Microphone fright was one problem which Hooker certainly didn’t have. Shy or not, from the first take of ‘Sally Mae’, he chorded his open-tuned guitar with rock-solid confidence and absolute rhythmic authority, and the rich, brooding baritone in which he sang bore nary a trace of the hushed, stuttering murmur in which he spoke. It was what he played and sang – rather than how – which baffled the producer. For a start, Hooker’s approach to the blues was utterly unlike anything which Besman – to whom form was infinitely more important than content – had heard before. To Besman, accustomed to categorising musical styles according to their underlying harmonic and rhythmic structures rather than their social context or emotional content, a song was a set piece with a basic shape and form which it retained no matter how often it was performed. By the same token, a ‘blues’ was one such specific form; one which rarely departed from its basic formal structure of a three-line twelve-bar pattern with an A-A-B rhyme-scheme, and then only into one of a few familiar basic variations. Clearly, Besman was sublimely unaware of the older, looser, less formularised rural blues traditions within which Hooker had received his earliest schooling. ‘The blues that you know of and that I know of up to this time: they’re all twelve bars or twenty-four bars, the standard blues,’ Besman still insists. ‘The blues are blues. It’s just twelve bars. It’s not a chord sequence, it’s just a pattern. It’s a pattern because the words and the stops that they have where they sing certain things, the breaks – whatever you call ’em – are there. I don’t care how you cook it or how you slice it, when they get through, there’s a pattern. Whether they’re playing twelve bars, or eighteen bars, or twenty-four bars . . . not in the blues. It’s got to be regular. Whether it’s twelve, eighteen, or twenty-four, that’s it.’
The kind of sophisticated ‘urbane’ blues which Besman was used to selling from his Woodward Avenue headquarters did indeed play by those rules. So – most of the time – did the citified country blues which Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins, their big country feet stuffed into slick city shoes which had to be loosened before they fit, were hauling into the studios of Chicago and Houston.8 Hooker’s music, by contrast, played by rules so utterly different from the rhythm-and-blues norm that Besman didn’t recognize them as rules at all. For Hooker, no ‘song’ was ever actually completed, finished, engraved into marble, rendered definitive. Rather, it was different each time it was performed. Each piece was a platform for improvisation, a loose framework of lyrical and instrumental motifs into which he poured the emotions of the moment. Ask him to perform the same song a year later, a month later, a week later, a night later, an hour later, or even five minutes later, and the piece would have changed, sometimes beyond recognition. The basic pool of riffs and verses upon which the song drew remained more or less constant, but it would be reconstructed anew; cooked from the same cupboard of ingredients, but served up fresh each time, remade not according to any detailed recipe but based entirely on the spontaneous emotional reactions of the chef. Thus the slow-to-medium-paced blues ‘Sally Mae’, for example, was performed in two quite distinct incarnations,9 with different lyrics. In both takes Hooker maintains the structural integrity of the 12-bar pattern with rather more fidelity than was customary in his solo performances, but he alludes rather than adheres to the conventional rhyme scheme of the A-A-B structure: it is acknowledged more in the breach than in the execution.
As if that wasn’t enough, Besman had never before been required to deal with the specific problem of how to record one man with an acoustic guitar. It may have seemed as if Hooker had strayed onto Besman’s turf and that it was the bluesman, rather than the producer, who was on unfamiliar territory, but the mesmeric unorthodoxy of Hooker’s music placed Besman as much on the defensive as his studio-neophyte artist. It was thus Besman’s turn to take a shot in the dark; to throw away his preconceived ideas about recording and start thinking on his feet. ‘When I started recording [Hooker] I thought, “Jesus, this is so empty, how the hell’m I gonna make this one guy sound like something?” I’d never recorded one man before: Todd Rhodes had a seven- or eight-piece band. I saw a pallet full of cardboard boxes at the other side of the room, so I said to bring that over and put it under his foot. I hadn’t noticed that he stomped: I just wanted some rhythm in there. We put a mike down there also and started doing that, and on most of his records – of mine, anyway – you can hear that. But I wanted to amplify his sound and we had no echo chambers at that time, so we set up [another] microphone in a toilet bowl. We took the speaker from the studio and put it in a toilet bowl, which was about sixty or seventy feet from the studio. Then we put a microphone in front of that speaker and brought the speaker from that microphone back into the studio. I didn’t know what would happen, but I realized that we would have an echo chamber. I had the speaker right on his guitar. And that’s why he sounds so big. This one guy sounds like a whole band when he plays on those recordings. I shocked myself because I’d never tried it before, the tapping of the feet on the pallet thing. It was a very good rhythm, a one-man band. I couldn’t get over it, myself.’ (For the record, Hooker vehemently denies the toilet bowl story, probably because, as the anecdote passed down the line, Chinese-whispers style, it has somehow mutated into the mythic notion that Besman recorded Hooker by placing the singer himself in a bathroom. So it goes.) ‘I experimented a lot with him,’ Besman remembers proudly. ‘So I recorded him most often with that set-up, and he sounds big. People were amazed at how we got that sound. That sound was really surprising to me. It was unique for just the one man playing the guitar. It sounded almost like a band.’
