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BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, TAKE A LETTER DOWN SOUTH FOR ME

In my mind, music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at McDonalds?

Henry Rollins, interviewed in Rolling Stone

Alabama’s got me so upset

Tennessee made me lose my rest

And everybody knows about Mississippi . . .

Goddam!

Nina Simone, from Mississippi Goddam

I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.

John Lee Hooker,

interviewed in Melody Maker, October 1964

So how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen the big city? Some people just can’t wait to get out of the country, feel some pavement under their feet, scrape the mud off their boots and morph, as smoothly as possible, into urban slickers ready to parade their new-found sophistication at the expense of the rubes fresh off the latest bus from down home. Every big city is full of people from the sticks or the ’burbs who’ve taken on urban coloration like so many concrete chameleons, shedding their country skins, going native on Broadway or in Hollywood, pumped and cranked all the way up, and primed to mud-wrestle the locals for that big-town pay-cheque. For others, the basic fact of who they are changes not one iota no matter where they may find themselves.

John Lee Hooker left the Mississippi Delta whilst still in the turbulence of adolescence. Nevertheless, Mississippi never left him. Though he’s lived in major conurbations – first Cincinnati, then Detroit, then Oakland, California, and finally the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area – ever since reaching his late teens, he remains a quintessential man of the Delta. His slow, deliberate drawl has never revved itself up to city speed. His manners are still country-courtly. His fondness for traditional Southern food remains unaffected by the temptations of any exotic delicacies from Europe, Asia or, come to that, anywhere else you could name. He’s seen it all and he’s not terribly impressed, but he’s far too much the country gentleman to give offence.

The Delta formed his voice, and he in turn became the voice of the Delta: the very incarnation of the traditional culture of its African diaspora; a king in voluntary exile. However, the suggestion that ‘Mississippi made him’ would be an outrageous oversimplification. There is only so much for which purely sociological heredity-and-environment hypotheses will account; there is no process, no set of circumstances, which can truly be said to ‘explain’ John Lee Hooker. We can certainly state without fear of significant contradiction that the ‘environment’ of the Mississippi Delta not only produced considerably more than its fair share of blues singers, but was most probably the spawning ground of the primal blues from which all the different varieties of blues-as-we-know-it ultimately derived. The blues of the Delta is the oldest, deepest blues there is; it therefore creates no major rupture of the laws of probability to propose that the Mississippi Delta (as opposed to, say, Surrey, England) would produce the artist with the most profound ability to tap into that primal blues, and the chromatic range of human emotions it explores. Even within the small community in which Hooker spent his formative years, two of his former playmates became blues singers and good ones at that: but not great ones. We can also discard immediate heredity: even considering the complex interaction between the two primary factors of heredity and environment fails to take us significantly further forward. John Lee Hooker came from a large family, but none of his many brothers and sisters became professionally successful blues singers, though his younger cousin Earl did. ‘I was different from any of my family, as night and day,’ he says today, ‘I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em.’

This is, of course, the big question. Why was Hooker ‘so different from the rest of ’em’? Of course, almost every person who becomes successful and famous and admired grows up amongst ‘normal’ people (read: people who don’t). Statistically it could hardly be otherwise, even if – in the cable and satellite era – it now seems impossible that anybody at all will be able to live through an entire lifetime without being seen, at least once, on television. It also seems as if every successful person elects to strive for that success from a very young age. Yet John Lee Hooker came up at a time when the majority (read: white) culture had decided that the sons and daughters of black Southern sharecroppers were not supposed even to entertain the possibility that they could escape their fate and take control of their own lives. Their culture was so ‘primitive’ that, by the standards of the times into which Hooker was born, it barely qualified as culture at all. The ‘leaders’ of the black communities, in their turn, decided that blacks not only could but most definitely would ‘make progress’ despite white opposition, but they would do so by self-improvement, by proving their worth to a society which treated them as though they were worthless. By dint of sobriety and study; they would haul themselves, hand over hand, up an American ladder from which most of the rungs had been cut away. Hooker steered precisely the opposite course: that of taking a fierce, incandescent pride in the identity he already had, and exploring the implications of that identity no matter what the consequences.

