Читать книгу Boogie Man - Charles Shaar Murray - Страница 13

5

WHEN I FIRST COME TO TOWN, PEOPLE

When I first come to town, people,

I was walkin’ down Hastings Street,

Everybody talkin’ ’bout Henry’s Swing Club,

I decided to drop in there that night.

When I got there,

I said ‘Yes, people, yes,’

They were really havin’ a ball.

Yes, I know . . .

Boogie, chillen!

John Lee Hooker, ‘Boogie Chillen’, 1948

Nineteen and forty, babe: halfway round the world, thousands of miles away, the Nazis were on the march and Europe was awash in blood and terror. Closer to home, John Lee Hooker was desperate to join the US Army. These particular circumstances were, however, entirely unconnected. Like the vast majority of Americans at that time, Hooker was sublimely unconcerned with the geopolitical implications of imminent American intervention in a distant foreign war. His desire to enter the armed forces had rather more to do with the strangely aphrodisiac effect that military uniforms seemed to exert on the local girls.

Hooker had but recently arrived in Detroit from Cincinnati: he had a little money in his pocket and, for the first time, he hadn’t had to hitch-hike. ‘I’d heard about all these big things in Detroit. The Motor City it was then, with the factories and everything, and the money was flowing. You could get a job paying money in any city in the United States, but this was the Motor City. All the cars were being built there. I said, “I’m going there,” and I went. Took me the Greyhound and I went straight to Detroit. Detroit was the city then. Work, work, work, work. Plenty work, good wages, good money at that time.’ He soon settled in, finding himself a job as an usher at the Park Theatre, and lodgings with a rather friendlier landlady than the one he subsequently immortalised in ‘House Rent Boogie.’ ‘She would give parties too, and I would work in the theatre and come down play on the weekend, Saturday night parties. It was nothin’ but work goin’ on there.’ Unfortunately, Hooker’s cosy Detroit applecart was soon upset. ‘When I come to town I had a girlfriend and I lost her. The army was a big thing; the soldiers became heroes and when they come into town all the girls was flocking up to them. She just flocked up to those soldiers, and I said, “I’m going to go to the army.” I went in on account of girls. They wanted a uniform. Guys come to the army, come out on a break with the uniform on, girls’d eat ’em up. Now uniforms don’t mean nothin’, but back then, uniforms was a big, big thing. I loved army life because that was the thing: the women would go crazy over an army suit. You get on a suit, you could get any woman, any chick you wanted.’

So Hooker, led by his libido, enlisted in the US army. Stationed just outside Detroit, he spent the next few months a mere spitting distance from the Ford Motor Company’s famous River Rouge plant. Half a century later, he still has fond memories of what turned out to be an extremely brief taste of military life. ‘I didn’t get too far with basic training; I mostly stayed around the camp. We would come into town every weekend. I would play on the barracks, go out, work in the kitchen. I never would even go out on the shootin’ range. I never would do that, just work ’round the barracks. They liked’ed me in there. I would play in there, and they all crazy ’bout me in there.’ Hooker’s sunny disposition enables him to enjoy, at five or so decades’ remove, a rose-coloured view of race relations within the US army of the ’40s which is entirely uncorroborated by mainstream con temporary accounts. Ask him if he experienced the army of that time as segregated and he answers in a firm negative. ‘No. Not in Detroit. If they did I didn’t know it. They loved’ed me in there, white, black and everybody. They didn’t allow that stuff [segregation] in the army. They maybe do it on the sly, but all I can tell you that I didn’t feel it. We all was together.’

This would have come as something of a shock to President Roosevelt and to his Assistant Secretary of War, Robert Patterson. In 1940, in answer to repeated urgings from black community leaders, Patterson published a position paper which amounted to a formal statement defining government policy on racial matters within the military. Six of its seven clauses were, broadly speaking, positive: they established the rights of ‘Negroes’ to receive training in areas, like aviation, from which they had hitherto been barred, and – radical step, this – to assume ranks and positions for which they had actually qualified. The seventh, however, was the cruncher: it stated that ‘the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organisation’. A clarifying statement from the office of the Adjutant General insisted that the army would not be manoeuvred into taking ‘a stand with respect to Negroes which is not compatible with the position attained by the Negro in civilian life’. In other words, the army would remain officially segregated until further notice: until 1950, in fact, when President Truman signed a military desegregation order as America entered the Korean War. Pandering to populist prejudice rather than biological fact, even blood supplies were segregated during World War II.

Sadly, Hooker’s military idyll didn’t last long. In his enthusiasm to don the khaki and get his leg over, he had blithely ignored the then-current proviso that enlisted men under 21 required the consent of a parent or guardian. A year or so shy of his formal majority, he had temporarily solved this vexing little problem by scoring himself some fake ID which claimed him to be three years older than he actually was. Hooker hiked his birthdate from 1920 to 1917, creating a miasma of ambiguity and confusion concerning his age which persists to this day. Having cited his elder brother William as next of kin, he was more than somewhat peeved to find William blowing the whistle on him to the army authorities. ‘They were good to me because I played guitar and they liked it. They liked’ed me ’til they found out I was too young to be in the army. I went into the army on false pretence, and they found it out real quick. I was in there four-five-six months. When they found out I lied, they kicked me out. They asked my brother [William], and he told ’em the truth. He didn’t lie. He told ’em how old I was, and they yanked me out. He was very honest. He was a minister too, but at that time he wasn’t . . . he told me I shouldn’t lie about my age. The army is strict, you know, they got to go by the rules no matter what they think of you. They called me into the office and said, “You know you lied about your age. You lied, kid.” And I said, “What can I say? I wanted to serve my country and I wanted to be part of it.” And that kind of got to him when I said that. They didn’t know what I really wanted. “Yeah.” he said, “I’m gonna have to let you go on a dishonourable discharge, but everybody round here really love little Hooker. Everyone round here love you, they love your music, kid.” They let me went . . . but they let me keep the uniform.

