de cheval. ‘Nobody else wanted to come over there, into that hoss-piss odour. They just didn’t want to smell it.

  ‘While they was living with us, Johnny decided that he was going to play the guitar, and he was going to start practising. So he said to Jake, “Would you mind if I do a little guitar practising?” Jake said, “No, I don’t mind; just don’t practise while I’m sleeping unless you’re going to sit outside.” So one day Johnny was practising, and he was just playing “Step By Step” and my husband was getting ready to go lay down and take a nap so that he could go to work at eleven o’clock, and he said to me, “Lord, I’ll be so happy when Johnny get up them steps.” Johnny would always practice out. If the weather was nice he would sit outside in the back. He worked days, and he’d come home in the evening and he’d sit out there and practice after he’d had his dinner. Sometimes he’d sit out there three or four hours, just picking different songs and different tunes or what-not, and then he’d come in and maybe get him a snack and he’d ask us, “How did I sound?” I said, “Well, you soundin’ good, man. Keep up the good work.” I was a Baptist and I wasn’t too much of a blues singer, but I figured that if there’s something you love to do and you want to do it, right on with you for doing it. My husband sang with a [gospel] quartet, and they sang every Sunday morning. Sometimes he and Johnny would get out there and he’d be singing and Johnny would be playing . . . I said, “You going to form a band or something of the kind?” He said, “Me and Johnny might just do that. I’ll do the singing and he’ll do the playing.” I said, “All Johnny’s going to sing is the blues and you’re not going to be making him sing no church songs, so shut up.”’

  Jake Bullock turned out to be something of a soulmate to John Lee, acting as chauffeur and cheering section as Hooker made his first forays into graduating from the house-party circuit into the more demanding environment of the Detroit club scene. ‘My husband and Johnny would go to the nightclubs and I’d stay home. You see, Johnny didn’t do a lot, didn’t drive. I don’t think he never did do very much driving. He would say, “B-b-boy! Whatcha doin’, Jake?” Jake would say “Well, I think maybe what I’m going to do tonight is go in early.” Johnny said, “N-n-no, come on there, come on there. We gonna leave these gals at home and we’re going out for a little while.” Maude went with them quite a bit. She was younger than I was and had a chance to get out, and they would go places. Johnny would play, just take his guitar and while he was there, he’d probably ask if he could play a number, or if he could be on the show or what-not, and that’s how he’d finally, you know, he got recognised. By doing things like that.’ Paul Mathis confirms: ‘We used to see John play at all the little bars around Detroit: the Caribbean Club, Apex Bar, Henry’s Swing Club which was in the Bottom, as we called it, Sensation . . . that was up north on Oakland. I can’t really remember all those bars now, because it’s been such a long time, but he played in every bar. He was playin’ “Boogie Chillen” and the “Hobo Blues”, “Sally Mae” and the “Crawlin’ King Snake”, those was some of the tunes that put him where he is. Blues was strugglin’. It was jitterbug and jivin’ back in those days. The blues singers was playin’ for a nickel over here, and the guy playin’ the jitterbug, he’s gettin’ a quarter, that sort of thing.’

  ‘There wasn’t too many clubs that you could play blues in during those days,’ confirms Eddie Burns. A sharp social division existed between the plusher, more sophisticated black night clubs, catering to a more moneyed crowd and featuring jazzier, more urbane music, and the blue-collar, spit-and-sawdust taverns and bars which served as urban equivalents of the jook joints of the Delta, downhomes away from down home. It was to the latter which Hooker gravitated, partly because the plusher bars were far more likely to demand that a musician produce a union card than would the taverns, which were only one step away from the house parties. Inevitably, John Lee found himself drawn to Hastings Street. ‘It’s a freeway now, the Chrysler Freeway. Oh, that was the street, the street in town. Everything you lookin’ for on that street, everything. Anything you wanted was on that street. Anything you didn’t want was on that street. Stores, pawnshops, clothing stores, winos, prostitutes. Like in “Walkin’ the Boogie” and ‘Boogie Chillen’ . . . “when I first come to town, people, I was walkin’ down Hastings Street.” Everybody was talkin’ about Hastings Street, and everybody was talking about Henry’s Swing Club. That was a famous place. A famous street. Best street in all the world. Too bad they tore it down.’4 Bernethia Bullock remembers the heyday of Hastings Street with rather less affection. ‘Oh, Hastings Street. There was a lot of guys on the street, a lot of hanging out. Hastings was one of the predominant places where most families wouldn’t allow their children to go. Hastings was a rough street, that was the understood thing. If my husband and Johnny went to Hastings, I didn’t have a knowledge of it. Because that’s what Hastings was like. If you had any type of respect, you stay off Hastings.’

  One of Hooker’s first fans from those early club appearances was a tall, thin electrical engineer from Pensacola, Florida, who called himself Famous Coachman. Improbably enough, it was his real name. ‘My daddy’s name was John Coachman. When I was born, my mother told my daddy, “John, I hope he’ll be a famous man” and my daddy said, “Why don’t we name him Famous?” They named me Famous, so I’m catchin’ hell tryin’ to be famous.’ Coachman came to Detroit in 1947, and he happened across John Lee playing out on a club on Lafayette. ‘It was a very small club and he was playing there every night for small change, and I used to come out to see him play on the weekend, and we woul
d all be around and about at different clubs and different places, and so we just had a good time together. He and I used to pal around a bit and go out and chase around and eat fish. When I first met John I thought he was just an old guy – well, he was a younger guy then – a guy from outta the South that has migrated to Detroit to get a job and he’s just picked up a git-tar. I thought he was just tryin’ to learn how to play,’ Coachman laughs. ‘I was fooled. That’s what he’s been playin’ ever since; I guess he’s still learnin’, but that’s his style. He’s just doin’ Johnny Lee, and that’s all it is. You can’t take him away from bein’ himself. But he played around Detroit, and he played in many, many clubs and places. Johnny Lee haven’t had it easy. He haven’t had it easy, he had it pretty tight, raisin’ a family and gettin’ no money from gigs and what-not. I mean, he worked in some places for a small amount, but he hadn’t worked that much, and he tried to make music, take care of him and his family. It was just small money, that’s all.’