Boogie Man

  ‘Democrat Man’ is the album’s ringer in more ways than one. For a start, it’s the kind of out-front partisan political song which was common in the predominantly left-wing white folk world but – the repertoire of the underrated J.B. Lenoir notwithstanding – such songs were highly unusual in the cagier, more cynical lyrical world of the blues. ‘You get in places, ooh whee, in the way backwoods, where they ain’t ever come out, and you start that stuff, you act like you wanna be like that, you liable to get torn up,’ warns Hooker. ‘You get one of the worst whuppin’s you ever seen. Little redneck towns, they ain’t never been to a big city. You know’ – he laughs, but he isn’t smiling. ‘Rednecks and hillbillies.’

  For another, it was an adaptation of a recent song by one of the members of Hooker’s own local blues community. ‘I learned that from Bobo Jenkins,’ says Hooker. ‘Bobo Jenkins give me that song, he’s gone now.’ The late John Pickens ‘Bobo’ Jenkins, who played simultaneous guitar and racked harp in the manner of Jimmy Reed, was born in 1916 in Forland, Alabama, had reputedly been married nine times, and recorded his ‘Democrat Blues’ for Chess in 1954. ‘“Democrat Man”, that was a lovely song,’ Hooker recalls fondly. It’s certainly derived from Jenkins’s piece, a mid-slow shuffle with chunky guitar, wheezing mouth-harp and keening vocals which shares some audible musical and lyrical ancestry with Jimmy Rogers’s ‘That’s All Right’ and Eddie Boyd’s ‘Five Long Years’. However, Jenkins’ punchline – ‘The Democrats put us on our feet, baby/you had the nerve to vote them out’ – becomes Hooker’s starting point: he puts his own distinct spin onto Jenkins’ line and then takes off from there. ‘The Democrats put us on our feet,’ sings Hooker, ‘and them crazy women vote them out.’

  Hooker’s political views have never been any great secret. Like many another African-American of his generation from the rural South, he has clear, distinct memories of the Depression, and of the sterling works carried out by the Roosevelt administration, not least among which was the Tennessee Valley Authority scheme which brought electricity to the Delta. Hooker is, by his own cheerful admission, a ‘yellow dog Democrat’: one who wouldn’t vote for a Republican even if the Democratic candidate were a yellow dog.50 (The only Republican for whom Hooker ever had a kindly word was Abraham Lincoln.) ‘I was speakin’ out,’ he says proudly. ‘Lettin’ people know.’ ‘They told us they’d send your sons home,’ sings Hooker caustically, ‘they did just that: sent ’em home to stay without a job.’ Foreshadowing a new song which he would record on his return to Vee Jay the following month, he announces ‘I ain’t got no shoes, no shoes on my feet,’ before continuing ‘but I ain’t goin’ down that welfare sto’ no mo’. You know why? Because it won’t be long before election time.’ And 1960 wasn’t a bad year to be putting a marker down for the Democratic Party: the eight-year stretch which the Republicans had commenced in 1952 was about to end. ‘I know I’ll get shoes, I get clothes . . . when the Democrats get back in again.’

  Elsewhere on That’s My Story, Hooker revisited some of the key items in his core repertoire, like ‘Wednesday Evening Blues’, which he had first recorded at his inaugural session for Bernard Besman, and – under the title of ‘Gonna Use My Rod’ – a truly hardy perennial first recorded for Specialty as ‘I’m Mad’, soon to be revisited for Vee Jay as ‘I’m Mad Again’, and re-recorded several times thereafter as ‘Bad Like Jesse James’; as well as another old-time R&B hit from the ‘jump’ era, Roscoe Gordon’s ‘No More Doggin”, which he’d first cut for Specialty in 1954.

  Come 1 March it was business as usual back at the Vee Jay Chicago corral, with Hooker cutting his first session for them in over a year in the company of guitarist Lefty Bates, bassist Sylvester Hickman, and drummer Jimmy Turner. There was no doubting this particular trio’s basic competence, and with a more orthodox bluesman they could probably have delivered a highly satisfactory performance, but they were not exactly the most inspired crew with which Hooker had ever worked. Rather, they were plodders to a man, and – having already recorded three albums’ worth of material for Riverside in the previous twelve months – Hooker himself was hardly at his most sparkling. The dozen tunes they cut that day became Hooker’s first all-original Vee Jay album Travelin’, which came complete with a smudgy, impressionistic cover painting of a generic black man who bore no particular resemblence to Hooker sitting disconsolately on a beat-up, sticker-bedecked suitcase, and an erudite, sympathetic liner note from Nat Hentoff, who’d become a fan after hearing ‘Tupelo’ on Country Blues and had snared Hooker a spot on a CBS-TV folk-music show earlier in the year. The record company may well still have been aiming Hooker’s singles at the jukeboxes of the urban ghettos and the Deep South, but they were simultaneously targeting his albums at the new audience which Hooker had created for himself, without any aid from them, during his year-long sabbatical.

