Boogie Man

by Charles Shaar Murray

  In a parallel development, the Newport Jazz Festival, which had been running in Freebody Park, near Newport, Rhode Island, since its establishment in 1954, acquired a sibling event, the Newport Folk Festival. Due to the domination of its rosters by clients of major agents like Albert Grossman and Harold Leventhal, it speedily became known amongst the more traditional folk musicians as the Newport Folk Agents Festival. The Newport Folk Festival formula involved the juxtaposition of popular whitebread folkies like the Kingston Trio alongside rather more authentic performers like Pete Seeger and the New Lost City Ramblers, while also featuring ‘world’ acts like the Oranim Zabar Israeli Troupe, bluegrass virtuosi Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs, and – making her major-league debut – the young Joan Baez, as well as those bluesmen who, like the guitar/harp duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, were already active on the East Coast folk scene.

  This new audience developed radically different methods of consumption from the traditional blues constituency, which was strictly a singles market. Hooker was all but unknown to white audiences, though some of the more adventurous white youth across the country had already crossed certain barriers, both visible and invisible, in order to discover him. ‘Well, on the radio, living in Memphis as a kid,’ remembers Charlie Musselwhite, ‘I would hear him on a station from Nashville called WLAC, and there was another station from Mexico, XERF, and they would play John Lee Hooker and lots of other blues. Both of these stations were really powerful; XERF I could only get at night, but WLAC from Nashville came in a lot clearer. They would play John Lee Hooker and he had this sound which was unlike any other sound. You couldn’t hear any influence; this guy sounded only like himself, and it was a real mysterious, sinister sound. I loved it, man, it sounded great. Sounded tough. “Hobo Blues”, “Crawlin’ King Snake”. There was a guy that I knew that serviced jukeboxes and he had a garage just piled with thousands and thousands of 45s. I would look through his 45s and anything by John Lee Hooker, all blues records, I would just get ’em. I would go round to junkstores and I’d find 78s of John Lee Hooker. Some had different names on ’em, I re member finding one by a guy named Texas Slim. I never heard of Texas Slim, but as soon as I put the record on . . . that’s John Lee Hooker. You can call it Texas Slim, but that’s John Lee Hooker. I had John Lee Booker records, I had Johnny Williams records, Birmingham Sam 78s . . . “Down At The Landing” . . . “Low Down Midnight Boogie Woogie”, that was the name of that record. I was always fascinated with that sound, especially that drone sound that he would get playing in that open tuning.’

  In Tulsa, Oklahoma, a kid named Elvin Bishop was also tuning into WLAC. Intrigued by a Jimmy Reed record he heard one night, he went out the following morning in search of further enlightenment. ‘I went down to this record store in town that had all the R&B, as it was called then – all I knew was that it was black music – and I stole a bunch of blues records,’ he told Robert Neff and Anthony Connor.43 ‘And I started listening to that station every night and gradually got hip to it. Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker were the ones I liked the most, especially John Lee – the emotion of it just carried me away.’

  Comparatively few white kids, though, had either the good fortune to live somewhere as musically vital as Memphis, or the guts to go prowling sticky-fingered through ghetto record stores in search of vintage 78s. The new blues audience favoured a new record format: the twelve-inch, 33⅓ rpm microgroove long-player, capable of carrying around twenty minutes of music on each side, enough for a dozen or so tunes in all. Hooker made his first appearance on microgroove in 1959 – not to mention his second and third, but we’ll get to those in a moment – under fairly inauspicious circumstances. Highway Of Blues, released by the small Audiolab label, combined a fistful of Hooker’s earliest, roughest sides – originally cut in 1949 for King Records – with an equivalent number of tunes by Stick McGhee, Brownie McGhee’s less-talented brother who, a decade earlier, had stumbled his way into giving Atlantic Records its first big hit with ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, but never quite managed to follow it up. One copy of that Audiolab album eventually found its way across the Atlantic to Belfast in Northern Ireland, where it fell into the hands of one Ivan Morrison. ‘“Baby Please Don’t Go” was on it’, Van Morrison later told London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show, ‘and several other songs like “Devil’s Stomp” and all this slow stuff. “Baby Please Don’t Go” was the only fast number on it. It struck me as being something really unique and really different, with a lot of soul. More soul than I’d heard from any previous records.’

