Boogie Man (7 page)

The idea of John Lee Hooker as ‘the bully of the town’ seems somewhat unlikely. He was small for his age and tormented by a chronic stutter; his only known
attempt at a macho act was to slap a midget, and that particular exercise in boyish swaggering ended rather less than gloriously. Singer/guitarist Jimmy Rogers, a veteran of the great Muddy Waters
bands of the ’50s and a Chess Records hitmaker in his own right during that time, grew up around the Vance area and counted Hooker and harmonicist Snooky Pryor among his playmates. Rogers
paints a slightly different picture: ‘Oh, he was just a youngster just like me and Snooky [Pryor] was, just a young country boy . . . we would play marbles together, play ball . . . there
weren’t nothin’ special goin’ on in his life at all, nothin’ different from any other youngster back then. We was kids then, and he was just a regular guy. There
weren’t nothin’ special about him that I know of. We just met up, and Snooky knew him before I did. He didn’t mean nothin’ to me; he was just another boy. It’s been so
long since I been in Vance; I was a kid then and I’m 68 now. I know he’s a good four, five, six years older than me, at least five.’ It’s hard to imagine ‘the bully of
the town’ spending much time playing marbles and ball with kids half a decade his junior without standing out from the crowd. Hooker and Rogers were reunited in Chicago during the 1950s;
curiously, while they remained friendly right up until Rogers’ death in 1998 and occasionally spoke on the phone, and Hooker has clear and affectionate memories of their childhood encounters
– ‘I knowed him from my little childhood days down there. We’d shoot marbles together’ – Hooker remains adamant that he has no such recollection of Snooky Pryor, who
Rogers claims introduced them.

The ‘bully of the town’ notion definitely doesn’t stand up. If anyone was the family desperado, it was Hooker’s brother Dan, who later killed his wife, and then walked
ten miles to turn himself in. ‘I met Uncle Dan,’ recalls Archie. ‘The first time I met him, he was in prison. Doin’ ten years for killin’ his wife. Straight ten years:
no
parole. I was about five, six. My dad took me down. He was at Parchman, Mississippi. Short, heavy-set man. Cookin’, made trustee. But his violence had to be provoked,
because in the process of makin’ trustee, he carried a gun. If a guy was escapin’, he wouldn’t shoot. So that mean for him to really get mad, to hurt somebody, someone had to push
him. That mean a woman had to push him. John always said he didn’t have to fight, they always took care’a him. My dad said John was always fragile, never was one to want to be a
fighter. He was always kindhearted, and I’m thinkin’, basically, that’s what it is now. John’s not a fighter. That ain’t the way he was raised. He don’t believe
in it. My dad didn’t. Unless you pushed him. That’s why his brothers took care of him. They didn’t want him to turn the other cheek. They was tough, they would fight . . . deep
down inside, he was more of a minister’s son [than the others]. He might’ve sung the blues for relief, or for money, because you can’t make a lot of money singing spirituals, but
deep down inside he always had God in his heart. John may have ran away, true, but he ran away from poverty.’

According to Archie, there were other pastimes, too: ‘Things like stealin’ a neighbour’s chickens. [John Lee] said, “We couldn’t steal granddad’s
chickens”, cause he
counted
’em, but you’d go out and get a neighbour’s chickens.’ He didn’t want to do the fields, and him and all the boys, they had
nothin’ else to do, so that was they entertainment. They started like . . . his music really was his turnaround.’

John Lee could conceivably have stayed down on the farm, working in the fields, singing in church and perhaps following his father into the ministry, acquiring some schooling – the year
before he was born, the state of Mississippi had finally gotten around to instituting a public education policy – and raising a family of his own to work the land in their turn. Instead, a
chance encounter was to change his life. An itinerant bluesman named Tony Hollins took a powerful shine to John’s sister Alice, and soon he was coming round to court her. He
ended up making a bigger impression on his adored one’s little brother than he did on Alice herself.

‘Oh, I loved him so much, couldn’t he play guitar! I was hangin’ round him like a hungry dog hang around a bone. I was just a little kid, seven, eight. He recorded, but I
can’t think of
what
he recorded. Last I heard of him, he was a barber in Chicago. Whether he’s still around or gone, I don’t know, but anyway he got rid of the first guitar
he had, an old Silvertone. It wasn’t no heck of a guitar, but it
was
a guitar, and that was heaven to me because I had never had no guitar. It could have had three strings, but it was
a guitar. I never know what happened to that guitar that Tony give me, but anyway we used to sit on the porch on the pasture by the woods, with the cows and stuff like that with my sister, and he
would play for us. One day he said, “Hey kid, I got a guitar for you.” I said okay, and that was my first guitar.’

