Boogie Man

  Despite the fact that Hooker was already a popular artist – albeit decades away from his eventual national and international fame – when he was back home he was still emphatically a part of the same blue-collar Delta-expat community that he had joined when he first came to the city. It should therefore come as no surprise that, on nights when he wasn’t working, he was still playing local house parties, and happy to be doing so. ‘He used to like to play parties,’ confirms Tom Whitehead. ‘I’d go by with him because he didn’t have a drummer, he’d play by just himself. Little after-hours parties, he’d get up on the bar and just sit there and play. I went to a lotta gigs with him like that.’

  ‘Oh, I still would do the same,’ insists Hooker. ‘I never did change, get no big head, no ego. Do the same things I was doin’ when I wasn’t famous. Little bars, house parties . . . I like that shit. Still do. Once I was at my house. I give a house party, right there on Jameson Street in Detroit. There was my wife, Maude, sellin’ whiskey, sellin’ sandwiches, folks there be playin’ blackjack . . . gamblin’, y’know? The house was jumpin’. People would snitch on you, the cops would give ’em a little money to grease they hands. Three dollars, five-dollar, ten-dollar bill to tell ’em where the big thing – the big, big party – goin’ on at. They gamblin’ there, they shootin’ dice, they sellin’ bootleg liquor. “What they doin’ over there?” “Well, they sellin’ whiskey over there after hours, gamblin’ too.” And they would go there, just like they was goin’ to get a drink or a gamble. You would be po-lice, but you would act just like you was a citizen, you just one of the crowd who wants to have a good time. He might go in there to watch where the gamblin’ at; he may shoot the dice one time; not much, just to make it legal. Then he may buy a drink of liquor, so he can say “I caught you sell it.” And then they bust you. They go back outside, tell the po-lice out there, “We got ’em.” Then you come back in the house, and the rest of ’em come in and bust you and they got more po-lice out there waitin’ so you can’t get away. They got the house surrounded.

  ‘They got e-e-e-e-e-e-verybody. They come around with the paddy wagon, got e-e-e-e-everybody, men and women. But they didn’t get me. I hid in the closet. Crawled in with some clothes. They never got the house man! And when they left, they didn’t take my wife. When they left, she said, “Where w’you?” I was in the clothes closet. They got everybody down, they got out, they discovered they didn’t have the house man: me! And they come back, come back and got me. Asked my wife, “Where your husband? Where’s Mr Hooker?” I say, “Here I am.” They say, “Let’s go.”’ Back, presumably, to the bullpen.

  Sometimes Hooker would enliven house parties – his own or those of others – by bringing along a famous guest or two. One such was B.B. King though, fortunately, the Big B (rather less big in those days, as it happened) never got dragged off to the hoosegow. ‘Yeah, B.B. We used to sit up all night long at my house. Diane and my others, they was all little kids. We had a bar in the basement, and an old jukebox. We’d sit down and play guitar and drink ’til the sun come up, me and old B. His music very opposite from me. He always was a nice man, ever since I knowed him. Me and old B went through some things together, boy. Some good ol’ times together we went through. We used to put down a lot of liquor and chase women. I don’t regret none of it. I have no regrets. We had a really good time together. Some stuff he [might] tell you, you couldn’t put in the book. Mostly about women.’

  And Maude liked to have herself a good time, too. ‘My mom used to be a party-hearty marty,’ says Zakiya. Eddie Kirkland concurs: ‘She’s quite a bit younger than Hooker. I knew they had problems. She was quite young at that time, and you know how a young person mind go.’ Maude missed the security of regular income, but she also missed the carefree days when she could enjoy herself without the responsibility of looking after a houseful of young children: if anybody was going to be out partying, she wanted it to be her. ‘She wouldn’t tell you ’bout how all she did was run around and drink, stay out all night for two-three days, leave the kids,’ Hooker remembers, with no small degree of bitterness. ‘Mrs Rivers, the lady next door, used to have to take care of my kids when I be out of town. She stay out two-three nights runnin’ around with hoodlums. Mrs Rivers next door took care of my kids, but they would never tell you that. My kids would never tell you that.’