  Singles appear in the stores and jukeboxes and on the radio; then they suddenly disappear again. By contrast, albums stick around in the racks long enough to have a ‘shelf-life’. Vee Jay’s first Hooker album, I’m John Lee Hooker, released later in 1959, kept the best of John Lee’s late ’50s recordings in catalogue and in the stores, but the album that did most to redirect his career path hadn’t been cut for Vee Jay and did considerably more than simply recycle a stack of old singles. In April of that year, Bill Grauer, boss of the New York-based jazz label Riverside, came to Detroit with a fairly radical idea in mind: he wanted to cut a Hooker session specifically for album release. His intention was to record Hooker solo and au naturel; back-porch style: with an acoustic guitar and without the thunderous reverb and distortion of the early ’50s solo sides. What was more, Grauer wanted Hooker to perform a programme of Leadbelly songs, but this overly literal-minded notion of what was and what wasn’t ‘folk’ rapidly foundered when it became apparent that Hooker had barely heard of Leadbelly. With hindsight, this isn’t at all surprising. Huddie Leadbetter was a hero and a cause célèbre amongst white folklorists who, quite rightly, acclaimed him as a walking library of African-American cultural history, but he meant little or nothing to black record-buyers. By the time he started recording in 1935, his music was a decade out of date, and his attempts at commercial recording – not to be confused with the archival recordings, cut for the Library of Congress under Alan Lomax’s supervision, which are his most lasting legacy – sold miserably. Furthermore, despite the ‘traditional’ nature of his work, Leadbelly was a distinct and unique individual, and much of his repertoire was therefore personal to him, rather than simply being a generic representation of a place, time or community. As with Hooker himself, Leadbelly’s ‘authenticity’ was inner as much as outer, as intimately bound up with sense of self as with sense of community.

  ‘That [folk blues] was very popular for a while,’ says Hooker. ‘[Riverside] approached me. I was between contracts with Vee Jay. My contract was up, and I hadn’t re-signed, and I did [the Riverside sessions] between contracts. This is the way to do things. If you free, like a freelance, you can do what you wanna do.’ And the resulting album, originally released as The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker but subsequently reissued as The Folk Blues Of John Lee Hooker, was very much something Hooker wanted to do. ‘That was good stuff. “Two White Horses”,44 really good stuff.’ And did it require any radical shift of approach? ‘Oh, I changed nothing.’ The session, cut at Hooker’s old stamping ground at United Sound but in a distinctly different atmosphere than that which had held sway back in the Bernard Besman era, was something more valuable and important than any contrived recycling of excerpts from the by-then heavily strip-mined Leadbelly repertoire could possibly have been. As Paul Oliver put in his sleeve-note to the British edition of the album, ‘Perhaps it is well [that Hooker did not know Leadbelly’s songs] if only because the present album might not have been made if he had been familiar with them. Instead of singing the blues and songs of an other man, which would have been second-hand experience at best, he was encouraged to recall the blues he had heard or sung in his youth.’

