Boogie Man Read online

  So Mississippi, after all, made many people, but only one John Lee Hooker. Rather, Mississippi provided the wherewithal for John Lee Hooker to make himself. During his first fifteen or so years, Hooker took three key decisions which set him on a collision course with all the prevailing values of his family and community; he stood by those decisions and received validation beyond his wildest dreams. At a time when most people are still struggling to discover who they are, Hooker knew not only who he was, but who he wanted to be. Like all great bluesmen, Hooker is his own greatest creation, and the creation without which none of his other creations would have been possible. The ‘self-made man’ can be found somewhere near the front of the Great Book of Facile Truisms (right next to the notion that ‘you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’, in fact), but Hooker fulfils it to the nth degree. The self he chose to make is that of a man supremely fitted to sing and play the blues, and virtually little else. After all – as Henry Rollins asks – what would John Lee Hooker be doing if he wasn’t singing the blues?

  If he had decided to play the game through strictly on the hand he was dealt, he would have lived and died a Delta sharecropper and nobody outside his community would ever have heard of him. What would he have had if, even without his music as the spur, he had still headed for the city? A lifetime of the kind of dead-end jobs he plied in the various cities before his artistic breakthrough: janitor, usher and so forth. The kind of jobs a man does when he has neither the physique or inclination for hard manual labour, nor the education for anything else. He could conceivably have sung gospel – which would, at least, have pleased his preacher father – but his extreme distaste for what he came to perceive as the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of the ostentatiously devout would surely have precluded that. John Lee Hooker would not be John Lee Hooker if he wasn’t singing the blues. And the blues he sings is the blues that only he can sing.

  When his first hit record ‘Boogie Chillen’ was released in late 1948, it fitted easily into a burgeoning market for downhome blues. Two years earlier, the Texan bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins had bucked the existing trends by enjoying a surprise ‘race’ hit with ‘Short-Haired Woman’; one year after that Muddy Waters – a Delta-raised, Chicago-based near-contemporary of Hooker’s – had done likewise with ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’. Both records were deep-country blues with only the faintest discernible urban gloss but, by comparison with ‘Boogie Chillen’, they were downright conventional. Both used a standard twelve-bar blues structure (though Muddy, characteristically, dropped one bar in each verse) and each boasted the cleanest and clearest recorded sound that the impecunious independent record companies of the time could manage.

  ‘Boogie Chillen’, however, definitely proved that there was something new under the sun. Its insistent, droning one-chord vamp, driven by an obsessive, impatient foot-tapped beat as impossible to resist as a ’flu bug, harked back to the rural prehistory of the blues, a style so archaic that it seems to predate even the earliest blues recordings that can be found today. At the same time, it was contemporary and urban in a way that the Hopkins and Waters records weren’t: it seemed to crackle with electricity. Hooker’s guitar and voice were recorded with a rough, distorted electric edge, his pounding feet reverberated with the hard slap of city pavements. This was back-porch, fish-fry, house-party country blues adapted to the accelerated pace and claustrophobic ambience of the big city. The lyrics told two linked stories: one of a youth defying his parents in order to live the rockin’ life; the other of a country boy hitting the big town and deciding that it was good. Both stories were Hooker’s own: the song was an empowering parable of the experience of the thousands upon thousands of Southern migrants who had established their foothold in the big Northern cities, but the record provided the sonic metaphor for that experience. Even if you didn’t listen to the words, the record itself told you that the people of the Delta had come to the big industrial cities and become part of them without compromising the fundamentals of who they were.

  On one level ‘Boogie Chillen’ was an extraordinarily simple record: a one-man show with zero chord changes, repetitive lyrics and little melody. On another, it was a work of sheer genius in which one man’s personal story deftly encapsulated the collective experience of a community in the throes of profound and far-reaching social change. Plus – in the finest traditions of what was, a little later, to become rock and roll – it had a great beat and you could dance to it. To call ‘Boogie Chillen’ a ‘hit’ is actually an understatement. Hopkins’ and Waters’ records were ‘hits’ by the standards of the time: ‘Short-Haired Woman’ sold somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 records, and ‘Can’t Be Satisfied’ did slightly better than that. ‘Boogie Chillen’ was a smash: it sold around a million copies. It was the record that John Lee Hooker, 31 years old at the time it was recorded, had spent more than two-thirds of his life preparing to make. Or rather, he had spent more than two-thirds of his life becoming the only man who could have made it.

  To choose one single mission in life and methodically unfit yourself for all else is a demonstration of the deepest, most profound faith in oneself and the promptings of one’s inner voice. To stay with that course when it seems like it’s getting you nowhere is either folly of near-suicidal proportions, or the sign of the truly dedicated. The point here is that John Lee Hooker didn’t choose to sing the blues because it was a cool career move or because he had a prophetic vision of having his music featured in TV commercials, but because singing the blues completes him, realises him, soothes him, arouses him . . . the blues is John Lee Hooker’s key not only to the highway, but to the universe. It is his means of satisfying that most powerful of all human urges: to find a means of comprehending the world around him and interpreting it to others. He does so in his own terms, through his own vision. That vision was formed in Mississippi, and has never really changed. Hooker’s own inner Mississippi travelled with him wherever he went, his own unique personal property: a Mississippi of the mind which sustained and forever defined the man whom he chose to become; a Mississippi in which the weeping scars of both the childhood Mississippi he left behind and the real, contemporary Mississippi which exists in his, and our, present have healed.

