Boogie Man (9 page)

‘Burnin’ Hell’ was a song Hooker first recorded in 1949, at the very outset of his career. Set to the remorseless, foot-stomping beat of Will Moore’s
primal boogie, it takes as its point of departure the line quoted above, which first cropped up on record as the second verse of Son House’s ‘My Black Mama (Part 1)’, which House
originally recorded in 1930. Its folk origins are undisguised, but both its form and its agenda are uniquely Hooker’s. Accompanied only by the piercing harmonica of Eddie Burns –
originally from the neighbouring community of Dublin, Mississippi – Hooker chants his credo of defiance to the church and its philosophy of endurance on earth to earn rewards in heaven. But
the song is no simple hymn to secular values, no straightforward rejection of the spiritual life: in its own way, it is an affirmation. In its central section, Hooker goes down to the church, and
falls down on his knees. He asks the preacher – ‘Deacon Jones’, the folkloric archetype of the black divine – to pray for him. He prays all night long, and having thus paid
his respects, in the morning he goes on his way freed from the constraints of belief, but a believer nonetheless.
‘
Ain’t
no hell!
Ain’t
no hell!
’, he
shouts triumphantly; even if there is a hell for others, it can no longer claim him. He has traded the promise of salvation for freedom from damnation; thus liberated, he can make his own way in
the world. It is one of the most powerful works in his extensive catalogue and – revisionist though the notion may be – I’d argue that the 1970 remake (recorded with the late Alan
Wilson, of the blues-rock band Canned Heat, replacing Burns on harp) – is more powerful still: if only because, during the two decades which separate the recordings, the original
version’s slight tentativeness has been burned away by Hooker’s increased confidence in both his hard-earned artistic powers, and in the validity of his philosophy. In purely musical
terms, it is a perfect example of Hooker’s ability to link the deeply traditional with the startlingly radical; while its content demonstrates how, time and time again, he can dig deep into
his personal history to produce a universal metaphor for the
contradictions of belief. It is where the adult John Lee replies to his father, restating both his challenge and his
love. Finally, it is yet another variation on a perennial Hooker theme: the need to respect one’s past whilst still reserving the right to define one’s own values, write one’s own
future, and find one’s own way in the world.

So Moore’s notion of a loving and compassionate Supreme Being displaced, in John’s vision, Rev. Hooker’s vengeful Old Testament deity; just as the Rev. Hooker himself was
replaced in John’s life by Will Moore. In other words, having visualized God in Rev. Hooker’s image, John remade him in Will Moore’s. And it is Will Moore’s Supreme Being in
whom John Lee continues, to this very day, to believe. ‘As years go by, I learned more and more about the world. The world growed, and I growed with the world and learned more about the
world. When I was in Mississippi, I was strictly in a spiritual world. When I was with Will Moore and my mother, my mother was spiritual, but she didn’t object to me playing the blues. I was
restricted to a lot of things I couldn’t do there, but when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I filled up with all these things. I could do what I wanted to do.’

And thus, armed with everything which Will Moore could teach him, John Lee Hooker was ready to take his third key decision, which was to leave. As we’ve seen, he had already figured out
that there was nothing in Mississippi which could further his ambitions and desires. He knew full well that all of the great Mississippi blues singers had had to go elsewhere in order to make their
names and to do what John most wanted to do: to make records. Mississippi had no record companies, no recording studios, no booking agents. All it had was an abundance of talent, the kind of talent
he had, and the kind that Will Moore had. However, Moore had stuck with his farming and rarely left the Delta, and had thus been denied the opportunity to have his music heard across the Southland,
let alone across the nation, and – most especially – across the world. So in 1933, at the tender age of fifteen, only a year or so after he first began to learn his future
trade at the knee of his mentor, John Lee Hooker made his third life-changing decision. He grabbed his guitar and some clothes, and upped and split for the bright electric lights of
Memphis, Tennessee.