  Hooker may indeed have ‘changed nothing’ for the session, but the circumstances changed him. The unamplified acoustic guitar gave him a smaller, drier, less sustained and reverberant sound than the electric and amplified-acoustic guitars featured on his earlier recor
ds, and as a result the entire performance is scaled down accordingly: where the ’50s sides placed almost equal emphasis on voice and accompaniment, here the vocals are unchallenged for centre-stage dominance. Hooker’s singing loses the declamatory edge, the dancehall holler, of his previous singles-oriented work; instead there’s a quiet, confidential intimacy, an overwhelming sense of eavesdropping on a meditative communication with the singer’s own inner being. The longer playing-time offered by microgroove vinyl does away with the constrictive limits of the single’s three-minute barrier; the performances be come longer and more discursive. The Country Blues session was an astonishingly productive one. Grauer left Detroit with enough material for two albums: though the second one, Burning Hell, remained in the can until its UK-only release in 1964 and took a further three decades to become available in the USA, it was by no means markedly inferior to its more illustrious counterpart. For Hooker’s part, the Riverside date gave him the opportunity to try a few things he couldn’t possibly have attempted in the rapidly shifting and highly competitive world of the late-’50s R&B singles market: the chain-gang chant of ‘Water Boy’, the sharecropping reminiscences of ‘Behind The Plow’, the nostalgic harking-back to the ’20s and ’30s hits of Blind Lemon Jefferson and pianist Leroy Carr, the rural ribaldry of the Tommy McLennan-derived ‘Bundle Up And Go’, the primal Delta riffs and lines of Charley Patton’s seminal ‘Pea Vine Special’, and – most of all – the debut of what was to become a signature song which remained in the forefront of Hooker’s repertoire from that day to this.

  ‘Tupelo’ is a one-chord, free-form talking blues which, like Charley Patton’s ‘High Water Everywhere’, Bessie Smith’s ‘Backwater Blues’ and ‘I Rowed A Little Boat’ which Hooker developed from them, evokes the terrible flood which devastated the Delta in 1927. The Hooker family were far enough away from the river to escape the direct effects of the flood, but the magnitude of the disaster made it inevitable that tales of the flood entered the folklore of the Delta: everybody in the region, even if they themselves had been lucky enough not have been forced out of their own homes and farms, had a friend or relation who’d been somehow affected by the calamity. On the face of it, not much happens in ‘Tupelo’. Hooker sets up a rolling, repetitive bass-string riff in the key of E, paced to his slow but remorseless foot-tap, and he talks. In a deliberately casual country-stoic voice, with no shouting or histrionics, he simply tells the tale of something that happened, a long time ago, in a little country town named Tupelo, Mississippi.

  ‘Did you read about the flood?’ he asks us. ‘There was thousands of lives . . . destroyed.’ The guitar riff ominously rolls on, like some force of almost unimaginable power now temporarily quiescent, but capable of erupting, furiously and without warning, at any moment. ‘It rained, it rained’ – tap, tap goes the foot – ‘both night and day. The po’ people,’ Hooker continues, his voice still hushed, still matter-of-fact, ‘was worried . . . they had no place to go.’ The death-knell guitar continues to toll. ‘You hear many people cryin’, “Lord, have mercy. You the only one . . . that we can turn to”.’ Thousands of people, stripped of everything they had or could aspire to, beyond the help of any human agency, calling on the same deity whose power has laid them low. The guitar departs from its basic riff, erupting into brief bass-string flurries. When the riff returns, Hooker hums along in unison with it. ‘There was women . . . and there was children,’ Hooker says. ‘They was screamin’ . . . and cryin’.’ Once again they appeal to the Lord: ‘you the only one now . . . that we can turn to.’ Once again, he reminds us that it happened a long time ago. ‘The mighty flood,’ he says, reverently, ‘in Tupelo, Mississippi.’ And then, as if in awestuck obeisance to the sheer enormity of the forces of nature, Hooker at last begins to sing. ‘Oh-oh-oh,’ he moans wordlessly. ‘Lord have mercy, wasn’t that a mighty time.’ And then, almost as an afterthought as the record fades out, ‘Tupelo is gone.’