  Maude Hooker shared her husband’s frustration with his inability to translate his undoubted popularity and acclaim into hard currency. However, Hooker asserts, she took her anger at the family plight out on him, playing on his insecurities about the difficulties he faced trying to provide for his family the way he wanted to. These particular memories seem as fresh and painful to him as if they’d happened yesterday rather than forty years ago. ‘She used to tell me, “You ain’t never gonna get nowhere with this ol’ git-tar, ol’ starvation box.” She just said it to hurt me, to make me feel bad. Anything she could say to stab me, she would do it.’ During his second British tour in 1964, Hooker revealed to Max Jones of the British weekly Melody Maker that ‘my happiest time in life is when I’m on that stage, but anywhere I’m playing is home. I’m happy when I’m playing that guitar. Take that away, and I feel I’m nothing.’ And since Maude took away his guitar both metaphorically (contemptuously calling it the ‘starvation box’) and literally (beating him over the head with it in front of an audience), it is hardly surprising either that he did indeed feel that he was nothing. Or that the consolations provided by the company of the women who made themselves available to him on the road became ever more appealing.

  ‘Something like that makes an entertainer like him feel like somebody,’ diagnoses Dr Eddie Kirkland. ‘John felt deep inside that the problem he had with his wife, that she probably made him feel like he was nothing, that he didn’t have nobody. That’s the most fast thing that’ll turn a man another way. If he don’t feel loved, if he feel left out. By him bein’ with another woman, if deep down inside he don’t mean anything, it’ll make him feel that he is somebody. If your wife turn away from you, the first thing you think about is “All those years that I put in with her, bein’ faithful, and now I don’t have nobody.” You feel left out. You feel left out. You start datin’ another woman, keep her ready in case anything go wrong. It’s bad to get in your mind that you’re not wanted. That’s why a lot of people commit suicide. You think “I don’t have nobody in the world care for me”. That’s a bad feelin’. A man reach out sometime and do things because sometimes he feel that he left out. So that could’a been John’s case through the years. It’s hard to be unfaithful to a woman [when] you know that woman care for you. You can’t just walk over there and do it. You got to feel that she don’t care.’

  And sometimes those on-the-road diversions degenerated into outright farce, particularly if that veteran carouser Jimmy Reed was involved. ‘He had me laughin’,’ chuckles Buddy Guy, invited to retell his favourite Hooker anecdote, ‘about how him and Jimmy Reed was in the hotel with these two women and they had a few dollars and they was drinkin’ heavy, said he’ll make sure that the women don’t rip him off. So he take the mattress, and he take the money, and he put it in the centre of the bed in between these two mattresses, and he gon’ get on it and go to sleep. And ’fore they get the money, they’ll wake him up. So when he woke up, the mattress was on top of him, on the floor, and he didn’t have nothin’ left but his shorts. So he looked around and he didn’t see Jimmy Reed, so he say, “Now I got to go down to the desk and complain to the desk about my pants. I don’t have no pants.” So he was trippin’, tryin’ to get downstairs to complain about how he needed some pants so he can leave the hotel, and Jimmy were already down there – said they had his pants too – and he at the desk raisin’ hell, talkin’ so loud . . . he looked up, saw John comin’, said, “They got you too, huh, John?” The last time I saw John he told me this. The girls took both of ’em pants, didn’t leave ’em nothin’ but shorts. He said, “I was so drunk drinkin’ that stuff then, man, d-d-didn’t
leave me n-n-nothin’ but my sh-sh-shorts.” Him and Jimmy was in the lobby with nothin’ but shorts on.’

  The couple’s friends were, inevitably, placed in a very difficult position. ‘Me and Maude was great friends,’ Kirkland asserts. ‘Like sister and brother. I used to go out with her older sister quite a few years, and I never had anything to do with their problems. I was her friend, his friend too. The only thing I can say about Maude: she treated me like a human being. I taught her how to drive a car. Search around, sneak around try to find out what goes on between a man and his wife, none of my business. I could listen to John Lee, what he would say about Maude, but I would never take sides. I’d come over the house, Maude would laugh and talk with me, so I have no jurisdiction to say nothin’ about her. I kept my distance. He would tell me, and I would listen, but I would never make no comment, say, “John, you oughtta leave her.” I have told him, “Well, John, there’s nothin’ I can tell you because I’m a friend’a Maude’s too, but I hope you can work things out.” Between you and me, there was a lot wrong between them, but it was none of my affair.’

  Sometimes, according to Zakiya, things got very rough indeed. ‘If you notice his hands . . . they were having one of their confrontations and she cut his finger, cut the tendon. You’ll notice that one of his fingers is always straight, it doesn’t bend any more. It was a very rocky relationship. I can remember times when it was really good, but she just was not able to deal with him being a musician, him being gone all the time, and . . . little cheap floozies calling the house.’ Maude could hardly have been unaware of Hooker’s womanising while out on tour. ‘She knew this and she was not able to deal with this. I don’t know if I could’ve dealt with it . . . if any woman could.’