That sound was an inspired improvisation. The experiment paid off big time: Hooker sounded huge. What might have started as a back-porch meditation, a sound which customarily dissipated and escaped into the vastness of the night sky, was now so big that it threatened to crack the studio walls. Hooker’s blues may have travelled from the low, low lands and reached its destination virgo intacta; but now it had unquestionably arrived in the city. The music reverbed off concrete and tile; it positively crackled with electricity. Maude may have smashed Hooker’s electric guitar, but the way that Besman and Joe Siracuse had close-miked the pawnshop acoustic created a sound pressure level high enough to overload the valve-powered recording machine, driving the meters into the red zone. The result was so distorted and ‘hot’ that just about everybody who ever heard the results of that session swears blind that the guitar they’re hearing was heavily amplified. In fact, it wasn’t the guitar that was electric – it was the guitarist.
So right there Besman had two takes each of Hooker’s first three titles, but he wanted more. ‘I needed four numbers. I was teed off already that I wasn’t going to get four records. So I said, “Do you know how to play a boogie?” because boogie was big, twelve-bar boogie. I figured if we could make a boogie then we maybe have a chance. And he says “No, I don’t know how to play a boogie.”’
‘And finally,’ says Paul Mathis, ‘he made “Boogie Chillen” . . . and that’s history.’
6
‘BOOGIE CHILLEN’ CAME OUT BURNIN’
Let the children use it,
Let the children lose it,
Let all the children boogie
David Bowie, ‘Starman’, 1972
I didn’t understand the music at the time I recorded it.
Bernard Besman, interview with the author, 1994
Boogie-woogie: style of playing blues on piano, marked by persistent bass rhythm. [20th c.; origin unknown].
The Concise Oxford Dictionary
We hold this truth to be self-evident: that one man’s boogie is another man’s woogie. Let me explain.
‘A long time ago,’ Hooker says, ‘they used to call it boogie-woogie, on an old piano. But as the years went by, as the time went by into the modern day, they called it the boogie. It ain’t the boogie-woogie any more, it was the boogie. And I think I started all of that. I originated that. There was nobody else doing it like that
and calling it the blues, and I just called it “Boogie Chillen”.’
By way of contrast, the incorrigibly literal-minded Bernard Besman’s notion of exactly what constitutes ‘boogie-woogie’ is more or less the same as that of the compilers of the Oxford Dictionary: an uptempo, eminently danceable eight-to-the-bar piano blues with a regular ‘walking’ left-hand bass line. In fact, both the style and the term had been around for decades before pianist Clarence ‘Pinetop’ Smith brought them together on his 1928 hit ‘Pinetop’s Boogie Woogie’.10 Variously known as ‘barrelhouse’, ‘honky-tonk’ or, intriguingly, ‘Dudlow Joe’, this rumbustious idiom emerged out of Southwestern saloons and lumber camps sometime in the late nineteenth century. The expression ‘boogie’ (or ‘boogie-woogie’ or ‘booga-rooga’) dates from roughly the same time: it simply means to dance, to party, to rock, to have any kind of physical good time you care to name, specifically including the obvious one for which ‘jazz’ and ‘rock’n’roll’ have, over the years, also served as euphemisms. Hey – you know what I’m talking about.