The story of John Lee Hooker’s life is, essentially, the story of his resistance to any and all attempts to change him, to dilute an intrinsic sense of self which has successfully withstood all pressures, including those of institutionalized racism, family, church and the music business. That resistance has been, at times, essentially a passive one: throughout his life, Hooker has remained polite, deferential, quiet-spoken and accommodating. Despite the occasional peevish or impatient outburst, he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t bluster, he doesn’t bully. And then finally, when absolutely no alternative remains, he quits. By which I mean: he leaves, he splits, he dusts, he’s outta there, he’s nothin’ but a cool breeze. It doesn’t matter if it’s a marriage, a record contract, a family, a home: once Hooker decides he’s had enough, that is it. No discussion, no recrimination, nothing. Just gone. And the reason he does it is to protect himself. Not because he’s callous, or cowardly. He is neither. But himself – or rather, his self – is that which makes the music, and that will be protected at all costs; yea, e’en to the ends of the earth.

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 father’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.

Hooker recalls being one of ten children, but as his nephew Archie gleans from his own studies of the family history, ‘I always thought there was thirteen of ’em, but some died. See, what happened was . . . stillbirth you don’t count.’ John Lee’s older brothers were William, Sam and Archie; the younger boys were Dan, Jesse and Isaac; and John Lee’s sisters were Sis, Alice, Sarah and Doll Baby.

‘Doll Baby’s name was Mary,’ opines Archie. ‘One of them’s supposed to have been blind. I think it was Aunt Mary. I think she was the last sister that died. She was the oldest child. They wouldn’t use names. They would use nicknames. Sis might be Mary.’ Minnie kept on having children until she was nearly 50; this, according to Archie, was not uncommon. ‘Womens were different [then]. They could have kids and two days later be back in the fields. More kids you had, the more crops you could produce. Simple. And every one of them had big families.’

The family lived and worked on what Hooker remembers as ‘a big farm, close to a hundred acres’, which would put the Hookers into whatever passed for the middle classes of the Delta. Slightly more than half of the farms in the region were 80 acres or smaller, while 30 per cent were over 300 acres, and the very largest spread to as much as 2,000 acres. ‘It was an old wooden house with a tin-top roof, but we was comfortable, you know, we had a lot to eat. I never been hungry a day in my life. We had cattle, horses, pigs, chickens, farmland . . . he had people working for him. Down South there was merchant people who saw him as being in the same category. He had a few Spanish people working for him, not many, maybe a couple. Two Spanish, Mexican, my older brothers, four or five more black people. He was a sharecropper, you know.’

The practice of sharecropping meant that the larger plantations managed to keep the majority of the black workers on the land, substituting economic ties for forced labour. A tenant farmer would take responsibility for a certain area of land and would work it, together with their families and any sub-tenants and day labourers, with equipment and cash advances supplied by the ‘boss’. When each year’s crop was harvested, the farmer and the landlord split the proceeds, and if the farmer and his team had worked especially conscientiously, there would indeed be a profit after the boss deducted his advances. If the crop failed, or if, for any other reason, sufficient profits did not materialise, the tenants began the following year in debt. Given a few bad years, a sharecropper could easily fall so far in debt that it was impossible ever to break even again. Once that happened, the ’cropper would virtually be enslaved all over again, and entirely legally. William Hooker must indeed have been a skilled and conscientious farmer: the records of the S.N. Fewell Company, based on the Fewell plantation close to nearby Vance (where the Hookers moved a few years after John was born) show that in 1928 ‘Will Hooker Sr and Jr’ made a profit of $28.00. By the standards of the time, this was a more than respectable sum.

The work was back-breakingly hard, and getting it done was entirely down to the muscle-power of humans and animals. In the rural Mississippi of the ’20s and ’30s, the twentieth century hadn’t quite arrived. Since cars and tractors were still comparatively rare, horses and mules did double duty as agricultural implements and personal transport. Country backwaters like the Mississippi Delta weren’t yet wired up for electricity; Hooker remembers that it wasn’t until his mid-teens, when he first travelled to sophisticated, progressive Memphis, that he saw his first electric light. (For the record, Buddy Guy – nineteen years Hooker’s junior and raised in rural Louisiana – tells substantially the same story: he, too, had to go to Memphis as a teenager to see a lightbulb for the first time.) ‘When I was there [in the Delta],’ Hooker says of electricity, ‘it wasn’t there.’ The telephone was another piece of hi-tech exotica: something that folks had in the city and which you could occasionally see at the movies. The phonograph in the family parlour was ‘the Victrola, the kind you wind up’, where the energy of a weighted pulley drives the turntable and the sound is amplified acoustically through a large horn. There was also an old crystal radio, on which they would listen to Amos And Andy, and ‘music from a radio station in Helena, Arkansas’.