‘Yeah, I left home then. I went to Memphis because it was the closest, about ninety miles from Clarksdale. That was the closest I could go with no money, by the direct route.’ For
someone in the Delta who has a mind to travel anywhere else (other than further south, of course), Memphis was – and is – the only place to go. That holds true metaphorically as well as
literally; Memphis was a cultural as well as a geographical crossroads; the unofficial capital of the black South, a place where hix-from-the-stix could rub shoulders with their more sophisticated
cousins from the Southwest Territories, the gateway to the big Northern cities like Chicago or Detroit. It was also a wide-open town which at one time enjoyed the dubious honour of having the
highest per-capita murder rate in America. Its epicentre was Beale Street (‘The Home of the Blues’) but it was still fundamentally a racist Southern town despite its relative
enlightenment and sophistication. It was different, but not
that
different. ‘Oh yeah, a little different. Not a lot, but a little looser. You could spread a little bit more, but then
you weren’t allowed to ride on the bus and trains with ’em [whites], but then we had our places we could go and them
not
go. All the towns down there was like that. Oh, it was
rough for years and years. I didn’t go back down there too much after I grew up until all that was over. I
played
down there after I got famous when I was in my late twenties and it
was like that, we had to play in certain places. There was certain places you couldn’t. You couldn’t be flirtin’ with the white; you stay
here
and they stay
there
.
You could go out with Chinese, with the Spanish, but I never seen what difference that it made. We was the same colour they was.’

Many wonderful and intriguing stories have arisen surrounding John Lee’s sojourn in Memphis. Some – including Hooker’s own autobiographical lyric to the title song of his 1960
album
That’s My
Story
– place him there for as long as two years. Others depict him as leading a gospel quartet, or attending house parties with the
young likes of B.B. King and Bobby Bland. The latter tale, unfortunately, collapses as soon as you consider that B.B. didn’t relocate from the Delta to Memphis until 1947 – by which
time John Lee was a full-grown adult husband and father living and working in Detroit – and that even if Riley B. King had been in Memphis in 1933, when John Lee hitched his way into town, he
would have been barely eight years old, and Bland still a mere toddler. The truth is somewhat more mundane.

‘I had an aunt named Emma Lou – I forget her last name, just Emma Lou – on my mother’s side in Memphis, and she had this big boarding house on a backstreet. The boarding
house is long gone now, and she gone too. I worked there [in Memphis] as an usher, you know, seatin’ people in the New Daisy Theatre for about two, three dollars a week. You could live on
that: a nickel would get you almost two loaves of bread. You could just about get along on that, it was
good
. You had five bucks, you had a lotta money. There was two of them: New Daisy and
Old Daisy on Beale Street. I would sing and play in my room, and once in a while I would sit outside and do it. She let me stay there about two weeks, and then she called my mother and told her.
They could have got the mail, and they never did tell me how she know. I was two weeks there, so she must have wrote. After so long, they came and got me and I went back to Mississippi.’ This
enforced return to hearth and home was most definitely not to John’s liking. He took it for as long as he could, and then he legged it once more. This time he headed for somewhere where the
support of his extended family couldn’t be used as a net with which to drag him home.

‘I didn’t like working in the fields. I stayed there maybe another two or three weeks, I ran off again. I didn’t go to my auntie because I knew she’d tell on me again. I
went on to Cincinnati.’

Like the Memphis sojourn, the period between John Lee’s departure from the South and his arrival in Detroit has become the stuff of legend, conjecture and romantic
embroidery. The liner notes to some of the albums he cut during the late ’50s and early ’60s for the Chicago-based Vee Jay label are full of such myth-making. The text accompanying
1961’s
The Folklore of John Lee Hooker
refers to ‘a life of drifting and restless traveling’ and goes on to claim ‘The itinerant’s life lasted for sixteen years
– during which time John Lee had spent relatively long stays in Memphis . . .’ while
I’m John Lee Hooker
goes further still. ‘He is an itinerant soul, a body who
strayed from the Gulf of Mexico, from Corpus Christi to Brownsville, to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia – and plenty of area in between.’

Now, hype is the raw material of which the music business, in all its forms, is built and, as hypes go, this is all good stuff; the kind of rhetorical flourish that’s perfectly suited and
highly appropriate for cementing the public image and professional status of the artist whom Vee Jay was successfully marketing as the king of electric downhome blues. The problem is that
it’s bullshit. Hooker’s present account is radically different.