The etymological origins of the word ‘boogie’ remain obscure. It would be nicely symmetrical if we were somehow able to prove that it was an African term, that it shared the Wolof-via-Gullah derivation of ‘juke’ (or ‘jook’); unfortunately, we can’t. First amongst its closest linguistic cousins would appear to be ‘bogy’, a nineteenth-century term for an evil spirit or goblin, or even for the Devil himself. This is itself descended from ‘bogle’, a sixteenth-century Scottish word for a goblin, phantom or scarecrow, which – significantly enough – was also used in the mid-’90s to describe the state-of-the-art obeah-derived dirty dancing which accompanied ragga and jungle music. (No wonder religious folk disapproved of the boogie: its very name must have seemed like Satan’s calling card.) Because of the number of ‘train’-oriented titles and rhythms prominent during the recorded idiom’s early days in the wake of Meade Lux Lewis’s epochal ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ (he recorded the first of many versions in 1927), we could also throw in the portion of a train’s undercarriage known as the ‘bogie’. Also – though we’re on rather less solid ground here – we could cite the numerous musical and titular allusions to ‘bugle’ calls in piano recordings of the ’20s.
All this notwithstanding, barrelhouse piano and the word ‘boogie’ achieved their critical mass when Smith combined them in a cascade of rollicking stop-time piano choruses punctuated with exhortations and instructions to the dancers in general – ‘When I say stop, I want you to stop. Stop! Now git it!’ – and to a seriously rocking girl with a red dress on in particular.11 ‘Now this,’ he announces cheerfully, ‘is Pinetop’s boogie-woogie’, as if it could be anything else; sadly, Smith didn’t live long enough to see the first anniversary of his record’s release, let alone any royalties. It was several years before ASCAP – the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, the body which controlled and administered musical copyrights – would permit boogies, even best-selling ones like ‘Honky Tonk Train Blues’ or ‘Yancey Special’ to be recognized and registered as legitimate compositions, let alone acknowledge their composers as ‘authors’.12 ‘Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie’ soon became an American archetype, and much of the genre which was built upon its foundation was created in its image.
Progressive white musicians like Benny Goodman had begun to taken an interest in boogie-woogie by the mid-’30s, but what enabled the music to break the surface of American culture was the crucial ‘From Spirituals To Swing’ concert promoted by the producer, critic and entrepreneur John Hammond at Carnegie Hall in 1938. As well as showcasing gospel music, rural blues (by harpist Sonny Terry and guitarist Big Bill Broonzy, the latter standing in for Hammond’s first choice, the recently murdered Delta bard Robert Johnson), chamber swing from Count Basie and Benny Goodman, and an exhibition of African tribal music and dance performed by actual Africans, Hammond treated the crowd to a positive avalanche of boogie by wheeling three pianos onto the stage and teaming up Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis and Kansas City boogie champ Pete Johnson, complete with Joe Turner’s sonorously authoritative vocals. This show – and its successor a year or so later – transformed boogie-woogie into a national craze. After Goodman came Bob Crosby, and after Crosby came the Andrews Sisters and their ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy (From Company B)’, and from there it was a comparatively short step to such pop-novelty nonsenses as ‘Chopsticks Boogie’. After that things got seriously silly, and for a while just about every damn thing called itself a boogie of some sort or another.