  In January, 1959, Hooker kicked off his latest Vee Jay studio date with ‘Maudie’, a song dedicated to, and named after, his wife. The mood of this particular recording session was already a nostalgic one, revisiting as it did early ’50s triumphs like ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘I’m In The Mood’, ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’. ‘He made one for me, you remember that one?’ laughs ‘Maudie’ herself. ‘He got up one morning and said, “I got to go to Chicago and make a record and I’m gonna make a record about you.” And I didn’t think any more about it, and he really did! He went right over there and that was what he did! When we all heard we was so surprised and laughin’ about it. Everybody always teased me about it, about that record. They still do, every now and then: somebody say,’ – she launches into the song – ‘“Ohhh, Maudie . . .why did you do it?” It was really nice.’

  ‘Really nice’ is an odd way for its subject to describe ‘Maudie’. Set to a relaxed but swinging Reed-style shuffle beat, it was recorded with only the support of Eddie Taylor and Earl Phillips: Taylor picking out the bass-line on the low strings of his guitar and Phillips slapping gently at his drums. It is indeed a love song, but not by any stretch of the imagination is it one which celebrates love’s pleasures and passions. Instead, it’s resigned and sorrowful: John declares his love for Maude, but they are apart, divided. He tells her that he misses her, but she – not he – is the one who’s ‘been gone so long’. A world of hurt resonates between the lines of its telegrammatic lyric: what we hear in ‘Maudie’ is a man, his voice hollow with regret, singing to a woman whom he loves but whom he knows, in his heart of hearts, that he has already lost.

  [The Delta Blues] had gone up the river to Memphis, thence to Chicago, and been urbanised and commercialised. A whole branch of the recording industry, captained by men who largely looked down on the blues and its Negro composers, grew and prospered by teaching its mild-mannered country protagonists to cheapen themselves with gimmicks, in sincere effects, poor arrangements and silly subject matter. Since to the recording directors the blues were both cheap and meaningless, they encouraged the singers to compose blues by the yard, cut ten to twenty sides a session, to pour out bits of rhyme about any and every subject to a blues-hungry public . . . that in spite of all this so much original and superb music was made is a testament to the force of the bluesmen who kept coming out of the Yazoo country with their many musical inventions. But what I have heard convinces me that the blues might have flowered so much more fully and richly if these men had not been forced to market themselves.

  Alan Lomax, liner notes to The Roots of the Blues, 195940

  Not long after the rock-and-roll craze began to spread, white intellectuals, college students, liberals, cognoscenti and later the beatnik-folknik crowd rediscovered the blues in their quest for ‘truth’, ‘vitality’ and ‘authentic ethnicity’. Singers who had long been in partial retirement or in total obscurity were unearthed and recorded for posterity. Musicians still active like [Big] Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry were quick to adapt their styles to this new audience. Considering the premium placed on authenticity, it is rather ironic that many musicians who had been living in the city since their childhood found it convenient to let themselves be labeled country singers, primitives or folk singers, unhooking their electrical amplification and cleaning up their diction a bit to fit the new roles demanded of them.

  Charles Keil, Urban Blues41

  It wasn’t until his third year under the Vee Jay regime that Hooker was able to score his first substantial hit, and it came with an uncharacteristically conventional piece which wasn’t even one of his own compositions. ‘I Love You Honey’, which nosed its way into the lower rungs of the R&B Top 30 towards the end of 1958, had been composed by one Freddy Williams. Hooker’s rocking version of ‘I Love You Honey’, recorded the previous June at a session which also gave the song its B-side ‘You’ve Taken My Woman’, boasted a ‘direct-time’ symmetrical metre, tightly-rhymed lyrics, little vocal improvisation and – probably its major selling-point – rollicking boogie-woogie piano breaks provided by Joe Hunter,42 a stalwart of Detroit’s jazz and blues club scene whom Hooker had brought with him to Chicago for the session. His next Vee Jay studio date produced nothing which the company’s executives found sufficiently attractive to release, so after the January ’59 session at which he cut ‘Maudie’, Hooker took a one-year sabbatical from Vee Jay, and reconsidered his options.

