Raising the ‘patronage’ question inevitably opens yet another can of worms: that of the nature of the relationships between the ‘original’ Delta blues, the postwar Chicago-style electric-band music into which it mutated, and the ’60s-and-onwards blues-and-beyond rock which Chicago blues helped to inspire. A moderately illuminating parallel can be made by considering this relationship as a johnny-come-lately pop-culch equivalent to the neo-Romantic modernist primitivist movement132 manifest in the visual arts of the early part of this century.
In 1984, your correspondent was both sufficiently fortunate to have the opportunity to attend an exhibition entitled ‘Primitivism’ in Twentieth Century Art at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art; and sufficiently prescient to purchase its catalogue. It was a wonderful, magical, deeply enlightening exhibition, juxtaposing crucial works by key modernists – Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Moore, Klee, Giacometti et al – with the specific examples of tribal art which inspired them. The exhibition’s directors, William Rubin and Kirk Varnedoe, were meticu lous in the execution of their intention to avoid patronising or condescending to the sources of that inspiration, even down to the quotes surrounding the word ‘primitivism’: retaining the essential reference whilst distancing themselves from its more distasteful implications, handling it at arms’ length with metaphorical tongs. Nevertheless, the exhibition was still accused, by Marianna Torgovnick, of implicitly suggesting that, ‘Here is the primitive instance; here is the masterpiece, with the primitive absorbed and transcended.’
‘In other words,’ wrote Michael Tucker, paraphrasing Torgovnick’s contention, ‘was not this exhibition not simply another version of colonialism, a patronising acknowledgement of a mythical “Other” as an essential, yet nevertheless anonymous ingredient of the yeast of modernism?’ Those who have followed the blues on its journey into progressive and/or hard rock – or, indeed, African-American music on its broader and more complex route into becoming the mainstream popular music of much of the world – will find this debate a familiar one. Were not ’60s white bluesers, still pimply of visage and damp behind their hair-curtained ears, not praised to the skies for executing what were, in many cases, simply clumsy caricatures of the work of African-American masters? Did many of them then not mock or disparage the blues for its intrinsic limitations of form and content – not to mention individual bluesmen for their conservatism or foibles – as they ‘progressed’ into their brave new world of fuzzboxes, flower-power and rock operas?
Well, yes and no. Sure enough, Janis Joplin received more plaudits (not to mention more money) for her blunderbuss renditions of ‘Ball And Chain’ and ‘Piece Of My Heart’ than Big Mama Thornton and Erma Franklin ever did for originating the songs in the first place. Eric Clapton was for years routinely voted the world’s top blues guitarist. But the key point was that whilst ‘real’ blues artists progress or mature by going deeper into the music, into its musical and emotional detail, finding more and more nuances in the gaps between the lines and notes, their successors could move only outwards, using what they’d learned from the blues to explore other musical realms entirely. To them, the blues was a stepping stone, though an essential one. If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, for many of the rock musicians of the ’60s and after, that single step was the one they took into the blues. Their mistake was to assume that there was no more to the blues than that which they themselves were able to draw from it.
They just copy me, and there’s nothing I can learn from them.
Little Walter
However, before we leave the subject of Hooker’s pre-breakthrough critical status too far behind, it’s worth pointing out that he has never been renowned as what journalists consider an ‘easy interview’: a media-wise, self-packaging subject who is both willing and able to serve eager profilers a pre-digested version of his/her life and work. For that matter, neither was Howlin’ Wolf, but the grumpy giant was such an outsize personality that he was fun to describe even when he wasn’t being notably forthcoming.133 B.B. King, for his part, has always evinced an intense desire to reach out to others and explain himself, his worldview, his music and its meaning and context to anyone displaying even the faintest signs of empathy and interest; and the fluency, eloquence and personal charm which originally established him as a Memphis radio personality have made it comparatively easy for him to do so.134 And whilst Muddy Waters was neither as awe-inspiring a personality as Wolf nor as effusively articulate a spokesman for the blues community as B.B., he nevertheless managed to combine elements of both into a charismatic, dignified and magisterial/ambassadorial persona which rendered him a pleasure, as well as an education, to interview.