It’s not hard to second-guess Hollins’ reasoning. Giving an old, worn-out guitar to John meant that he could send the youngster off on his own to practice, and – once the young
gooseberry was safely distracted and out of the way – enjoy some precious time alone with the loved one. The acquisition of the guitar created an immediate problem with the loving but stern
Reverend William Hooker. ‘Finally, you know, I went to play guitar,’ Hooker reminisces. ‘Had an old piece of guitar and be bangin’ on it.’ The main reason that Tony
Hollins had to lurk by the front porch when he came by to see Alice was because of Rev. Hooker’s disapproval of his reckless, hard-travelling, blues-singing ways. Reluctantly, William Hooker
allowed John to keep the guitar, as long it never crossed the threshold of the family home. ‘I couldn’t play it in the house, because . . . I had to keep it out in the barn. All the
time I was pluckin’ on it, and my daddy called it the Devil. He said, “You can’t bring the Devil in this house.” They all feel like it devil music back then. They call blues
and guitar and things the Devil’s music. That was just the way they thought. Not only my
father,
everybody
thought that. The white and the black ministers, they
thought it was the Devil’s music.’

To the Reverend Hooker, it must indeed have seemed like that. Tony Hollins didn’t stick around very long, but his beat-up old guitar did. The second young John Lee got his hands on the
discarded instrument, whatever interest he may have had in his schooling went right out of the window. ‘When I was a kid comin’ up, I would pretend I was goin’ to school and hide
out in the woods with my old guitar. When the other kids come out of school, I come back along with them like I’d been to school. I hadn’t been to school for a long time, and then they
caught me and used to whup me and beat me.’ For John Lee, the choice was absolutely clear-cut. ‘You never knew this, I’m a very, very wise person. I’m a very good songwriter
in the blues, but I never got education because I had two choices. Stay, go to school and get a good education, stay down in Mississippi and be a farmer the rest of my life and never be a musician;
and I took the choice of leavin’, comin’ North and being a musician. In my mind, I was very smart. I wouldn’t have been a musician, living in Mississippi, farming, sharecropping.
I had two choices: going to school, and become a well-known whatever – I never would have been known just working the rest of my life in Mississippi or wherever – or take off and get
famous, which is what happened.’

The Hooker boys were growing up. Archie Hooker remembers the boyhood tales told him by his father. ‘My daddy told me about how when they was growin’ up they would swim in the creek,
and my daddy was a moonshine maker, they would make corn whiskey. “I made John drunk once – he was just a little boy – from white lightnin’.” Down in the woods, they
would go down to the still and let him sample. “That’s how you could tell how good it was. If it made him drunk, it was good.” My dad was a little bit older than Uncle John, just
a couple of years. Not a whole lot, but they was real close.’ John Lee, too, remembers his elder brother’s homebrew
experiments. ‘He was making home-brew in a
little cabin, and the stuff was good, too. We’d cap it, bag it and take it to a party one night, and I had it on my back and the thing goes to bustin’, beer got warm, explodin’.
He made the corn liquor too, same thing as whiskey, made outta corn . . .’

Needless to say, this too contravened Rev. Hooker’s house rules; it’s as well that he never found out what his sons were up to in the little cabin out the back. ‘Oh yeah!
Ooohh!
Never
be caught with a bottle. The
Devil
in the bottle! It’s funny, but it’s true. The Devil in the bottle. Anything with alcohol, the Devil puts it
there.’