‘Sacred’ music only, though. William Hooker was a part-time preacher, a pastor at a local Macedonian church, and family life revolved around farm, church and school. ‘We had,’ says John Lee, ‘to work.’ They also had to sing in church, as Hooker’s nephew Archie, son and namesake of John Lee’s immediate elder brother, explains: ‘He’d been singin’ for, like, years. If you’s ever been a minister’s son, you gonna have to participate in church. They made him go to church, and if you go to church, you gonna learn how to sing basic hymns, so it stuck. It stuck to him, and when he be workin’ he would always try to sing.’ As Hooker himself proudly recalls, ‘I used to sing in the church when I was nine or ten. I was a great gospel singer. Macedonian, where my father was a pastor. It was in the country. I was a very talented young man, and everybody round in the county looked up to me and said, “Oh, that kid is somethin’ else, he can sing better than anybody I ever seen.” When I come into the church everybody look round, and when I started singin’, people start shoutin’ and hollerin’. I had such a tremendous voice. I was nine, ten years old.’

And there was farm-work, though John Lee was neither physically nor mentally suited to the toil of agricultural labour. He just flat-out didn’t like working in the fields, and down there working in the fields was all there was. ‘My daddy,’ says Archie Hooker, ‘was more a mechanical type. He worked with his hands, and Uncle John didn’t.’ However, there was also play. In the rural South, you either made your own entertainment, or else you got very, very bored. ‘There was this old mule we had, an old mare mule, and she was very stubborn, but she was a gentle old mule and she know us kids. She was a very wise old mule. She wouldn’t hurt us, and she really cared about us. We’d ride her back and she’d let us ride ’til she get tired, and then she rub up against a barbed-wire fence. You know what a barbed-wire fence is? She’d just swing you right into the barbed-wire fence and scratch you and you’d have to jump right off her back! You’d get so mad with her you’d start bitin’ her lip and be cussin’ her: “You bitch! You . . . !” There’d be one behind kickin’ her, bam! Right up against the barbed-wire fence! Whoo! Whoo! Old Kate, that was her name. She’d drag you right into a barbed-wire fence! You had to hop right off her or get stuck with the wire! Yeah! She’d see us comin’ and if she didn’t want to be bother, she just lay down, get on her knees and lay down. Old Kate. Hell of an old mule. She knew when twelve o’clock come and we’d been workin’ in the fields, when time to eat she started hollerin’ Whoo! Whoo! and she wouldn’t go no further. She lay down in the middle of the field ’til she knew that you were gonna take her and get her somethin’ to eat. A lot of memories in that old mule.’

Chicago drummer S.P. Leary, a veteran of the Muddy Waters Band who worked with Hooker on the 1966 sessions for The Real Folk Blues, would certainly agree on that: ‘Everyone I worked [with] taught me something but John Lee Hooker. Me and him fell out. You have to watch your p’s and q’s with John Lee; he’d tear a house up, he’d tear the top off a house. If you make him mad, you talk about a mule . . . ha ha. I think a mule showed John Lee a hard time.’

And then there was the usual kid stuff.