  If this book could be boiled down to one sentence . . . I’d be a fool to admit it. But if, and only if, it could, that sentence would run: John Lee do not do, he be. In fact, he do as little as possible; but he be all that an artist in the twentieth century can be. His gift to us is not so much his music – monumental though that music is – but the sensibility that created that music, a sensibility which gives us the ultimate gift: a new way to see ourselves, and to experience ourselves. A new way to understand and, finally, to live with ourselves.

  Chris Blackwell, the Anglo-Jamaican enterpreneur who founded Island Records and forever changed the course of popular music by promoting Bob Marley & The Wailers to an international audience, used to be fond of saying that ‘there are no facts in Jamaica’. In impeccably Jamaican style, this remark is capable of sustaining a considerable variety of interpretations. It could mean, for example, that in a society which places little value on the lives of the majority of its people, much of their existence and experience takes place away from official scrutiny, unrecorded as formalised data, but preserved as folklore and collective memory. It can also mean that the region’s ostensible political culture, and its accompanying rhetoric, bears little relation to the daily lives of its citizens, much less their inner lives. Or that, in a community which sustains a hidden world of mystical and spiritual experience behind, below and beside its orthodox religious life, anything can happen. Or even simply that only the initiated know what’s really going on, and that even if outsiders are capable of asking the right questions – i.e. questions that make sense to those questioned – the answers cannot be guaranteed to make sense to the outsider. The hidden (African) world which shares Mississippi’s 300-odd square miles with the mundane, statistical
world of factuality is, to shoplift an aphorism from Carlos Castenada, a ‘separate reality’.

  All of which adds up to this: that of course there are ‘facts’, but these facts explain comparatively little of what actually goes on in a culture which is, despite increasingly widespread literacy, primarily an oral one. Mississippians of African descent have little faith in so-called ‘objective’ reality: ‘facts’ tend to be part of outside descriptions of their lives; accounts of who they are into which their input has rarely been sought, and rarely accepted when proffered. So they replace these imposed facts with their own, and the distinctions between ‘truth’ and ‘folklore’ tend to blur until the distinction becomes all but meaningless. At best, it is irrelevant. This is as true of Mississippi as it is of Jamaica: Mississippi is old country, secret country, deep country. In whitebread terms, popular American mythology demands that the nation’s moral centre should coincide with its geographical centre: amidst fields of waving Midwestern corn, where adorable tow-headed children with freckles, accompanied by appropriately cute pets, forever chase baseballs and fish in the creek. This is, after all, where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two introverted Jewish kids from the decidedly unlovely urbs of Cleveland, Ohio, chose to place the adoptive home of Superman, the American saviour from the stars. Nevertheless, the secret heart of America is located in the South: for the descendants of those who involuntarily became African-Americans, it’s where the unhappy story of their lives on this continent began, and the Mississippi Delta is the wounded heart of that South. Mississippi was the hardest of hardcore Jim Crow.

  African slaves were first imported en masse into Mississippi in the 1830s, around the time that the Native American Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes were finally dispossessed. The slaves’ first task was the clearance of massive tracts of forest in order to render the land arable; their second to pick the cotton which briefly made Mississippi, in the period immediately prior to the Civil War, the wealthiest state in the Union. After the war, it became the poorest, and it shares with Alabama the dubious distinction of emerging from the Civil War as the most racist state in the Union. The worst thing that could happen to a slave would be to be ‘sold down the river’ from Virginia or Maryland, comparatively less brutal only insofar as the condition of slavery is at all quantifiable, to Mississippi or Alabama, whose plantations have been comparable only to ‘prisons run by sadists’. It had the richest soil and the poorest people in the nation, and it still does today. The most-famous by-product of the Civil War was the end of legal slavery and its eventual replacement by the various bits of segregationist legislation which came to be known as the ‘Jim Crow’ laws, specifically designed to reproduce slavery as closely as possible despite its technical abolition. It may seem surprising that Mississippi was rarely the first state to opt for formal adoption of each new chunk of Jim Crow; this was no indication of any comparative liberalism, but the exact reverse. In Mississippi, the substance of those laws was already common practice and there was no immediate or pressing need for their formal enshrinement in law. The etiquette of oppression crystallized into an obscene and elaborate dance: blacks and whites walked the same streets, but in different worlds. Equality under the law – or, indeed, anywhere else – wasn’t even a theory. In any case, ‘law’ was pretty much for whites only: the black experience of it was the receiving end. They had to make do with the informal protection of the local plantation boss, who would look after his workers – provided that they were in conflict with other blacks rather than with whites – simply because he needed their labour. The lives of blacks were not considered to hold any intrinsic value whatsoever. Lynching remained legal there until 1938.