  1959 found the denizens of Planet Blues coping with a series of major upheavals. During this pivotal year, a veritable forest of signposts to the future appeared. Right under Hooker’s nose, a new musical revolution was brewing in Detroit: Berry Gordy, whose record store had gone under a few years before, had sold a few songs to his cousin, Jackie Wilson. One of them, ‘Lonely Teardrops’, reached No. 7 in Billboard’s pop chart; Gordy invested the proceeds – plus everything else he could beg, borrow or otherwise scare up – into independent record production for, among others, United Artists and Chess. In 1959, he moved up a gear, starting up his own record company. He named it Anna, after his wife: the following year, he founded two more labels, which he called ‘Tamla’ and (after the black contraction of Detroit’s ‘Motortown’ nickname) ‘Motown’. Gordy’s gameplan was the creation of a new kind of rhythm-and-blues – slick, sweet and tuneful, but still soulful and funky – which would draw its backroom team, including pianist Joe Hunter, from the city’s clubs and bars, and its frontline talent from the hungry, ambitious youth of the housing projects. Gordy’s intention was to build a new music; one which would profit simultaneously from tapping into black America’s need to move on up, and white America’s desire to get on down.

  In Chicago, Vee Jay was pulling further and further away from Southside blues. Never as thoroughly identified with transplanted Delta music as Chess, Vee Jay may not have had big-name rock and roll stars like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley on its team, but it could certainly punch its weight when it came to the post-gospel sweet soul which was becoming an increasingly important part of the Windy City tradition. Intrigued by a promising young vocal group called The Impressions, Bracken and his team cut the successful ‘For Your Precious Love’, but released it under the name of the band’s lead singer, Jerry Butl
er, whom they signed as a solo artist. This left the rest of the group, including guitarist/songwriter/auteur Curtis Mayfield, at liberty to take themselves and their music elsewhere. Mayfield continued to write, arrange and produce Butler’s records for Vee Jay (generating another major hit, ‘He Will Break Your Heart’, in 1960), but the dazzling string of landmark hits subsequently notched up by the Mayfield-fronted trio version of The Impressions benefited the New York-based major ABC (a subsidiary of the television company) rather than their hometown label.

  Meanwhile, as the traditional blues audience continued to shrink, an unexpected new market began to grow: white academics, intellectuals and jazz and folk fans started to take an interest in the music, albeit in its root forms rather than its contemporary extensions. Rinehart published Samuel Charters’ The Country Blues, unleashing a torrent of scholarly works which focused critical attention onto the hitherto neglected field of rural blues, and giving it, for the first time, the kind of academic respectability which had been lavished on jazz, particularly in Europe, for quite some time. Despite Charter s’ disdain for contemporary blues – and for contemporary blues singers – Hooker and Muddy Waters were the exceptions singled out as recipients of the author’s approval. ‘From Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and Bukka White to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker,’ wrote Charters, ‘there has been an almost unbroken line of great [Delta] singers.’ The British scholar Paul Oliver’s equally influential Blues Fell This Morning arrived the following year courtesy of the Cambridge University Press; like Charters, Oliver was an admirer of Hooker’s music, and later sought him out in Detroit during a lengthy research trip to the US.

  In Europe, where early forms of African-American music, notably New Orleans jazz, were the objects of fanatical fundamentalist worship, blues singers had been welcome for years, provided that they were sufficiently ‘traditional’ and ‘folkloric’, and were willing to present themselves as ‘untainted’ by ‘commercialism’. Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters’ predecessor as the kingpin of the Chicago blues scene, had been a regular transatlatic visitor from 1951 until his death in August 1958. Broonzy played the ‘folkloric’ role to the hilt, arriving for shows in overalls, carrying on like he’d never before left his Mississippi farm, and assuring his more credulous listeners that he was ‘the last of the blues singers’. That Big Bill’s reversion to a style he hadn’t touched for decades might have been prompted by purely commercial motives was a possibility that few of his new friends were prepared to entertain. Muddy Waters himself had visited Britain in 1958, where purist critics and audiences were shocked into paroxysms of fear and loathing by his slicing electric guitar and rumbustious performance. (The punch-line to that particular joke came in 1964, when Muddy returned to the UK with an acoustic guitar and a traditional repertoire, only to be confronted by a new generation of blues fans weaned on the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds and desperate to have their mojos worked to death.) The impressive share of this European bonanza which was waiting for Hooker had been prefigured by an admiring piece in the French magazine Jazz-Hot. Its author, Jacques Lemètre – who, as Oliver would also do a year or so later, had visited Hooker in Detroit during a trip undertaken with his colleague Marcel Chauvard – was the first to describe Hooker as ‘one of the most primitive (from a musical point of view) and, I would say, one of the most African of blues singers’.