In many ways, the Reverend’s hard-nosed attitude to his son’s musical ambitions backfired. If he had allowed John to play his guitar in the house, John might well have stayed in
Mississippi. On the other hand, he might not. ‘I could have stayed home and played, but there wasn’t no producers, radio stations and record companies. Weren’t none of that in
Mississippi. I could have stayed down there and played and gotten real good, like so many down there right now are real good, but they never come to be a star because there’s nothin’
there. I could have stayed there like you say. You right. If they ever let me stay there and play, I could’ve become a grown-up musician, a real good musician, but there’s nothing down
there like producers, managers, record companies, booking agencies could’ve heard me and discovered me. The country people could’ve discovered me, but . . . I was very wise. I was
different from any of my family, as night and day. I was just . . . I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em. The rest of ’em grew up, got educations, stayed down there
. . . they all gone now. But from twelve or fourteen I wanted to be a city boy, a musician. I wanted to explore my music. I were very humble, very mellow, very nice; I were raised very good, to be
a Christian and respect everybody, love people. But it wasn’t what I wanted in Mississippi. I said I’d never reach my goal livin’ there, goin’ to school,
sharecroppin’, come home from the fields . . .’

Hooker takes considerable pride in his lack of schooling. In a sense, he’s absolutely right to do so – after all, how many illiterate millionaires are there,
anyway? – but in the short term, it certainly made his life harder. He won’t concede the point without an argument, nor – for that matter – even
with
an argument. To
Hooker, his illiteracy is what provides him with the sensitivity to sonic detail and emotional nuance which he needs to make his music, and he defends it fiercely. ‘I see people right today
got college educations, all kinds of different degrees, can’t even get a job. Back then too, they couldn’t get a job. It wouldn’t have made, I feel, too many difference. I had to
work my way up, do little jobs, until I got to the big man who could open the door for me because I
know
I had the music. I
know
I had the talent. I
know
I was good. I knew it,
but I knew I had to work up to find someone to open that door for me to come in. I was knockin’ on the door, but wasn’t nobody there to
say
, “Come in.” No matter how
much education I didn’t have, that book education didn’t have what was in
here
’
–
he taps his chest – ‘and in
here
’ – he taps
his head. ‘I could’ve been a professor, but I repeat myself to you and to whoever read this book after I’m gone: you can
not
get what I got, out of a book. You got to have a
talent.

‘I never change, and I won’t change. When I did “The Healer”, the first take was it. Live with the band. The first take was the best one. We did two, but we played it
over and over and decided that the first take was it. I can train my voice directly to whatever they play. I can fit my voice into anything, directly like a lock and key, come out with the right
words and bars, just lock right in there, automatic. No schoolin’, no readin’, because I don’t have that. But I have the talent. Let me put it this way. Ray Charles, for instance,
and Stevie Wonder, they don’t read and write ’cause they can’t see, right? But both of them are genius.’ Against such rock-solid conviction, though, it cuts very little ice
to point out that both Charles and Wonder taught themselves to read and write fluent Braille. ‘Yeah, right,’ Hooker
grudgingly concedes. ‘Ye-e-e-e-s. But they
can’t see. I can see, but . . . I don’t believe in no
paper
. Take your paper, stick a match to it. My paper’s right in
here
, and in
here
. I lay down at night,
and a song will come to me. I can be talkin’ to you, and you can say things, and I can make a song out of it.’

As John Lee was reaching his adolescence, serendipity struck again, this time in fairly baleful disguise: Rev. Hooker and the former Minnie Ramsey decided to split up. John never learned why,
and he knew better than to ask. ‘They weren’t
involved
; kids can tell that. We’d know when they was arguin’, we’d see it, but we couldn’t get in and say,
“You stop it.” But we knew what was goin’ on, that they weren’t getting along. I repeat, we didn’t get into they business. We knew that they was arguin’ about
something that wasn’t right, but we didn’t know who was right and who was wrong. They were very strict on kids in them days. We was raised better: my sisters wasn’t even allowed
to date until they was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.’

In her mid-fifties, Minnie Hooker found herself a new man. He was a local sharecropper named Will Moore, originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, and – like Rev. Hooker – some ten or
twelve years Minnie’s senior. As might be expected in the days before ‘family meetings’ and ‘quality time’, John Lee remains unclear about exactly when and where Moore
and Minnie first met, or the precise circumstances under which their relationship began. ‘Kids at that time didn’t have their nose into the old peoples’ business, like it is now.
Kids in them days, if they put they nose into they parents’ business, they was told that they get a whuppin’ like they never had in they life, you know. They didn’t allow them to
sneak around finding what old people was doin’ and what they was up to, stuff like that. They was more stricter on kids; they were raised better. We was raised to be obedient to old people,
say
yes-ma’am
and
no-sir
. Not yes and no, but yes-
ma’am
and no-
sir
. And mind our business and stay out of theirs. That’s why I don’t know how
they met.’