Whilst Hooker is celebrated amongst his intimates as a witty, genial and gregarious man, it’s equally undeniable that he is capable of being opaque and uncommunicative in the extreme towards those with whom he does not yet feel sufficiently comfortable to relax, share a joke and speak his mind. Nowadays, with the mantle of bona-fide ‘stardom’ firmly clasped around Hooker’s shoulders, misfired interviews still get written up and published, even though in some cases Hooker and his interlocutor barely seem to have been in the same room, let alone the same conversation.135 However, this is now and that was then: in those early ‘blues boom’ days, a musician’s ability to talk (as well as sing and play) himself into the front rank counted for a lot, and Hooker’s seemingly taciturn, introverted stance was not exactly a major promotional asset.
The archetypal ‘lone cat’ of the blues was Robert Johnson – the most mythically-correct bluesman who ever lived – but he was in no way unique in this respect: most of the prewar blues guys were itinerant soloists. The social and demographic shifts of postwar African America in general, and the mass urban migrations of the Delta diaspora in particular, rooted the bluesmen of the ’50s in bands and communities but Hooker, almost alone amongst the city bluesmen of his time, travelled solo, and performed with borrowed bands. In a famous and oft-quoted soliloquy delivered to the cameras of ITV’s South Bank Show in 1987, Eric Clapton perfectly defined the romantic appeal of the legend of the Lone Bluesman:
I felt, through most of my youth, that my back was against the wall and that the only way to survive was with dignity and pride and courage. I heard that . . . most of all in the blues, because it was always an individual. It was one man and his guitar against the world. It wasn’t a company, or a band, or a group; when it came down to it, it was one guy who was completely alone and had no options, no alternatives other than to sing and play to ease his pain.136
But few postwar bluesmen still actually lived and worked like that. On the road, they had their bands (albeit often stuffed into cramped, shagged-out vehicles); in the studio, they had producers to shape their work, studio musicians to augment or even replace their regular sidemen, and songwriters waiting in the wings with additional material should their own inspiration not suffice. Only the most successful, like B.B. King with his 300-shows-a-year itinerary, toured so much that they could barely be said to ‘live’ anywhere.
Hooker, of course, could sound ‘alone’ even with a full band pumping away behind him. There is more than a little irony in the fact that Hooker’s ’90s success has been built on collaborations – to the point where some inattentive listeners could have been forgiven for thinking that his full name is ‘John-Lee-Hooker-and’ – because for decades it was an article of faith among many hardcore fans that Hooker sounded best on his own; and amongst detractors (including Bernard Besman, who of all people should know better) that he was actually incapable of performing effectively with others. But no matter whether he was, on any given occasion, accompanied by a dozen musicians or none at all, Hooker’s performances are invariably one-man shows which take place against the backdrop of his own inner landscape. B.B. King, Muddy Waters and Buddy Guy – to name but three; we could cite dozens should we choose to do so – are essentially extrovert performers. They aim outwards; they take a show all the way to the audience. Ho
oker, by contrast, goes within: to his own still centre; in doing so, he takes the audience there with him, and at his centre, they find themselves. Hooker is thus not only a human exemplar of the most venerable traditions of the blues, but also of a mystical and spiritual tradition that is older still: far older than the blues, far older even than African-American Christianity.
He is a shaman.
The way he works is just like a preacher. Preachin’ the blues . . .
Charlie Musselwhite, interview with the author, 1991
You know what? If you ever listen to him in that song ‘Boogie With The Hook’ at his closing act, do it to you kinda sound like he’s preachin’ in there?
Rev. Robert Hooker, interview with the author, 1994
The only one who could ever move me . . . was the son of a preacher man.