‘Between Memphis and Cincinnati I was in a little town, I don’t know what you call . . . Knoxville? Stayed there a lttle while.
¹
Me and a guy
called Jerry went there. He was older than I was. I followed him there, and we stayed there about six months, maybe a year. I got no stories to tell you about it. It was about like Memphis. I was
about
seventeen, maybe eighteen. We left there and come to Cincinnati, and when we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, it was a big difference, you know.
Ooh
!
Much
different! You could go wherever you wanted there. You could ride with ’em [whites] on the same buses, go to the same places they go. That felt good. I stayed in Cincinnati a good long time,
two-three years, two and a half years. I worked at the Philip Tank & Pump Company up on Walnut Hill. I was working in the plant making rings for cars. I was a helper for one of the people run
the machines, and that was way out in the hills. Redd and Rose, this main street that had nothin’ but used cars, new cars, and it was way out there, so we had to take a bus out there every
day. I finally got an old car, an old Ford, and I thought I had somethin’. An old ’37 Ford! But it run good; I thought I was livin’ in heaven. I had an old guitar I played, and I
stayed in a little restaurant called Mom’s Place, was workin’ as a janitor, dishwasher before I got a job sweepin’ and janitor at the old Philip Tank & Pump Company plant. I
was always smart. I never did like to sit around. I always had me a job to pay my little rent, any kind of little handy job I would do. I would make about ten bucks a week. Oh, that was big money
then. The Depression never did bother me. I never did feel it. My daddy always had a lot of food; it never did bother any’us.’

In Cincinnati, the once-sheltered boy began taking his first serious steps into adulthood. He began to mingle at the kind of house parties and blues dances of which Rev. Hooker had disapproved,
and from which Will Moore had excluded him. And, for the first time, he began to play his guitar to others. Nothing ambitious at first – ‘Aww, it was routine stuff, just songs in
general. Nothin’ that I wrote too much. Oh yeah, I was playing “King Snake”, stuff that I’m playing right today, stuff that I come up on’ – but his social life
was beginning to pick up. ‘Mom, she had a daughter called Coon.’ You’re kidding, John. ‘No!’ Hooker laughs uproariously at the memory. ‘Daughter named Coon! They
called her Coon, and they had this big house where she would
give house party on the weekends in Cincinnati, and I started playing at the party for her. Boy, I wasn’t
quite into women then because I was younger, not quite twenty, but she was so good to me. Everybody would love me and like me because I was a malleable kid. I was very intelligent, I had class, and
I knew how to treat older people and young people, so everybody would take a liking to me. I would play there for her on a Saturday night and weekends, and do janitor work, you know. And I would
work in theatres, seating people. Wasn’t making much money, but it was good money.’

Nevertheless, John wasn’t quite ready to shoot for the big time. ‘Cincinnati was a good town. There was more happenin’ in Cincinnati than in Memphis or Mississippi, that was
for sure, but as far as record companies . . . there was a big record company there [King Records, a small but hardworking label dealing in both R&B and country music, later became best-known
in the ’50s and ’60s as the musical home of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul], but I wasn’t known, wasn’t even thinkin’ about it. I didn’t have a chance
then.’

As far as John’s family – or, to be more precise, his families – back in Vance, Mississippi, were concerned, their boy had simply disappeared back in 1933. John Lee Hooker had
‘just vanished out of the world’. As far as John himself seems to have been concerned, so had they. There was a desultory exchange of correspondence over the years, mainly to reassure
them that he was alive and well, but John Lee never saw William Hooker, Will Moore or Minnie Ramsey Hooker Moore ever again.

‘I never met grandmother when I was little,’ says Archie. ‘I only knew what my mom and dad told me. They said she had long pretty hair. Said she was on a bed of affliction when
I was born. That meant she only lived eight, nine months after I was born, and I was born in ’49. That meant grandmama had to die in ’50. That meant she was dead when [John Lee] came
back [to Mississippi]. I seen John when I was four years old. He had made it.’