Boogie Man

  Vee Jay itself also dabbled a toe in this new market, and their Hooker album provided a musical counterbalance to the revisionist image of John Lee promulgated by Country Blues. Hooker’s temporary absence from Universal Studios had been effectively disguised by a dribble of singles from the vault – his remakes of ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ as well as ‘Maudie’, his only new song released that year – and by the release of I’m John Lee Hooker, the first album devoted entirely to his R&B work. Though not billed as such, it was a de facto ‘greatest hits’ collection, gathering together Hooker’s most popular Vee Jay tracks thus far, including ‘Dimples’ and ‘I Love You Honey’, alongside the then-current single ‘Maudie’ and his recent remakes of vintage hits like ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘I’m In The Mood’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ and ‘Hobo Blues’. The packaging was ostentatiously downhome; the front cover eschewing the uptown imagery associated with the new smooth R&B by depicting a big old coal-fired stove.

  Similarly, the folkie-friendly liner notes emphasized Hooker’s rootishness and rurality, as well as continuing that process of self-consciously romanticized mythmaking which has dogged Hooker ever since. ‘He is an itinerant soul,’ the anonymous author solemnly assured his (surely not ‘her’) readers, recycling Keepnews’s potted biography from the Riverside album. ‘A body who strayed from the Gulf of Mexico, from Corpus Christi to Brownsville to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia – and plenty of area in between. John Lee held many different kinds of jobs. But they only bankrolled him between sessions of pickin’ and singin’ with anyone who cared to join or listen. He absorbed the authentic folk styles and trends everywhere he travelled . . . but thousands of miles and years of moving intervened before he hit . . . Detroit.’ Hooker was, the writer asserted, ‘first taught by his grandfather to pick out harmony on strips of inner tube nailed in different tensions to the barn door. From this crude and primitive beginning comes the very distinctive and Hooker-styled strumming you’ll find herein.’ Rather more acutely, the same author pointed out, ‘At times, you’ll find the sound hearkening back to the Orient, while often, you’ll hear the bag pipe’s drone.’

  If one middle-class white listener’s experience was anything to go by, Vee Jay’s policy of shifting their Hooker catalogue into the albums market was an unqualified success. Fourteen-year-old John Hammond was the son and namesake of the man who will probably be remembered as the greatest talent scout in all of twentieth-century popular music, with a track record stretching from Bessie Smith’s last session to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first, with names like Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen in between. Though his parents had separated when he was a child, young John still had access to his father’s extensive record and tape library, and had thus already been exposed to some fairly esoteric country blues, including the works of Robert Johnson, then as yet uncollected on album. Nevertheless, his chance discovery of Hooker’s music blew his mind. ‘The first album that I had of his was called I’m John Lee Hooker, and it included “Maudie” and “Dimples”, all the really heavy-duty ones. And then later on I heard his earlier recordings, and hearing him play all by himself with his foot on a block of wood and him just making the sounds . . . I found it truly amazing and passionate and delightful.’ Consumed by the urge to perform the blues himself, the younger Hammond proceeded to acquire every Hooker record he could find; only a few years later, he and Hooker would become professional colleagues.

  However, it was in the wake of Country Blues that John Lee Hooker the acoustic troubadour would be welcomed into places whence John Lee Hooker the raucous city bluesman would have been indignantly turned away. Like, for example, the Newport Folk Festival.

  9

  FOLK BOOM . . .

  In the thirty years since he learned music . . . from his stepfather in Clarksdale, Mr Hooker has embraced several styles. He has shed none of them, his performances running the gamut from personal country blues through more sophisticated, externalised urban blues to heavily rhythmic, flashy material that borders on rock’n’roll.

