‘[Hollins] used to play, “I wisht I was a catfish, swimming in the deep blue sea,”’ says Hooker. ‘That song go way-way-way back, man. Muddy didn’t write that song; the first time I heard it was [Hollins]. Tony Hollins would play it when Muddy was a little kid. “Catfish”, he used to play that all the time, and another song which he give me was maybe a hundred years old. He give me “Crawlin’ King Snake”. I turned that around and made it different, but he give me that song. At that time there wasn’t no songwriters, there wasn’t no publishers, nothin’. They just made songs up in the cotton fields and stuff like this. It was just a song he made up and passed it on to me, so that made me the writer when I did it my own way. Now the song become so popular, everybody was doin’ it, the “Crawlin’ King Snake”. Everybody do’s that now.’
Among all but the most erudite blues buffs, Tony Hollins’ name is not exactly one with which to conjure. He recorded a mere handful of singles during the 1940s, and the two most durable compositions with which he is associated are most commonly attributed to others. ‘Crosscut Saw’, first recorded by Tommy McClellan – of whom more in a moment – was adapted by the Binghampton Blues Boys118 and credited to ‘R.G. Ford’; their recording in turn inspired Albert King’s, from which all subsequent versions, including those by the Groundhogs and Eric Clapton, were derived. Hollins cut the original ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ in 1941 – or rather, he sort of did: Big Joe Williams recorded a very similar ‘King Snake’ the same year – but up until very recently the song has generally been credited to Hooker. Listening now to Hollins’ slender body of work, and hearing it not only in the context of Hooker’s music but of the recorded legacy of the great Delta bluesmen who were Hollins’ contemporaries, he sounds a marginal figure indeed: almost all his sides are minor variants of his basic ‘King Snake’ template, his work neither deep nor broad. To child John, of course, Hollins was a revelation: the man who first opened the door into the realm which Hooker would explore for the rest of his life.
The underlying structures of much of Hooker’s early repertoire derive from the work of one of the biggest names in pre-war Chicago blues: Sonny Boy Williamson. Singer/harpist John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson should not be confused, though he often is, with another, better-known, harp virtuoso: Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, an older Delta-based performer who took on the ‘Sonny Boy Williamson’ name even before its original bearer was murdered in 1948. Miller, whom we’ll call ‘Sonny Boy Williamson II’ for clarity’s sake, hosted the King Biscuit Boy radio show for the pioneering Memphis station WDIA, cut a series of magnificent sides for Chess in the ’50s, toured and briefly resided in the UK in the early ’60s, and died back home in the Delta in 1965. The original Sonny Boy, for his part, recorded for Bluebird between 1937 and 1948, often in tandem with Big Joe Williams, and early hits of his which found their way into Hooker’s bag included ‘Decoration Day’, ‘Bluebird Blues’,119 ‘Bottle Up And Go’ and ‘Sugar Mam’. (Sonny Boy’s studio partner Big Joe Williams, incidentally, cut variants of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – copyrighted in his name, fortunately for him – and ‘Ground Hog Blues’, both of which subsequently became Hooker staples).
‘Bottle Up And Go’ and ‘Sugar Mama’ didn’t simply enter Hooker’s repertoire under their own colours. They also became templates for many of Hooker’s own creations. What’s truly fascinating, though, is that they seem to have arrived in Hooker’s songbook after a detour via the work of yet another near-forgotten Delta bard: Tommy McClennan.
He sang in a hard, keening high tenor not unlike a Robert Johnson without the shadows or the nuances, but it is his guitar-playing which foreshadows Hooker most eerily: in the insistent use of modal fills performed without a slide. Hooker’s guitar style is so defiantly personal that it comes as a shock to hear an earlier performer who sounds anything like him, but McClellan’s instrumental approach includes passages which suggest Hooker far more strongly than anything – apart from a few obvious ‘King Snake’ licks – in the recordings of Hooker’s actual mentor, Tony Hollins. When it is possible to make direct comparisons, as on the material McClennan and Hooker share with Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Williams, the McClellan sides sound almost like vague preliminary sketches for the subsequent Hooker versions. McClennan is more, but only a little more, than a historical curio: one of those likeable minor genre artists who enable archivists to join up a few more of the dots linking major figures. He landed up in Chicago at the tail-end of the first era of Chicago blues, cutting records for three years before World War II temporarily shut down the American record industry, and by the time the modern era commenced he was out of the game.