  ‘John Lee Hooker,’ wrote Orrin Keepnews in the album’s notes, ‘is a very successful Rhythm and Blues singer of today. But . . . he is also a most authentic singer of the way-back, close-to-the-soil kind of blues.’ In order to emphasise Hooker’s ‘authenticity’, Keepnews presented a somewhat embroidered version of the singer’s personal history, quite possibly derived from Hooker himself. ‘Young John Lee left home to lead an itinerant life that, over a number of years, carried him from the Blue Ridge mountains of Virginia to the Gulf of Mexico, and across Texas from Brownsville to Corpus Christi. He worked at various jobs, but always his first concern was to play and sing blues, with and for whomever he could, and to learn the music that was all around him: in the hills, and on farms, and in the shacks and backroom dives and on the streets of towns.’ Like many revisionist fables, this one stuck: by 1961, when Pete Welding annotated Vee Jay’s The Folklore of John Lee Hooker, the timespan covered by John Lee’s nonexistent ‘itinerant’ period – his ‘life of drifting and restless travelling’, during which he absorbed the music of ‘the lumber and turpentine camps, the rough dives, shacks and juke-joints of the rural south’ – had expanded to a full sixteen years.

  The release of Country Blues didn’t so much advance John Lee’s existing career as give him an entirely new one. The album garnered ecstatic reviews in publications ranging from the Washington Post to downbeat; folk and jazz critics striving to outdo each others’ superlatives in praise of a man whose music they had never previously deigned to acknowledge. Hooker was hailed either as ‘one of the best examples today of the rural tradition’ (his previous history conveniently expunged) or as a prodigal son who had found his way back to the True Path (‘a successful rhythm and blues performer . . . returns to the basic blues’) after a decade in the wilderness of philistine commercialism. ‘A singer like Hooker,’ Orrin Keepnews wrote rather sniffily in the liner notes to a subsequent River side album, That’s My Story, ‘can now finally sing the honest blues the way he really feels them. Until very recently, John Lee Hooker had little opportunity to record material of this type. Ever since his recording career got under way in the 1940s, he has functioned largely in the strange, musically hybrid area known as “rhythm-and-blues”. But let’s face it, in the past decade or so that area has been the only place even faintly like home where a singer of the blues could earn his way. And the fact that Hooker has achieved more than a little success as an R&B performer is probably primarily a tribute to the ability of the real blues spirit to fight its way through souped-up rhythmic monotony and inane lyrics.’

  By contrast, to fans of the rough-edged, rocking electric city blues – or, if you prefer, the ‘souped-up rhythmic monotony and inane lyrics’ – which Hooker had created in that ‘strange, musically hybrid area known as “rhythm-and-blues”’, it was the acoustic folk-blues posture which represented the real sell-out. Tony Glover articulates this view in the liner-note to a recent reissue of an early-’60s solo live album, wherein his enthusiasm for Hooker’s music in general is tempered only by the faint praise with which he damns the folkie years in particular. Hooker, he writes, ‘became a storyteller/showman with a slightly cleaned-up and diluted repertoire . . . it’s obvious that he was being careful about his music and the manner in which he presented it – the raunch and fire of his old sides on Modern and Vee Jay is missing.’ In a similar vein, Colin Escott, writing in Goldmine magazine more than thirty years after the release of Country Blues, disapprovingly noted that ‘Hooker’s folk blues albums also featured him playing an acoustic guitar. This was the man for whom the electric instrument might almost have been invented, and these stabs at “authenticity” arguably resulted in some of the least authentic music to bear John Lee Hooker’s name.’ Only Paul Oliver seemed prepared to step outside these contrived barricades and present the case that the artist himself would make: that, essentially, the ‘folk’ and ‘R&B’ records depicted the same man making the same music – ‘Oh, I changed nothing!’ – and that only the scenery was different. ‘It would seem hard to reconcile [Hooker�
��s] recent background with the picture of the country singer that has been drawn of him,’ he pointed out. ‘But of all city singers who have attained prominence John Lee Hooker has retained the qualities of his rural origins the longest . . . today John Lee Hooker is a city singer and it is artificial and unwise to make a country singer out of him. Nevertheless [Country Blues] is an important record for it shows uniquely the roots of the music that he has shaped into an idiom all his own.’45