Hurley & Wilkins on behalf of
Dusty Springfield and (subsequently)
Aretha Franklin, ‘Son Of A Preacher Man’
Forget your troubles and dance,
Forget your weakness and dance . . .
Bob Marley, ‘Them Belly Full (But We Hungry)’
John Lee Hooker was born and raised in the church. Indeed, his earliest and most formative musical, cultural and spiritual experiences came from the church, and from the preaching of his father, the Rev. William Hooker. He is, as it happens, not only the Son Of A Preacher Man, but also the brother of another, and the father of another still.
As John Lee’s second son, the Reverend Robert Hooker, and their former flatmate, harp virtuoso Charlie Musselwhite, observe above – and as we’ve already noted way back at the start of this book – the climax of Hooker’s stage act irresistibly evokes the transcendent fervour of charismatic Southern Baptism, wherein preacher and congregation alike are caught up in the ecstatic whirlwind of the descending spirit. In conventional Western religious services, the congregation are there to worship under the direction of their pastor, but the African-American ceremony goes further. It is rooted in the tradition of a fundamental, primal encounter with the powers that drive the universe, in which the participants invite transcendence, offering themselves up to the spirit they invoke in the knowledge that their offer will be, at least for the duration, accepted. It is about more than merely worshipping: it is about becoming, and about temporarily ceasing to be. It is the shamanic principle in action.
Who is the shaman? By way of introduction, our old friend The Concise Oxford Dictionary gives us, ‘priest or witch-doctor of class claiming to have sole contact with gods etc.’, whilst The Penguin English Dictionary offers, ‘priest-magician in primitive cultures’. Elsewhere, the shaman is variously described as priest and sorcerer, visionary and healer, and the shaman is indeed all of these; but as far as most anthropological sources are concerned, the shaman’s defining attribute is the ability to free his or her (and at the dawn of humanity it was almost always ‘her’) soul from the tethers of mundane existence.
Through study, sacrifice and ordeal, the shaman is one who has earned sufficient strength and wisdom to part the veils separating realities, to travel between this and other planes of existence, to contact the spirits and to return with them – ay, and what then? The shaman thus becomes, literally, a human gate or bridge between different realms of consciousness, if not different realms of existence. However, Mircea Eliade, the author of the magisterial Shamanism and Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, emphasizes that,
The specific element of shamanism is not the incorporation of spirits by the shaman, but the ecstasy provoked by the ascension to the sky or by the descent to hell: the incorporation of spirits and possession by them are universally distributed phenomena, but they do not belong necessarily to shamanism in the strict sense.137
‘First you lose control,’ incanted Patti Smith in her visionary ‘Horses’, ‘then you take control.’ The art of the shaman is the cultivated development of such virtuosic mastery of both the highest and most fundamental levels of individual consciousness that direct, deliberate control of the surface of consciousness can then be abandoned. The shaman loses one ‘self’ in order to contact and assume another, higher, self. Both possessed and possessing, yielding and summoning: the shaman is thus empowered to transform the experience of others, to transcend and to induce transcendence.
For most Westerners, the primary association evoked by the word ‘shaman’ is of an African or Native American (or Haitian, or Aboriginal) tribal mystic; but contemporary usage (and abuse) of that term actually originated with Russian anthropologists studying the Tungus people of Siberia, in whose language ‘saman’ means ‘one who knows’. It may be instructive at this point to consider, in the light of the extract from Julio Finn’s The Bluesman quoted earlier in this chapter, as well as my own description of a Hooker concert from the first chapter of this book, S.M. Shirikogoroff’s account of a Tungus shaman’s seance:
The rhythmic music and singing, and later the dancing of the shaman, gradually involve every participant more and more in a collective action . . . the tempo of the actions increases . . . when the shaman feels that the audience is with him and follows him he becomes still more active and this effect is transmitted to his audience. After shamanizing, the audience recollects various moments of the performance, their great psychophysiological emotion and the great hallucinations of sight and hearing they have experienced. They then have a deep satisfaction – much greater than that from emotions produced by theatrical and musical performance, literature and general artistic phenonomena of the European complex, because in shamanizing the audience at the same time acts and participates.