‘I met a midget once. Did I tell you about the midget? There was some pretty little girls around, and I was the big bully of the town. I was a bully. There was a little midget, ’bout this high. There was about four or five little girls around, and he was peekin’ on one girl, and I said “Leave him to me.” I was showin’ off for the girls. I was nine years old, and I thought I was gonna walk all over him. They said’ – Hooker shifts his voice into a taunting, little-girl falsetto – ‘“We gon’ make John whup your ass. John, will you hold him for us?” I said’ – roughening to a stylised ‘tough’ voice – ‘“Yeah, I’ll take care of it.” And I slap him, pow! And he said, “Don’t hit me no more.” I say,’ – toughly again – ‘“What you say?” Bop! He say, “I said don’t hit me no more.” I say, “You little short thing, I’m gonna whup the piss outcha.” He said, “Y’all don’t hit me no more.” I hit him again, and, boy, he grabbed me. He was a tough ’un. He whupped me and he tore off all my clothes, and the girls was there: “Get up, John! John, get up! Get him! Don’t let him getcha! John, get up! Get up! Get up! Get him off the ground! John, he on top of you!” We get up and he say, “Now, I don’t wanna hurt you, so don’t slap me no more.” I said, “I’m gonna see you again, and the next time I see you I’m gonna be ready.” And Loreen – the girl – said,’ – in falsetto – ‘“John wasn’t ready then!” But I never jumped on another midget. Yeah, he showed me!’

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 cannot 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.’

The breakup of his parents’ marriage led to the second key decision of John Lee’s life. In many ways, it was the most important choice he ever made. He had come to his first crossroad when he opted to pursue the guitar rather than school and church; and the second appeared before him when William and Minnie separated. Whereas all his brothers and sisters elected to stay with their father, John chose to leave with his mother and take Will Moore to be his stepfather. The main reason was that Will Moore played guitar, and he was a bluesman through and through. He was a popular entertainer at local dances and parties, and would appear alongside the likes of Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson whenever they were performing in the area. ‘I was fourteen. My real father, he didn’t want the guitar in the house. He called it devil music. My stepfather Will Moore, he played guitar what I’m playing now. I learned from what he played: that’s what he played, what I’m playing right now, identical to his style. I went to play my guitar. I didn’t go because I wasn’t treated right; I was treated pretty good. I left because I couldn’t play my guitar in the house, and he didn’t mind me going to my mother’s. I told him, “Dad, I wanna stay with my mom.”’

The Reverend considered the departure of his son to be a sign of failure on his part, but on one thing at least, he and John Lee were in complete agreement. If John insisted on living where he was allowed to play his guitar indoors, he had to go. ‘Well, you know how church people are. He loved the heck outta us, he would give his right arm for us. They believed in the church, in God, in the Lord, and he didn’t want his son . . . he felt that I was givin’ myself to the Devil. He didn’t want me to do that, and that’s they way of thinkin’. He felt like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong, he felt that he could guide me the right way. That was the way he lived, and he wanted all his children to be churchgoing people. But my mother had as much authority over me as he did, and he said, “You go live with your mom and her husband, if that’s the way you wanna go. You welcome to stay here, but you just cannot do this in the house.”’ Mrs Hooker felt differently. ‘Well, my mother was open-hearted, very open. She wanted me to do what I wanted to do best, because she felt that if I was forced to go to church, it wouldn’t be for real. So she said, “I’m not gonna force you. If this is what you wanna do, you and Will go ahead and I won’t object.”’

Will Moore gave his new stepson his next guitar: an old mail-order Stella to replace Tony Hollins’s battered gift. Moore became John Lee Hooker’s spiritual and artistic father-figure: the father who approved, the father who encouraged, the father who supported, the father who empowered. William Hooker had loved John dearly and raised him according to the best and finest principles he knew, but an unbridgeable abyss lay between them. With all his heart, the Reverend hated, feared and despised that which John Lee wanted, above all else, to become. Inevitably, a battle would have been fought for the erring son’s immortal soul, and whatever the outcome, both father and son would have been irreparably damaged by the conflict. Will Moore appeared when he was needed, and he gave John more than a beat-up guitar and a home with a room of his own in which to play it: he gave him the means to become the man whom he wanted to be.

He gave him the boogie.

Master bluesmen have traditionally adopted ‘sons’ to be schooled in the craft, ethos and lore of the blues. ‘You like my son,’ Muddy Waters famously told a young Buddy Guy one chilly ’50s night in Chicago. Guy, scarcely out of his teens, was fresh up from Louisiana, green as swamp moss, with little more to his name than the Stratocaster with which he was looking to carve up the Southside bars. This particular night, Buddy hadn’t eaten for almost three days. A cutting contest with Otis Rush and Magic Sam was scheduled for that night, and Buddy was so hungry he couldn’t hardly stand up. Then Muddy Waters appears out of nowhere. He sends out for bread and salami. With his own hands, he makes a sandwich. He offers it to the ravenous Buddy. Buddy says no. That’s when Muddy slaps him in the face. That’s when Muddy tells him, ‘You like my son.’ That’s when Buddy eats the sandwich.