Born in 1908 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, McClellan was already performing his own personal variant of ‘Bottle Up And Go’ when he hit Chicago in 1939. The goodnatured Big Bill Broonzy took him under his wing, as he was wont to do when promising young singers arrived from Down Home, and advised him that the couplet ‘nigger and the white man playin’ seven-up/nigger beat the white man, scared to pick it up’, which McClennan was fond of inserting into ‘Bottle Up And Go’, was unlikely to go down too well with the locals. McClennan sang it anyway at his first big-city house party and ended up leaving via a first-floor window with the remnants of his guitar round his neck. (He nevertheless included this troublesome couplet in his recorded version, which suggests either that folks cut him more slack once he’d made a few records, or else that he’d started employing bodyguards for personal appearances.)
‘Bottle Up And Go’ came complete with a catchy guitar lick, a stomping danceable groove and a neat structure which divided the twelve-bar (or, in John Lee’s case, twelve-bar-ish) stanza into verse and chorus: socking home a different couplet each time and using the title as a punchline.120 It became one of the templates on which a significant slice of Hooker’s early repertoire is based. Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Sugar Mama’, especially the way MacClennan performed it, was a tautly powerful slow blues whose beat pulsed as remorselessly as your heart. It, too, became a prototype, providing the framework for Hooker’s own ‘Sally Mae’. Hooker recorded ‘Sugar Mama’ itself several times throughout his career, most recently on 1995’s Chill Out, but its echoes still ring whenever Hooker plays an open-tuned slow blues with anything even faintly resembling conventional changes.
Then there were Hooker’s home-grown specialities, both essentially deconstructed equivalents of ‘Bottle’ and ‘Mama’. The latter’s Hookerised twin was an open-ended, free-form slow blues which never (or hardly ever) changed chord: its avatar was ‘Wednesday Evening’, which Hooker recorded for the first of many times at an Elmer Barbee demo session a few months before his first encounter with Bernard Besman. And the former’s was, of course, The Boogie.
And those, plus a couple of cousins from the ‘Catfish Blues’ and ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ song families, were pretty much all that Hooker brought to the party when he first started recording. Conventional notions of composition would suggest that a man who could play four songs would record four songs, and that would be it. As it was, Hooker recorded well over a hundred sides in the year following the original ‘Boogie Chillen’ session, most of which have been released, and many of which are wonderful. So how did he do it?
John is John, and the way he play is John Lee Hooker, and if you don’t study the man’s music, you think he’s wrong. But as far as I’m concerned he’s not wrong, that’s John Lee Hooker . . . he’s playin’ John Lee. I mean: in the beginning of time, who wrote the four bars? If John Lee hadda come along, we probably wouldn’t have four bars, we’d’a had just any kind of bar: three-and-a-half bars, five: just as long as it fits. If the shoe fit, it’s comfortable. If it don’t fit, it’s not comfortable. That’s the way I think he feel about his music. That’s the way I feel about it, you know. I think I got advantaged by not takin’ my music in school, because I’d’a probably been hung up on this ‘he chang in’ too fast’ or ‘he not changin’ fast enough’ and all that stuff. I don’t pay
that no mind. As many records as he sold on ‘Boogie Chillen’, I go along with his changes [laughs].