  Robert Shelton, New York Times, 7 April, 1961

  1960’s Newport Festival season proved to be rather more auspicious for some than for others. That particular summer, John Lee Hooker pulled off a memorable double, not only appearing, complete with acoustic guitar, at the Newport Folk Festival on 25 June, but returning to Freebody Park over the Independence Day weekend, one week later, to perform as a special guest artist with Muddy Waters’ band during a special Sunday afternoon blues concert. In folkie mode, he played a set accompanied on stand-up string bass by Brooklyn jazz musician Bill Lee, the latter a quarter-century or so away from composing the score for his then-infant son Spike’s movie debut She’s Gotta Have It. The show included impassioned meditations – if that seems like a contradiction in terms, let it serve as an indication of Hooker’s almost supernatural ability not only to resolve but to embody such contradictions – on ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Tupelo’, alongside a fine, rocking version of ‘Maudie’ flawed only slightly by the occasional (and wholly understandable) failure of Lee, who had never played with Hooker before, to second-guess the bluesman’s idiosyncratic method of telegraphing his chord changes.

  The Newport Folk Festival provided Hooker with the biggest single audience he’d ever played to in his life. ‘I feel like I accomplished something there,’ he says. ‘That was one of the greatest times, Newport. People used to sleep outside, have little tents. You couldn’t get a hotel room; it’d be crowded, packed. Joan Baez was one playing there. When I think about that, sometimes I just feel like crying, I’m so happy about the old days. The ’60s will never be forgotten, the memory will never die. Great musicians like Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, and Joan Baez and myself, and many, many more, blazed a trail at Newport.’

  The Jazz Festival showcased a different aspect of Hooker’s gifts. He appeared, for neither the first nor the last time, with Muddy Waters’ band, which at that time featured Otis Spann (piano), James Cotton (harp), Pat Hare (guitar),46 Andrew Stephenson (bass) and Francis Clay (drums). The conventional critical wisdom on the Waters bands of the ’50s tends to favour the line-ups from the earlier half of the decade, particularly the ones which included Jimmy Rogers in the guitar chair and Little Walter on harp, over those from the latter half. However, as Robert Palmer has persuasively argued, the Waters bands of this period more than compensate for their lack of celeb soloists by a greater degree of teamwork and a superior ensemble feel. Certainly Muddy had sufficient confidence in this particular crew’s ability to execute his music without instrumental cues from the leader to lay aside his own guitar and perform strictly as a vocalist for those sections of the set devoted to his more recent material, though his defiantly down-home Delta slide guitar was strongly in evidence on the older songs. The cover photo of the subsequent Muddy Waters At Newport album, taken at the foot of the steps leading to the stage, caught the immaculately suited Muddy mere instants before he stepped out before his equally immaculately tuxedoed band, already in full swing with Spann pounding out a rocking boogie shuffle. Ironically enough, the electrified archtop acoustic guitar Muddy is shown clutching so authoritatively was not his. ‘That was John Lee Hooker’s [guitar],’ Muddy told Tom Wheeler,47 ‘and I just grabbed it for the picture. My own guitar was up onstage, the same red Telecaster I got now.’ (In fact, the video evidence demonstrates that the instrument in question was a different Fender Telecaster altogether: the same early-’50s blond model that he’d taken on his first English tour two years earlier.)

  The spur-of-the-moment guitar switch turned out to be fortuitous as well as expedient. Not only did Muddy gain a short-notice photo-prop, but the iconographic significance of clutching a big sunburst archtop acoustic rather than a Fender solid-body was considerably more appropriate, in marketing terms, to the preconceptions of the white folkies and jazzers at whom the bulk of his future work would be aimed.

  Much of that Sun
day afternoon blues show has been preserved in a series of short films, collectively entitled Jazz USA, made under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and introduced by an amiable, bespectacled stiff named Willis Conover, host of a long-running Voice of America jazz radio show. Unfortunately, the format of the films demanded that the footage be edited into bite-sized chunks, following one piece by each of the artists – Waters, Hooker, cabaret-blues vocalist Betty Jeanette and old-timey guitar/fiddle duo Butch Cage & Willie Johnson, plus piano-instrumental contributions by Spann, and excerpts from evening shows by Dave Brubeck and Ray Charles – with a number by another, thereby destroying the continuity and pacing of each performer’s set. By contemporary concert-footage standards, the filming is impossibly sluggish and pedestrian. The camera spends what seems like eternities wandering interminably over the front rows of the audience, catching platoons of middle-aged, middle-class white people in inappropriate clothing clapping spectacularly out of time in the blazing afternoon sun. However, it provides us with unparalleled glimpses of two of the major Delta expats in their performing prime. Most existing film of Muddy Waters was shot in the ’70s, after he had lost much of his physical mobility to the after-effects of injuries sustained in a major car crash, but the Waters shown here is a vastly different proposition from the more familiar burly, avuncular figure, perched on a bar stool plucking at his guitar. Here, unencumbered by his instrument, he’s rockin’. His knees shimmy, his arms gesticulate, his feet fly and – during Spann’s piano solo on the climactic ‘Got My Mojo Workin” – Muddy rushes across the stage to James Cotton, gathers the bulky, pompadoured harpist into his arms and sweeps him into a gleefully impromptu lindy-hop. He effortlessly dominates the large open-air stage, whetting the viewer’s appetite for a chance to see a performance of similar intensity compressed into the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a South Side tavern.