  It would be inaccurate, not to mention ungenerous, to deny that the session did indeed provide some notable moments. ‘Run On’ both harked back to ‘Dimples’ and introduced a prototype of the musical setting Hooker would later use in ‘Boom Boom’, which he would write and record the following year; ‘Solid Sender’ was a mesmerically erotic incantatation; ‘Goin’ To California’ was, as things turned out, eerily prescient, and ‘I Can’t Believe’ delved deep into Hooker’s own personal domestic sorrows. ‘It’s hard for a man in love,’ Hentoff wrote perceptively in the liner note, ‘to accept the fact that his love, powerful as it is, can’t always make another person love him back.’

  However, it was the very last track they cut that day which brought in the money: it was as if Hooker and his accompanists finally clicked into sync just as the session was drawing to a close. ‘No Shoes’ had its roots in a fragment of lyric which Hooker had created as part of That’s My Story’s ‘Democrat Man’ – ‘No food on my table, no shoes on my feet/my children cry for mercy, they got no place to call they own’ – and a musical framework which artfully combined elements of the traditional and the contemporary. A slow, gospelly 12/8 blues-ballad punctuated by guitar riffs which processed Hooker’s guitar with the same shimmering electronic vibrato featured on fellow Vee Jay artists the Staple Singers’ successful pop-gospel releases by their leader/patriarch Roebuck ‘Pop’ Staples, it brought Hooker the biggest hit of any of his Vee Jay releases thus far; by late July it had lodged itself just outside the R&B Top 20. As soon as he returned to Detroit, Hooker celebrated by gathering his old pals Eddie Kirkland, Tom Whitehead and Boogie Woogie Red to cut an off-the-books session for Fortune Records.

  During his first stint with Vee Jay, Hooker had loyally and conscientiously abided by the terms of his recording contract; but the second time around he did nothing of the sort. Less than two months after the Travelin’ session, he was in New York City recording a solo studio date, in the Riverside vein but on electric guitar, for the aptly named jazz label Prestige Records. Predictably, Vee Jay weren’t about to let a currently hot artist get away with stuff like that. After a brief period of negotiation, the label came to some sort of ‘agreement’ with Prestige and ‘acquired’ the fourteen masters, six of which appeared the following year on Hooker’s next Vee Jay album, The Folklore Of John Lee Hooker. However, there was nothing they could do about the vast treasure-trove of Hooker sides already residing, quite legally, in the vaults of the labels for which he’d cut so prolifically in the past. Three more Hooker albums appeared in 1960, bringing that year’s long-playing Hooker releases to a grand total of five. Crown, the budget-album wing of Modern Records, cashed in with The Blues, which recycled ten of its most successful Besman-produced titles including ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘I’m In The Mood’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ and ‘Hobo Blues’, wrapping them up in an arty overhead shot of a male model standing in a ghetto doorway clutching a battered electric guitar and clad in the trademark Hooker outfit of trenchcoat, shades, porkpie hat and drooping cigarette. King Records weighed in with John Lee Hooker Sings Blues, a selection of titles recorded by Joe Von Battle i
n August and September of 1948 augmented by a couple of tracks cut by Idessa Malone in March of 1950.

  However, the real gem was Chess’s House Of The Blues, the first album-length harvesting of some of the finest fruits of Hooker’s moonlighting sessions for Joe Von Battle during the Besman years. These sides were as cleanly and cleverly recorded as the best of the Besman sessions: less pop-friendly but considerably more adventurous, they represent one of the creative peaks of the entire Hooker oeuvre. Even House Of The Blues’s superb Don Bronstein cover photo is wonderfully appropriate: depicting a tumbledown Delta shack with its occupiers posed warily on the porch, it emphasised Hooker’s Deep Southern roots without sentimentalising or mythologising them.

  Cats like John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins can play them folk clubs with an acoustic guitar and get them off. People look at them and say, ‘Well, look at that old man. That’s all he know.’ But go down to their own stomping grounds . . . they’ll hook up an electric guitar and scare the shit out of you.