That’s when Buddy wins the contest.

Throughout the story of the blues, there are countless examples of such ‘adoptions’. Son House ‘fathered’ both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Sonny Boy Williamson II and Howlin’ Wolf both, at different times, ‘adopted’ James Cotton. Little Walter took Junior Wells as his ‘son’. Later on, Albert King ‘adopted’ Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Albert Collins Robert Cray. These relationships involve more than simply tuition, though tuition is indeed the formal basis, the foundation upon which they rest. Above all, they are spiritual lessons in life, and in living. Yet John Lee Hooker’s connection to Will Moore was deeper still than that: Moore became John’s father in every sense other than the strictly biological. Let’s say this: Rev. William Hooker was the father of Johnny the child, but Will Moore was the father of John Lee Hooker the artist, and – because it is impossible to separate the two in any meaningful terms – of John Lee Hooker the man. Hooker remembers Moore as ‘a nice lookin’ man, about my complexion, maybe a little lighter, kinda medium tall. Very pleasant.’ Evidently, Moore took his new-found parental responsibilities very seriously. ‘Will Moore object to me drinkin’, but he did [drink]. Back then, they thought kids that young . . . they never did taught me to drink, my step-dad and mom. He would take a drink, but he wouldn’t drink it round me. Was Will Moore strict? Not on what I wanted to do. He was married to my mother and so he wasn’t . . . he was strict enough for me to know not to get outta line. He would tell me what’s right and what’s wrong, and if he would tell me I wouldn’t do it, because back in them days if you did something wrong that you shouldn’t’a didn’t’a did, you get a good whuppin’. An’ he was allowed to do that because I wasn’t real pampered. My mother would tell him that if I got outta line, whup us. But he never had to do that because I never did get outta line.’

Where Will Moore, in loco parentis, drew the paternal line was over whether to carry John with him when he went out to play with Patton, Jefferson, Son House, Tommy McClennan and other wandering players of the time. In the Delta, a boy of sixteen was generally considered to be practically a full-grown man, but because John was ‘rather small’ and those Delta dances could get pretty rough, Moore ‘wouldn’t take a chance on taking me to one of those places’. Clearly, John Lee was considered more vulnerable than many another youth his age; more urgently in need of shelter and protection. It’s fascinating to contemplate the spectacle of the adolescent John Lee Hooker sat at the feet of such towering blues patriarchs amidst the smoke, crush and clamour of a Delta house party, but the evidence suggests that he learned all he needed to know at home. If the feats of the student are anything to go by, the teacher did his job well. ‘He wanted me to do what I wanted to do best, long as it was right. He guided me and helped me to do that. He is my roots because he is the man that caused me who I am today. I understudied under him, Will Moore. He made me what I am with his style. He give it to me, like you got a piece of bread and I ain’t got none, and he said, “Here’s a piece of my bread.” He gave me a piece of his music. What I’m doin’ today, that’s him. Identical, the same thing that he taught me by watchin’ him. I wanted to play just like him, and I did, but he was so bluesy. The first thing I learned, the first tune I learned from him, I never forgot. It wasn’t one of his tunes, but he played it all the time. Called “The Peavine Special”, by Charley Patton. “I thought I heard that Peavine when she blows.” I would’na thought that song goes back so far. “I ain’t got no special rider now.” That was the first thing I learned.’

Not necessarily the first but without doubt the most important of the musical lessons John Lee learned from Will Moore was the boogie. This was Moore’s personal beat, his distinctive rhythmic pattern, his signature, his mark, his call. It is the most profound gift that a master bluesman can give to his apprentice, and just as it had been Will Moore’s trademark around the Clarksdale area, it eventually became John’s, recognised as such all around the world. His first hit, ‘Boogie Chillen’, cut in Detroit at the tail end of 1948, a decade and a half after he finally shook the Delta dust off his feet, was the piece that established him at the forefront of the ‘downhome revival’ which was one of the dominant trends of postwar blues. Its galvanic, hypnotic boogie groove was pure, unreconstructed Will Moore. ‘I got that from my stepdad,’ Hooker acknowledges, not only freely, but with palpable pride. ‘That was his tune, that was his beat. I never thought I would make nothin’ out of it, and he didn’t either. But I come out with it and it just happened.’