Boogie-woogie had exploded into a pop craze in the ’40s and, as pop crazes often will, it eventually burned itself out. Authentic barrelhouse piano became the territory of dyed-in-the-wool jazz collectors and committed aficionados, while boogie’s signature beat and bassline were absorbed by the popular jump combos as the foundation for a slew of rocking jukebox singles with novelty lyrics and honking, booting tenor-sax solos. In the meantime, there was the redneck offshoot known as ‘hillbilly boogie’. In Country,13 Nick Tosches cites Johnny Barfield’s ‘Boogie Woogie’, recorded for Bluebird in 1939, as the first swallow of this particular subgeneric summer, while also mentioning in dispatches The Demore Brothers, Arthur Smith – specifically Smith’s 1949 ‘Guitar Boogie’ – and pianist Moon Mullican, plus several late ’40s and early ’50s hits by Tennessee Ernie Ford, including ‘Smokey Mountain Boogie’ and ‘Shotgun Boogie’. The term ‘boogie’ thus returned once again to its original meaning – a sexy, rocking good time – which it retained right through the ‘boogaloo’ of the ’60s and the era of ‘Boogie Nights’, ‘Boogie Wonderland’, ‘Yes Sir, I Can Boogie’, ‘Boogie Oogie Oogie’, ‘Blame It On The Boogie’ and so on into the present day.14
Interestingly enough, in 1928 – the very same year that Pinetop Smith had formally launched the boogie-woogie movement with ‘Pinetop’s Boogie-Woogie’ – the great rag time guitarist Blind Blake had gone into Paramount Records’ Chicago studio with Detroit pianist Charlie Spand to cut a rollicking piano/guitar duet called ‘Hastings Street’. Primarily instrumental, and more a lightly swinging uptempo blues than a standard boogie, it nevertheless contained spoken dialogue between Blake and Spand which suggests that the term ‘boogie’ had more than a little special significance in the Motor City. ‘Spand, you never been to Detroit in your life,’ chaffs Blake. ‘Aw, on Hastings Street they do the boogie . . . they do it very woogie. You can drive, but when you been off from Dee-troit three weeks you think that’s a long, long time . . . go back there tonight, you can sure get woogie . . . I know you wanna go back to 169 Brady . . . I can’t hardly rest. All the mens tellin’ me ’bout Brady Street . . . wonder what’s on Brady? Must be somethin’ that’s very marvellous . . . mm mm mmm! Make me think, make me feel I wanna go to Detroit . . . let’s go back, let’s see about gettin’ the woogie.’ What can they be talking about? The only clue is that Brady Street was a direct turning off Hastings. The plot thickens.
So anyway, according to Bernard Besman’s version of events, he and John Lee Hooker and Joe Siracuse the engineer are in United Sound. The first three titles have taken over three hours to record, the clock’s still ticking, the studio time is running out, and Besman still doesn’t have what he considers to be four usable sides. ‘The first three numbers took over three hours, you know. Usually I paid for three hours, and I had a heck of a time because he would never sing the same song twice. Here you have someone singing a song, and you want to correct it and you play it the second time and it’s an altogether different version of the same song, different words and so on. Those were all supposedly blues, and I thought I’d better have something else.’
So he asks Hooker to play a boogie. Hooker – who maybe thinks he’s being asked to play the piano – says he can’t, and Besman has a brainwave. ‘So I go up to the piano and play a few bars of a boogie. Todd Rhodes was still there, and he was a pianist, so I said, “Todd, why don’t you play some boogie for him and see what happens?” So he played, and
I said to John, “Do you think you can do that, some of that?” And he said, “Oh yeah, sure.” That’s why the word ‘boogie’ is in there. Nothing to do with the song, you know. “Boogie Chillen”’s not a boogie. That was just what he thought was a boogie, and so I called it “Boogie Chillen”. As you can see, it doesn’t compare to boogie as you know boogie, but he played a lot of numbers in a similar rhythm which was quite original. So that’s where “Boogie Chillen” came from, but it was nothing like what I intended. I was real disappointed.’
Considering the way things turned out, it’s safe to say that nobody else was. Hooker, needless to say, remembers things rather differently. ‘[Besman] had Todd Rhodes on his little label Sensation,’ he recalls. ‘I can’t remember the studio, but I remember Todd Rhodes. Piano player. I can’t remember [being] in the studio with him; I remember [playing] on a show with [Rhodes], at the Capitol Theatre in Detroit.’ For that matter, he doesn’t remember Besman playing any piano, either. ‘He told you he played piano: I never seen him play piano. I saw him play organ once, on one tune; I never heard him play piano in my life. A lotta stuff he said he did he didn’t do. Said he played the piano . . . he didn’t. Said he wrote songs . . . he didn’t. He couldn’t play no piano. He didn’t write . . . he didn’t know one note of the blues. He claims he did everything.’
Boogie Man Page 18