  Dr John, quoted in Blues, by Robert Nee & Anthony Connor, 1975

  By the summer of 1960, Hooker was certainly not short of career options. The success of ‘No Shoes’ had given him his biggest R&B hit for years, while Country Blues, That’s My Story and his Newport double-header had awakened both folk and jazz audiences to his unique talents. The new ‘coffee-house’ circuit – folk-music cabarets without liquor licences which served coffee and soft drinks to audiences who were quiet, attentive, respectful and, most important of all, affluent – was his for the taking. Venues like Philadelphia’s Second Fret, Boston’s Golden Vanity, Cambridge, Massachusetts’ Club 47, Chicago’s Counterpoint and New York City’s Village Vanguard welcomed him, and he them. It was also a lot easier to take his young family to watch him work in this new environment than it was to bring them to the rumbustious taverns. ‘When we were small,’ recalls Zakiya, ‘I remember seeing him perform at either the Apex or the Black And Tan, and he would take us to coffee-houses. I remember the Checkmate, northwest Detroit. I used to love the coffee-houses.’

  And so did Hooker. Material which was next to impossible for him to perform effectively in the boisterous ghetto bars in which he had worked for the past decade and a half now became central to his act. ‘I could do ballads,’ he notes proudly. ‘From loud music to coffee-houses, that was quite a change, but you got to go with the times. You got to put on the brakes with whatever happens, with the dancin’, the youngsters. You got to keep up. Some of the old blues singers couldn’t keep up. Some of them couldn’t make the switch. I made the switch because I could already do that some. Coffeehouses, I could already do that. I’d played with a little old band in the Apex Bar, the Caribbean, but coffee-houses were so popular, they was everywhere. People would listen to you; the waitresses wouldn’t even serve until you finished the song. I could work four, five nights a week in the coffee-houses, get good money. Every city, was coffee-houses.’

  Or as he put it to Greg Drust, ‘I wish those days was here again. I really enjoyed just sitting down with my guitar, playing soft, slow blues, quiet, not loud, talking to the people, and they were just right around me in those coffee-houses . . . I know those days are gone, but I still weep and wish they was here again. I wasn’t making the money I am now, but it wasn’t the money. It was the scene and the people, and what I love to do. I would just really express myself.’

  For a verbal snapshot of Hooker in the coffee-house years, and an index of how he and his music were perceived by denizens of Planet Folk, we would be hard put to improve on Robert Shelton’s report, in the New York Times of Friday, 4 April 1961, of Hooker’s residency at Greenwich Village’s legendary folk room Gerde’s Folk City, on West 4th Street. As Shelton described it,

  Mr Hooker’s voice is immediately arresting, a deep, dark-leather-timbred instrument that turns sullen, nostalgic, brooding or sensuous. He has a rhythmic sense that sets a firm, heart-beat pulse against which he embellishes a smoldering vocal line. He projects his voice in an urgent and intimate fashion that almost makes the listener feel Mr Hooker’s hand is on his shoulder and the song is for him alone. The diversity of Mr Hooker’s material points up the mobility of the simple blues format. ‘Tupelo’ and ‘Natchez’ are bardic recountings of disasters, one telling of a flood, the other of a fire. ‘Booty Green’ is a rollicking dance tune, ‘Black Snake’ is a jealous threat, ‘Maudie’ is a song longing for his wife, ‘I Want To Walk’ is unvarnished sexuality and ‘That’s My Story’ is rueful autobiography . . . Mood being as decisive as it is in blues-singing, Mr Hooker’s sets can be erratic, often leaning too easily toward pleasing the crowd with suggestive lyrics or rhythmic excesses. His guitar-playing, on an electric instrument, is quirky, sometimes trilling a low bass figure that brings the audience to hushed suspense. At other times, however, he will slap at his instrument crudely, often failing to resolve a chord craving resolution, or traipse off on a run leading nowhere. But his relentless beat and emotional intensity save the day.

  Interestingly enough, neither of the two lyrical extracts quoted by Shelton elsewhere in that piece as indicators of Hooker’s emotional and poetic range were original to him: one was from Janie Bradford and Berry Gordy’s ‘Money’ and the other from Charles Brown’s ‘Drifting Blues’. And, of course, both were rhythm-and-blues hits (albeit from different eras), of which folkies were naturally unaware, rather than the ‘traditional’ songs which they seemed to be when Hooker sang them.