But there was rather more to ‘Boogie Chillen’ than a beat, no matter how funkily irresistible. It also told part of the story of John Lee Hooker’s early life.

Well, my mama didn’t ’low me

Not to stay out all night long

Oh lord . . .

Well, I didn’t care what mama didn’t ’low

Went on boogyin’ anyhow . . .

One night I was layin’ down,

I heard mama, papa talkin’.

I heard papa tell mama

‘Let that boy boogie-woogie

Because it’s in him

And it got to come out’

And I felt so good

Went on boogyin’ just the same . . .

Boogie, chillen!

So who were the protagonists of the real-life conversation which provided the seed of the song? ‘It could have been between my father and my mother, or my mother and her last husband. The song was mama and papa, but it would relate more to my real father, because mama said, Let that boy boogie-woogie. It could’ve been either one, but I didn’t do it upon that basis, though. It’s so true, when you’re a kid and you wanna get out there and boogie and your parents don’t want you to do it, and one of them will give in and say, “Let him go ’head. It’s in him, and it got to come out.” You can relate to that, because what’s in you has got to come out, and it was in me from the day I was born. It was a great talent I had, and so I come from . . . not a very poor family, wasn’t rich, but wealthy in food. I was brought up – not all the way up – religious, and to this day some of that is in me. Lovin’ people, helpin’ people. I was taught that by my parents, to do that, and I come up some rough roads since.’

One of the great tragedies of Hooker’s life, and one of his few genuinely profound regrets, is that Will Moore never lived to hear what John Lee achieved with his legacy. ‘Oohh, he woulda bin so proud. It would have made him feel like a big champ, knowin’ that he was responsible for this. It’s too bad that that’s the way it was. I think about that a lotta times, wishin’ that he could’ve been around just a little while to know that I was doin’ this.’

Will Moore forever redefined John Lee’s relationship with the music for which he was prepared to sacrifice anything, and anybody, with whom he was born and raised. He also redefined John’s relationship with his blood father’s primal resource: the church. For the Reverend Hooker’s bleak fundamentalist world of fiery retribution and divine punishment, John Lee substituted Moore’s vision of a non-denominational, non-judgmental world of compassion and trust. ‘He [Will Moore] was a religious man, but he didn’t believe in running to church and so forth. He was like me. I’m a religious person, but I don’t believe in going to church. The way I look at it, your heaven is here, and your hell is here. [Right now] I feel like I’m in my heaven. A lotta people love me, I got a few dollars, a place to live . . . that’s my heaven. And lovin’ people, that’s heaven to me. But people that’s sufferin’, hungry, sleepin’ in the streets, don’t know where they next meal is comin’ from, out in the cold . . . they livin’ in hell. For a long time, my parents had me believin’ that there was a burnin’ hell and there was a heaven, but it has come to me in myself, as I grew older and knowledge grew in me, that if there was a God, then he was an unjust God for burnin’ you for ever an’ ever, stickin’ fire to you. If the God was a heavenly father, a good God, then he wouldn’t torture you and burn you. He wouldn’t do that, he wouldn’t see you burn. But he tortures you, in a way, if you got nothin’ to eat and hungry, don’t know where you gonna get your next meal, don’t know where you gonna sleep at, half sick, can’t work, driftin’ from door to door . . . that’s your hell. But you’re not bein’ tortured with fire, where you get down in this hole being tortured with flames, with fire for ever. No. So you not gonna fly outta there with wings in the sky like an angel, milk and honey, as I was taught, if you go to heaven. You not gonna do that. There’s nothin’ up there but sky. The only heaven is up there in the big jets and airplanes, with the beautiful ladies walkin’ in the aisles. That’s your heaven.’

Only if you’re in first class, John.