Buddy Guy, interview with the author, 1993
And one thing [Will Moore] kept pounding into my head: play from the heart and the soul. Don’t think about no scales: twelve, sixteen and eight. Play the way you feel And I did that. But I also learned how to play with good timin’, with scales and bars. After I learned the way he taught me to play, it felt so good, people loved it so much that that was the way I did it. I can do it perfect, real perfect, but it wouldn’t be me. He said, ‘Just play until you just feel it in your heart and your head. Forget about the book, the scales’ . . . and I did that. And I really loved it. I can turn round and play scales, count it all, 1-2-3-4, 8, 12, 16 . . . I learned all of that, perfectly. I can do it. But when I get to feelin’ good, I can jump anywhere and don’t think nothin’ about it. That’s the way I am.
John Lee Hooker, interview with the author, 1991
From the point of view of an archetypal R&B producer of the ’40s or ’50s, committed to squeezing the maximum number of usable sides out of the minimum amount of studio time, the ideal performer would be one with a vast repertoire of distinctive original songs and the ability to perform each one consistently from take to take. Hooker was the exact reverse of that ideal: he knew comparatively few songs, and performed them differently each time. For Bernard Besman, this was a nightmare. ‘Out of the 250 records that I did with him,’ Besman claims, ‘there are at least twenty songs using the “Boogie Chillen” thing. It’s the same thing: all he’d do is change the words. If I [had] let him, he’d do “Boogie Chillen” or “Sally Mae” over and over again. He has the talent to do that; not many people could do that. But he wouldn’t remember what he did on the first song, or the second song. So that was frustrating.’
In William Gibson’s novel Idoru,121 there is a character whose short attention span makes him the perfect cyberspace researcher: he zaps intuitively from database to database, following connections apparent only to him. Technically, his concentration deficit is a disability; but he has found a context in which what might otherwise be a crippling flaw instead becomes a unique asset. Hooker, by the same token, has built his entire approach to music around the quirk which so infuriated Besman. In Totemism,122 Claude Lévi-Strauss observes that,
. . . so that pictorial academicism might feel secure, [the painter] El Greco could not be a normal person who was capable of rejecting certain ways of representing the world, but he had to be afflicted by a malformation of the eyeball, and it was this alone that was responsible for his elongated figures . . . by regarding the hysteric or the artistic innovator as abnormal, we accorded ourselves the luxury of believing that they did not concern us, and that they did not put in question, by the mere fact of their existence, an accepted social, moral or intellectual order.
Whether Hooker is a compulsive improviser whose vision drives him to reinvent a song every single time he performs it, or a musical naïf so scatterbrained and undisciplined that he cannot remember what he’s done from one moment to the next, is almost not the point. What matters is that, for Hooker, the feeling of the moment is all; and a song – any song – is simply an empty vessel waiting to be filled with that feeling.
And that feeling manifests itself through the body. In most music, the demands of the composition, the piece, assume the highest priority. In order to perform the piece correctly – or, in cases where ‘correctness’ is a less rigid notion, perhaps we should substitute the term ‘appropriately’ – the musician will use his or her body to manipulate the instrument so that it produces the required sounds. The sounds in question are the desired result, the instrument is the medium, and the body – through limb or digit movement, breath or whatever – is therefore the ‘servant’ of the piece or composition. In the case of John Lee Hooker, this process is reversed. The body acts to express the emotion, the ‘feeling of the moment’, and the instrument is there to express and to reflect that feeling. If the feeling dictates that Hooker should, at any given moment, strike a guitar string hard enough to make it ring a microtone sharp of ‘correct’ pitch – or so that an adjacent string to the one actually struck should sound out alongside it – then he will do so, and never think once about it, let alone twice. Or if he is singing a song, and has not extracted the necessary degree of meaning from a line, he will sing it again . . . and again, and again. Only then will he move on to the next line, and if this plays hell with some pedant’s notion of what the song structure ought to be – or if the musicians accompanying him start to panic and lose their nerve – then so be it. It’s not his problem. The feeling rules the body, the body rules the instrument, and the music is the result. The music is the servant of the feeling, as mediated firstly through the body, and secondly – via the body – through the instrument.