. . . or, indeed, Hooker’s own analysis of his performances, drawn from a mid-’70s interview:138
I watch them. Then I feel their mood with them. I move with them. I get them up and get to rocking with them, and after I get them going, I keep them going – higher and higher; I just don’t let them down. I take them in complete command . . . and when one or two of the crowd start moving, I start moving with them. And when they see me moving, they start to move. When I get into it, I feel good all over – higher and higher and higher; there’s no limit . . .
Hooker works on precisely these shamanic levels, to precisely these shamanic ends. His music is simultaneously repetitive and unpredictable, his voice moving freely as his guitar stays where it is. Performing a Delta staple like ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin”, he starkly illustrates this method by singing a melody which implies a standard three-chord change whilst the guitar riff obstinately remains on the ‘one’ chord. This trance-inducing effect is the staple resource of modern dance music from James Brown onwards: melodic variation atop harmonic and rhythmic repetition. Dance music of this nature may use Western instruments and vocabulary, but it operates according to an African grammar. African music, from the most traditional folk forms to the most lushly sophisticated urban pop, will operate like this: a groove will be set up, either on one chord or on a circular, infinitely repeatable riff, and the resources of that riff will be fully explored through improvisation before another riff is introduced and the musicians then move on to do the same for another section of the piece.
Such music creates joy and transcendence for some and unparalleled fear and loathing in others because it’s an utter affront to the basic tenets of Western rationalism: in other words, it disengages the body from the mind and the intelligence from the intellect. It stops you thinking, and starts you feeling. It creates an irrational ecstasy.
Hooker has long been acknowledged as the most African of all major blues singers. Nevertheless, he is unwilling to address or discuss the African aspects of either his music or its purposes: at least, with white boys he is, and certainly with this white boy. Asked if the Rev. William Hooker and the ‘respectable’ religious members of his community disapproved of the blues because they may have associated the music with the traditional African spiritual beliefs to which the Christianity of the time was unequivocally opposed, his response is disdainful. ‘Africans were a totally diff
erent type of people than the people from around here,’ he replies. ‘African people don’t speak good English; I suppose you know that. They didn’t consider theyselves part of us, the black people of Africa, they had no association with us in that way. Although they was black people, they was like Jews and Germans: they all white, but they different nationalities. Part from it come from Africa, but we sung different from them.’
If his questioner is sufficiently foolhardy to pursue the point beyond this rejection, he responds with crushing finality. ‘Well, I think you goin’ beyond my recognition. Maybe you read about it, but I can’t explain it to you.’ Quite understandably though, he is far less inhibited in the company of those he considers part of a more authentic peer group. ‘He’d talk about it with me,’ harpist/entrepreneur Chicago Beau once told this writer, ‘he’ll sit with me and say, “Sure, we African men.”’ ‘Quite understandably’ because, Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. DuBois notwithstanding, African-Americans of Hooker’s generation and background were not encouraged to cherish the ‘African’ in themselves. Indeed, the reverse held true: African culture and history were misrepresented, disdained and denied. In Western popular art from Tintin to Tarzan, it was the ‘Dark Continent’: depicted as a place of cannibalism, grass skirts, bones-through-noses and living in trees. For African-Americans, it was precisely that ‘African’ which impeded their full participation as ‘Americans’, which held them back, which was cited by white racists as the root of the ‘inferiority’ which justified their unjustifiable treatment. Thus African religious and spiritual values and rituals were mere ‘primitive superstitions’; light skin was superior to dark; ‘good’ hair was lank, fine, soft, Caucasian, whilst ‘bad’ hair was rough, coarse, nappy, African. Blond was beautiful, African was ugly. To call someone an African was dangerously close to an insult.
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