The present-day Hooker, resplendent in his living room, laughs. ‘Yeah, first class. That’s your heaven. You’ll never get it through to people, because the church has got ’em brainwashed to death, the ministers, the preachers. I believe in a Supreme Being, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t believe that there’s a hell that you’re gonna be tortured in. I believed in all of that, then I grew up and realized, and I wrote the song: “Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burnin’ hell/where you go when you die, nobody can tell.” Nobody knows. Nobody come back and tell you, “Hey, it’s all right, c’mon down.”’ He laughs again, louder this time. ‘It ain’t all right. I could be wrong, but I don’t think I’m wrong.’

‘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.’

When I first started hoboin’

Started hoboin’

I took a freight train to be my friend

Oh Lord . . .

John Lee Hooker, ‘Hobo Blues’

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.’

‘I wrote to [the family] a coupla times,’ says John Lee, ‘wrote ’em a letter an’ we got a good response back. They were glad to hear from me, glad that I was doin’ all right. Very glad to hear from me before she died. She died when I was livin’ in Detroit, thirty-five or forty years ago. I forgot what time it was at. He died before she did. He was way up in age, about ten, twelve years older than my mother. She was seventy-five when she died. My father lived to be a hundred and two. A very strong man.’

Allowing for John Lee’s shaky maths – neither Reverend Hooker nor Will Moore survived into their eighties – one can only concur that he’d have had to be.

Today Vance, Mississippi, just about qualifies as a one-horse town. To reach it, you follow Highway 49 south out of Clarksdale, through Matson, and through Dublin. When you reach Tutwiler, turn onto Highway 3 and pretty soon you’re in Vance, on the Quitman/Tallahatchie county line. The post office and the general store are on your left, and the mansion which was once the headquarters of the old Fewell plantation on your right. Then you pass a few shacks and trailers on each side of the road, and the graveyard adjoining St Mark’s Baptist Church, containing those few remaining graves which haven’t yet been ploughed over. A couple of seconds later, you’re out the other side, en route to Lambert, Marks and the junction with Highway 6. John Lee Hooker sighs heavily when he thinks of Vance. ‘Yeah. Zoom-zoom, right through. There’s nothin’ there. It’ll never grow into nothin’.’

Vance is a town waiting to die, except that it can’t quite summon the energy. The only thing that really qualifies it as a town at all is the fact that it still has its own post office. The official state map – brightly festooned with attractive touristy images of riverboats, Elvis and the Civil War – lists the populations of most of the various towns and cities in Mississippi, ranging from Jackson, the state capital, which can boast over 200,000 souls and actually has its own airport, down to the likes of Learned, in Hinds County, with its registered population of 113. Places with a head count below three figures don’t carry a listing at all. Vance is one of those.

In blues parlance, Delta landscapes like those surrounding Vance are dubbed ‘the lowlands’. That’s because they’re about as perfectly flat as a landscape can possibly get, and the long straight highways scythe through them to the horizon, decisive grey slashes designed to take you somewhere else as fast as possible. Around those parts, a ‘thousand-yard stare’ implies chronic short-sightedness. Every place you go in the deep country, you see field: cotton, soya, pecans, all growing green or gold wherever the red earth is not puddled and paddied with water. Your line of vision ends only when you sight the light woodlands far in the distance. Away from the comparative bustle of Clarksdale – where any building over three storeys high dominates its immediate vicinity like some Delta equivalent of the World Trade Centre, like the building which houses radio station WROX, where blues and gospel DJ Early Wright spins Little Milton and Bobby Bland records and thunders out community news and commercials for local businesses – everything is quiet, blanketed in a silence so deep it seems to have remained unbroken forever. This is a place with few distractions; a place where people have no option but to face themselves head-on; to come to some kind of accommodation with their thoughts, with their feelings, and their circumstances. Anyone failing to reach such an accommodation has no options other than to go crazy or else to get out.