  For his part, Hooker is physically more reticent – gently bouncing to the beat on the balls of his feet, guitar slung across his right shoulder rather than around his neck – but musically he is equally eloquent. Backed by the core of the Waters band – Spann, Hare, Stephenson and Clay – the film clips depict him performing ‘Maudie’, ‘It’s My Own Fault’ and a piece introduced by Conover as ‘Come Back Baby’, alternately crooning and snarling his lines through his chipped front teeth whilst the band, fully accustomed to the vagaries of Delta singers, effortlessly cover his every musical bet. Lean and dapper in his slim-cut Italianate suit, Hooker came across as what he was: a country man utterly at home in city clothes.

  Hooker could therefore be said, without significant fear of contradiction, to have had a ‘good Newport’. The festival organisers, on the other hand, had a rotten Newport, and they couldn’t even claim that it wasn’t their own fault. As Jack Tracy puts it in his Muddy Waters At Newport liner notes,

  Newport Festival, 1960, will go down as the year of the great riot. An estimated 10,000 beer-inflamed youngsters tried to storm the gates of the Saturday night concert and gain entrance. The park already was full. The result? Tear gas, windows broken, heads cracked, and a near-state of martial law declared. The next day, the Newport city council and the heads of the Newport Festival met and decided to call off the remaining two days of concerts. Only the Sunday afternoon program would be allowed to continue. Fittingly, it was an afternoon devoted to the blues. And chosen to wind it up, and thus probably be the last jazz group ever to play the Newport Festival, was the Muddy Waters band.

  In a sulphurous essay entitled ‘Bringing Dignity To Jazz’,48 the veteran jazz critic Nat Hentoff, then co-editor of the Jazz Review, went somewhat further. ‘Independence Day weekend of 1960 at Newport,’ Hentoff wrote, ‘is worth detailing as the most mephitic49 event yet in the usually inglorious campaign to win wider “recognition for jazz”. According to Hentoff, the debacle was the logical if not inevitable result of the Festival’s own policies:

  The Newport Jazz Festival has become the bleary symbol of how ‘success’ and ‘acceptance’ can eventually corrode the ‘image’ of jazz more effectively than intermittent Sunday supplement stories about jazz and junk. For several years, the promoters of the Festival had been programming the concerts as if they were vaudeville shows, and had been generally lowering the musical standards of their celebrations of America’s ‘only indigenous art form’ until by 1959 the Festival had become the backdrop for a weekend of drinking by as many teenagers as could fit into the town . . . the NJF was ordered to cease all music on Sunday afternoon, July 4. Al though the Sunday and Monday night and Monday afternoon concerts were cancelled, the city allowed the Sunday ‘educational’ daylight session to go on in the knowledge that it would attract few people. It was a blues afternoon – one of the best in the Festival’s history. There were no big names. The passion of the players and singers reminded one musician, ‘That’s the way this festival started. Music was its reason for being . . .’

  The actual climax of the afternoon wasn’t included in any of the USIA films: indeed, they contained no allusion whatsoever to the problems which had wrecked the festival. Langston Hughes, the celebrated African-American poet and playwright, had scribbled the lyrics to an impromptu blues (entitled, logically enough, ‘Goodbye Newport Blues’) onto a fistful of Western Union telegram blanks and brought them to the stage, where the song was performed almost immediately. It was sung by Spann, rather than Waters, for one very simple reason. Spann could read, and Waters couldn’t.