  Hooker’s three-week stint at Folk City has, as it happens, been rather over-shadowed by the fact that it represented the first fully professional extended NYC engagement performed by the young singer who was his opening act for the season’s final fortnight. Bob Dylan had been bouncing around the Village folk scene for some little while, lionized by some as that scene’s rising young prodigy and reviled by others as a bumptious young opportunist. Performing floor spots during the club’s Monday-evening ‘hootenanny’ nights, he had made a favourable impression on some of Folk City’s habitués, who’d persuaded the club’s proprietor, Mike Porco, to give him a shot at opening for Hooker. ‘He was so excited he was jumping up and down,’ Porco subsequently told Anthony Scaduto.51 ‘His first real job, and working with John Lee Hooker who was liked by everybody, and Bobby probably figured, too, that Hooker would bring a lot of people in.’ Dylan was most assuredly a fan: even during the first week of Hooker’s residency when he wasn’t performing himself – nobody, not even Shelton himself, seems to remember who opened for Hooker during that first week – Dylan, according to Scaduto, ‘spent every night in Gerde’s watching [Hooker], talking to him, sponging up his unique urban-country blues guitar.’

  ‘I met Bob Dylan in New York at Gerde’s Folk City, him and his girlfriend Susie [Rotolo], who I see once in a while,’ says Hooker. ‘He were hangin’ round me at the old Broadway Central Hotel. I had this suite there, and he had come to Gerde’s to hear me and see me and talk to me. I met him there and got acquainted and just got real thick. Every night he’d be right there with me. We’d stay there, we’d party there, drink gin . . . and he got discovered there at Gerde’s Folk City. I thought he was a hell of a folk-singer, ’bout one of the best that come along in that field of music. And he was a hell of a songwriter, that was for sure. He fitted right in the pocket, but he don’t do that no more. He’s with a band and the rock scene.52 We all had to get away from that, but Bob fitted perfect, because that was how he’s known, as a folksinger. He’d sit around and watch me play; he’d be right there every night, and we’d be playing guitars in the hotel. I don’t know what he got from me, but he must’ve got something. A lot of guitar players have.’

  According to the account presented by Shelton in his Dylan biography No Direction Home,53 the Hooker gig was not altogether an unmixed blessing for Dylan. ‘Bob thought only about having his name on a bill with John Lee Hooker, one of the great bluesmen,’ noted Shelton. ‘His elation soon soured as he sang for apathetic or noisy drunks and heard the carp
ing of jealous musicians.’ Dylan was also somewhat pissed off at the lack of attention he received from Shelton himself, who had spent much of Hooker’s offstage time at tempting to extract biographical information from the taciturn, introverted bluesman, then still unaccustomed to confiding in or relaxing around whites, however seemingly well-intentioned, let alone answering personal questions from them. (‘His painfully shy manner and his stammer,’ Shelton told his Times readers, ‘could give one the impression of inarticulateness. But only until he starts singing the blues.’) It wasn’t until Dylan was rebooked into Gerde’s Folk City the following September, this time as opening act for the old-timey Greenbriar Boys, that Shelton was sufficiently convinced by Dylan to champion him in the famous New York Times review which was reprinted on the sleeve of Dylan’s first LP.

  Hooker’s ‘rabbi’ on the folk scene was super-agent Albert Grossman, a legendary entrepreneur with two major qualifications for music-biz management: an economics degree (from the University of Chicago) and an informal grounding in child psychology. Grossman had started out booking the likes of Big Bill Broonzy and the black folk-singer Odetta into Chicago’s Gate Of Horn club, branched out into management with Odetta and Peter, Paul & Mary, and subsequently served on the board of governors of the Newport Folk Festival. Blossoming into one of the key rock tycoons of the ’60s, his client roster later expanded to include Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Paul Butterfield and The Band. Indeed, in Don’t Look Back, D.A. Pennebaker’s justly celebrated documentary film of Bob Dylan’s 1965 UK tour, the burly, pony-tailed Grossman virtually steals the movie from his client, methodically chewing up TV executives, journalists, hotel staff and anybody else unfortunate enough to get in his or Dylan’s way. Hooker describes Grossman as his ‘manager’ at that time, but Grossman seems to have restricted his activities on Hooker’s behalf to booking the bluesman onto the folk circuit which he knew so well, taking no interest in Hooker’s recording career or his R&B work. According to Robert Shelton, Grossman was famously vague about the precise nature of his relationships with artists: rather than categorically stating that he was ‘managing’ or ‘booking’ an act, he would simply murmur that he was ‘working with’ or ‘helping out’ or ‘advising’ whichever performer happened to be under discussion.