This is where you find the richest soil and the poorest people in the USA. The richest soil: a rusty loam sufficiently fertile and welcoming to nourish just about anything you care to put in it. When it’s been raining for a while, the terrain can look as if all the blood spilt there has started bubbling back up. The poorest people: everything in Mississippi is cheap. A shirt, a guitar, a meal, a bottle of beer, a packet of cigarettes, a motel room: they’ll all cost you less than you’d have to pay just about anywhere else in the US. That’s because people around here have proportionately less money than elsewhere in the US. The horses and mules have disappeared, replaced by tractors and BluesMobiles: battered cars with mismatched doors, eczema-scabbed with rust, kept running by faith and ingenuity alone. The shacks which appear so ‘picturesque’ and ‘authentic’ in old photos and on the covers of reissue blues albums look quite different up close on a wet afternoon in Vance. And the spectacle of ten members of one family – three generations ranging from squalling babe-in-arms to wheezing grandmother – crammed into a three-room trailer hoisted up on cinder blocks off to the side of a dirt road makes a complete and utter mockery of the American Dream. These people haven’t failed: they’ve been betrayed.

John Lee Hooker is easily the most famous person ever to come out of Vance. Indeed, he’s the only famous person – ’nuff respect both to Snooky Pryor, a fine musician if not exactly a household name, and to Andrew ‘Sunnyland Slim’ Luandrew, a founding father of Chicago blues piano – the poor burg ever produced. As such, the locals are keen to claim him as one of their own, even though their reminiscences – such as they are, having been filtered through half a century of local folklore – are vague to the point of utter insubstantiality. The church where Rev. William Hooker used to preach, has long burned down. Some of those as yet undesecrated graves near St Mark’s carry the names of members of the families whom Hooker recalls as his childhood neighbours: Cage, Hardman and Johnson, plus one or two Pryors from Snooky’s clan; but ‘Hooker Hill’, where John Lee’s family was buried, has long since vanished into Mississippi limbo; dumped into the bayou during the late ’60s. If we could magically materialize John Lee Hooker at our sides, there’s nothing here, other than the imposing English-style mansion that dominates the virtually empty landscape, which he would recognize.

Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, Jim Crow displaced in its turn by a statutory equality which nowadays means little more than the right to share an endemic poverty side by side. The old South has gone, taking with it both the institutionalized racism of old, and the warm, yeasty sense of family and community which enabled the descendants of kidnapped Africans to withstand the depredations of a society explicitly constructed not only to keep them under but to discourage them from ever looking up. The new South which was supposed to replace it may have manifested elsewhere in the region – in the proud metropolis of Atlanta, for example – but it never arrived in Mississippi. It wasn’t until 1995 that the state finally got around to passing the anti-slavery laws into the statute books.

‘John Lee’s from Mississippi,’ says Archie, in case anyone should need reminding. ‘Most people that came from Mississippi want to forget it . . . or escape. It’s like a bad nightmare, and most of ’em want to try and sleep it off, sleep it away.’

‘Leaving a place when you’re fourteen [sic], it’s pretty hard at my age to say, “It were right there.”’ confesses Hooker. ‘Things change so. Back then, the big white man had all the land, acres and acres and hundreds of acres and stuff like that. Now it’s all cut up and sold, and all them farmers ain’t there no more. It’s farming, but everybody got they own thing. Everything is equal down there now. It is equal, so it’s cut up, the land is taken. If I went to Detroit now, I’d get so turned around with all these buildings tore down . . . Mississippi probably worse, because they done took all the land from all the big old rich people, and the government took it and made everybody equal, cut it up and said, “This is yours, build on this.” The mules, they gone. They got tractors, they got different things. It’s so turned around down there. It’s a different world. All that’s tore down. There’s apartment buildings where them old houses used to be. People done say, “Mr Hooker, you wouldn’t know where nothin’ at, you went down there now.” I was down in Greenville, Mississippi, and everything was so different. I played down there: Greenville, Dublin, Drew-Mississippi, Jackson . . . it’s built up, and there ain’t no big fields, no cotton belts down there. It’s fields, but everybody got they own little patch, sharecroppers got they own land. So all them old houses are gone. Them old houses? Shoot, man, they gone. It’s history.’

Vance remains helplessly suspended between a painful past and a threatening future. If it was my hometown, I wouldn’t want to go back there, either. Neither would you. Maybe this goes some way towards explaining why, whenever a movie about the Deep South – be it Gone with the Wind, The Color Purple or Mississippi Burning – shows up on television, John Lee Hooker reaches for the remote control, and switches channels.