  By the time he played that double-header at Newport, Hooker was back in the Vee Jay fold, but he had put his year-long sabbatical to very good use. On 9 February, he had recorded a further acoustic session for Riverside, this time at Reeves Sound Studio in New York City, under the supervision of Orrin Keepnews. Rhythm section support was provided by Sam Jones and Louis Hayes, respectively the bassist and drummer from alto saxophonist Cannonball Adderly’s band, then contracted to Riverside. Julian ‘Cannonball’ Adderly was a Floridian who’d played alongside John Coltrane in Miles Davis’s legendary Kind of Blue band, and Sam Jones had cut with Davis himself when the trumpeter had made one of his rare guest appearances on Adderly’s Somethin’ Else session for Blue Note the previous year. The resulting album, That’s My Story, demonstrated that Hooker had absolutely no problem adjusting his music to the light, syncopated swing of a ‘jazz’ rhythm section, though the reverse isn’t strictly true: you can virtually hear the sweat dripping from bassist Jones’s brow as he continually shifts his chords to stay in sync with Hooker.

  That’s My Story found Hooker juggling an astonishingly eclectic variety of source musics, considering that he was supposed to be a musical ‘primitive’, miraculously uncontaminated by commercialism and vulgarity. Hooker delved even-handedly into the popular rhythm and blues of his youth, the traditional blues and gospel of his boyhood, his own Modern and post-Modern repertoire, and even the pop hits of the day. The album’s curtain-raiser, ‘I Need Some Money’, for example, is a straightforward Hookerisation of a contemporary R&B hit, Barrett Strong’s ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’, one of the earliest Motown classics from the days when the label left some of R&B’s rough edges in place. Composed by Janie Bradford and Berry Gordy himself, it later earned the honour of being the only song to be covered by both the Beatles (in late ’63 on their second album) and the Rolling Stones (in early ’64 on their first EP). Hooker, however, sang it with such laconic, insouciant conviction that many listeners were convinced that his fellow Detroiters had borrowed the song from him, rather than the other way about. (The Doors, who performed the song live but never cut it in a studio, based their version on Hooker’s; when two of their in-concert recordings of the songs appeared on CD in 1997, composer credits were awarded to Hooker rather than to Bradford and Gordy.)

  In stark contrast, it’s followed by ‘Come On And See About Me’: no relation whatsoever to the 1964 Supremes hit of (almost) the same title, but a heartwrenching adaptation of a traditional gospel tune, performed solo in the meditative
mode of ‘Tupelo’, and echoing that song’s theme of those abandoned, stripped of all earthly resources and helpless in a hostile and uncaring world, with nothing left to turn to but the mercy of the Lord. However, where ‘Tupelo’ is detached, understated, almost deadpan in its account of catastrophe and horror, ‘Come On And See About Me’ is passionate, fervent, almost unbearably intense: sung in the first person as opposed to ‘Tupelo”s third. Set to a slow, quiet foot-tap and the eerie strains of Hooker’s open-A-tuned acoustic guitar, it was easily the most gorgeous and affecting vocal performance of his career thus far, a hearkening-back to his Baptist childhood. To those ‘electric purists’ who claim to detect nothing of value or merit in Hooker’s ‘contrived’ acoustic recordings, this song above all is heartily recommended. Check your ears: better yet, check your soul.

  ‘I’m Wanderin”, a slow blues which begins with a highly entertaining dispute between Hooker and Jones concerning the chord changes, is one of many variations on Charles Brown’s perennial ‘Driftin’ Blues’ – first recorded by Brown in 1945 when he was a member of Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers – which can be found dotted through Hooker’s discography. Brown was ‘driftin’ and driftin’ like a ship out on the sea’ whereas Hooker finds himself wandering ‘like a ship out on the foam’. (The title assigned, presumably by its producers, to a 1970 version of the same piece over-phoneticizes his pronunciation to create the highly arresting and deeply surreal image of ‘A Sheep Out on the Foam’: the very stuff of nightmare, to be sure. Another possible interpretation is that Hooker was singing about ‘a sheep out on the foal’ – presumably a reference to being out in pasture. Enigmatic or what?)