In his 1970 essay ‘Musica Practica’,123 Roland Barthes creates a distinction between two kinds of music: ‘the music one listens to, the music one plays’. Which is to say: music which is performed in order to be listened to, and music which is listened to only incidentally, because its primary purpose is the function which it fulfils for the performer. Regarding the latter, he writes:
The music one plays comes from an activity that is very little auditory, being above all manual (and thus in a way much more sensual) . . . with no other audience but its participants (that is, with all risk of theatre, all temptation of hysteria removed); a muscular music in which the part taken by the sense of hearing is one only of ratification . . .
In the blues, as in no other music; and the music of John Lee Hooker, as in that of no other bluesman, this distinction collapses. Hooker’s work takes a private music – ‘private’ in the sense of ‘personal’ rather than ‘secret’ – into a public sphere whilst retaining all aspects of the characteristic described by Barthes above.
By way of illustration, let’s take a detailed look at a specific Hooker performance: ‘Dark Room’, as recorded live in concert at New York’s Hunter College in February 1976 and most recently released as part of the Tomato Records double-CD Alone. It’s neither one of Hooker’s most celebrated songs – in fact it is, if the reader will forgive the oxymoron, quite spectacularly obscure – nor does it date from any of his generally acknowledged ‘classic’ periods. Its origins lay in a song called ‘Seven Days And Seven Nights’, which Hooker had recorded twice: first during the November ’64 London sessions with the Groundhogs, and again in August ’66 whilst cutting the Live At Cafe Au Go-Go album with Muddy Waters and his band. Its next metamorphosis occurred in November of 1970 when it was cut, as ‘Sittin’ In My Dark Room’, during the three-day San Francisco session which produced the ABC double-album Endless Boogie.
Endless Boogie’s version of this ominous, muted free-form slow blues was a team-handed affair: as well as a rhythm section (bassist Gino Skaggs and drummer Billy Ingram), Hooker was backed by two other guitarists (Steve Miller and Mel Brown) plus two pianists (Mark Naftalin and Cliff Coulter, respectively playing acoustic and electric instruments). Their accompaniment is subtle and sensitive – dark, roiling undercurrents of bass and piano, lit and pierced by sharp splinters of guitar – and they listen. Hooker sings as a man coming to terms with the departure of his lover: he sits weeping in his bedroom, and even when his friends stop by to visit, his emotions still overwhelm him to the point where he must abandon his guests so that he can grapple with his sorrow in his darkened bedchamber, alone. It is a fine, moody performance, but it somehow doesn’t go deep enough: it is not so much that Hooker doesn’t have his heart in it, rather that the piece has not yet grown large enough to accommodate that heart.
All of this had changed by the time of the Hunter College show. Hooker was performing solo on electric guitar: without the support of a band, but also without the limitations of one. He opens the show with a brief, hushed version of ‘Maudie’, here retitled ‘I Miss You So’. ‘Dark Room’ itself is preceded here by a letter-perfect performance of
‘(Bad Like) Jesse James’ (aka ‘I’m Mad’ or ‘I’m Mad Again’), one of those rare Hooker songs which, like ‘Boom Boom’, is graven in marble and almost never changes from one performance to another. In this one, over a single rolling riff which repeats and resolves, repeats and resolves, over and over again, Hooker tells the story of how he was cuckolded by his best friend, and the awful revenge he plans to exact upon that treacherous friend. The torrential litany of threats – casually recited in Hooker’s badman voice: hard, dry, uninflected – which climaxes the piece can only be described as ‘gangsta blues’. If Quentin Tarantino teamed up with Ice-T, they could scarcely better it:
I got three boys,
Do my dirty work,
You don’t see me,
I’m the big boss,
I do’s the payin’ off,
After the job is did,
They may cut you,
They may shoot you,
They may drown you,
I don’t know,
An’ I don’t care . . .
’Cause I’m maaad,
An’ I’m baaad. . .
Then he goes into detail. Four are going down to the river, but only three are coming back. The victim is going to be gagged, and bound hand and foot, and held underwater – just hold the cat there, don’t let him up, he been talkin’ too much. Hooker even gives us the bubbles of air – plupluplupluplup – which signify his cuckolder’s dying breath.
Boogie Man Page 47