  ‘People would get killed, beat up, shot, out in the country,’ John Lee Hooker remembers. ‘It wasn’t such a thing as the po-lice could be right there. The po-lice would get shot and killed. Your boss who owned all the land would take care of all his people. He would come out with the sheriffs, and they’d be a day gettin’ out there. It ain’t like it is now, police there in a moment or a flash if something go wrong and someone get hurt or beat up, get killed. Police right here. You way out in the country, the closest thing be the sheriff in one of those towns, and you couldn’t get to a phone, somebody had go get him. It was just olden days, you know. Nothin’ happen in a flash. Black people, Chinese people, Spanish: they wasn’t important at all. They didn’t count Spanish people as white, they counted ’em right along with us and Chinamen. There was just a very few Chinamen was there, but a lotta Spanish people. We all lived in the same area, in the same houses, shared the same things. So they had to live under the same gun that the blacks lived under. That’s the way it was.’

  There was no way, says Hooker, to work around the system. ‘It was just that way, and we never thought it would change. But people had faith that one day it would change, and it did, but we never thought it would change so soon. It was a long, long time.’ By the time he or she was five or six, any black child living in the South would have already learned how he or she was supposed to act around white people. ‘They taught you that when you had the ability to talk. Your parents taught you what you had to do and what you couldn’t do. They [whites] taught they kids not to fool with us, and they taught our kids not to fool with them, so we knowed. We stayed on our own territory. My dad, we had enough land so we didn’t have to fool with them. We couldn’t mix, you know. It was pretty rough and pretty hard. I was fortunate enough to get out of it when I was that age. I was very aware of what it was, what it was like. We had no contact at all, but I knew stuff was going on. I knew some black people did get into lots of trouble, but we knew what to do and not to do; my daddy would tell us. He told me a million things. I can’t repeat just what they said, but roughly: you just got to stay in your place. You can’t do that, you can’t do that. I can’t tell you just what he said – this word and that word – but he said, “You can not mess with those people.” He kept pounding it into our heads. We knew that, we see’d that. Everybody would be in they own place.’

  Except that John Lee Hooker decided that he wasn’t going to stay in his.

  A certain amount of confusion exists around the precise place and date of John Lee Hooker’s birth; much of it created by Hooker himself. He’s always cited his birthday as 22 August, but the year has been variously reported as 1915, 1917, 1920 and 1923. For a while, Hooker was insistent that he was born in 1920, rather than the more commonly cited (and accurate) 1917. ‘We all was born with a midwife, which was not in a hospital. We had our records in a big old bible, our parents did, they might not have put it in a courthouse.’ Even if they had done so, it would make no difference: almost all records were destroyed in a fire which consumed the county courthouse in 1927. As it is, surviving state records contain no mention of anyone by the name of John Lee Hooker. ‘My parents, they might have been the same. I know my birthdate – August 22, 1920. I grew up knowin’ that, but they birthday I don’t know. They go way, way, way back. My mother was born in Glendora, Mississippi, and my father was born there too.’

  More recently, Hooker has recovered from the spasm of age paranoia that struck him on the eve of the release of The Healer, and led him to rewrite his personal history in order to lop those three years from his age. Nowadays, he cheerfully owns up to having been, after all, born in 1917. Not that it made a hell of a lot of difference to most people that he then claimed to be 69 rather than 71 years old, but nevertheless the John Lee Hooker of today has nothing – or, at any rate, very little – to hide.

  Hooker has always given his place of birth as Clarksdale, Mississippi, the nearest urban centre of any significant size. ‘That was my town that we would go to,’ as he puts it. ‘We would say, “Well, we from Clarksdale”, because that’s where [Reverend Hooker] did all his business, buy the groceries. Every weekend we would get supplies from Clarksdale, and we would go there. We run out to the candy store, get back on the wagon and go back to the country.’ In fact he was born out in the country on his fat
her’s farm, approximately ten miles south of the city. ‘It was close to Highway 49. It went to Tutwiler and Clarksdale and Memphis,’ Hooker remembers. ‘There were many songs wrote about that Highway 49. We didn’t stray too far from that.’ ‘Clarksdale,’ blues singer Bukka White used to say, ‘is just a little old small town, but a lotta good boys bin there.’ Bessie Smith, the diva of the ‘classic’ blues of the ’20s and ’30s and according to Hooker and not a few others ‘one of the greatest blues singers ever been alive’, died there; John Lee’s younger cousin Earl Hooker, generally acknowledged as one of the finest Chicago guitarists ever to pick up a slide, claimed it as his home-town, as did Ike Turner and harmonicist/vocalist Junior Parker. The unofficial capital of the Delta, it’s the third largest city in the state and even today, after successive waves of northward migration have carried away its best, brightest and most ambitious youth, it boasts a population of over 20,000.

  Glendora is a tiny hamlet some twenty-five miles along Highway 49 from Clarksdale: it earns its place in the blues history books as the birthplace of Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, best known as the second of the two major singer/harmonicists who used the name Sonny Boy Williamson. John Lee’s mother, the former Minnie Ramsey, was born there in 1875; his father, William Hooker, a decade or so earlier. The Civil War wasn’t ‘history’ yet – in some parts of the South, it still isn’t – and the shadow of slavery lay heavy across both their births.