‘And that’s the story. I said, “Can I keep the uniform?” The guy says yeah. I wore it around town a bit, and the girls were thinkin’ I was in the army until they found out I was kicked out and I wasn’t a soldier anymore.’ Which was probably just as well. As the recipient of a dishonourable discharge, Hooker was ineligible for the draft introduced later when, in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, America finally entered the war. This meant that he could spend the war years safe in Detroit, working on his music and enjoying his pick of home-front factory jobs, instead of being sent overseas to be shot at by foreigners. ‘Yeah, and I’m glad I got out, because if I’d stayed in I probably wouldn’t have been famous. When you that age, you don’t think. You not scared of nothin’. You don’t even think about that, because you thinkin’ of the glory and the fun, what you gonna do then, right then, how these army suits gonna bring you fun and joy with the women. You don’t think they’re gonna send you over there and kill you. I just settled in Detroit, right. No, I didn’t go anywhere from the army but back to Detroit, where I didn’t leave any more. Just stayed right there. When I come out, that’s when I started my research on trying to get on record, on a label, playing around, stuff like that.’

Well, it’s a great story, but unfortunately that’s not quite the way it happened. That’s how John Lee told it back when he was claiming to have been born in 1920 rather than 1917, but if one readjusts his birthdate back to 1917, the central premise collapses. When the subject is broached nowadays, Hooker gives a superb impression of a clam. All we can say with any certainty is that Hooker, despite being a healthy man in his twenties with no dependents, didn’t go to war; and that by the early ’40s he was living and working in Detroit. Only John Lee Hooker himself knows the full story, and for whatever reason, he’s not telling.

Detroit was hardly the most obvious base for an ambitious young bluesman looking to launch a career. Though the bulk of its black population originated in the south-eastern states – from Alabama or Georgia – it had a small pool of the homesick Delta migrants essential to support the career of any transplanted Mississippi bluesman. However, there was a serious lack of the necessary infrastructure: record labels, booking agents, talent scouts and the like. In sharp contrast, over on the other side of Lake Michigan was Chicago, aka Chi-Town or the Windy City, a primary urban focus for black migrants from the Deep South. The city’s South and West Sides were packed with Delta expatriates, and during the 1940s their numbers were swelling literally by the day. The white blues-harpist Charlie Musselwhite, a close friend of Hooker’s whose own journey from Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago to California unwittingly re-enacted the twentieth-century odyssey of the blues, explains it this way. ‘If you look at the map,’ he says, ‘a lot of people in California came out from Texas or Oklahoma. Philadelphia and New York get the Carolinas. Chicago gets people from the Deep South, from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. Highway 51 and Highway 61 both go straight up there.’

Even before the genesis of the distinctive post-war strain of Windy City amplified ensemble blues most frequently associated with Chess Records, Chicago had been a major regional recording centre for about as long as the recording industry had been in existence, a status it owed, indirectly, to the New Orleans authorities’ decision to close down the red-light district of Storyville in 1917, which in turn prompted an exodus of the city’s musicians to Chicago. Many of the great rural blues artists had also travelled there to make their records and, inevitably, some of them decided to settle in Chicago. Equally inevitably, a distinctive local sound began to emerge. Georgia transplant Hudson ‘Tampa Red’ Whittaker soon became one of the kingpins of the pre-war South Side scene, and Big Bill Broonzy was its primary figurehead, but the Godfather of pre-war Chicago blues recording was entrepreneur Lester Melrose: imagine a combination of Leonard Chess and Willie Dixon, who didn’t actually compose or perform, but simply decided who got to record and who didn’t, and who pocketed the resulting income, and you’ve got it. For Chess, Chicago’s leading postwar blues independent label, read Bluebird, the Chicago-based ‘race records’ subsidiary of the formidable Victor label.

Melrose ran Bluebird as a personal fiefdom: it was he, not the artists, who had the contract with Victor. At various times the Melrose stable of Chicago-based blues stars included Broonzy, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Jazz Gillum, John Lee – the original ‘Sonny Boy’ – Williamson and Washboard Sam. Hooker’s original mentor Tony Hollins was there (albeit running a barber shop), and so was Tommy McClennan, one of the very few blues artists whose recorded work had any audible effect on Hooker’s music. Hooker’s Vance homeboys Snooky Pryor and Jimmy Rogers were there, too. Rogers had been in and around Chicago since 1939, working the Maxwell Street market for tips; a decade or so later, he would eventually join forces with one McKinley Morganfield, a burly extrovert from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, soon to be better known as Muddy Waters, to form the blues band which would end up defining the city’s indigenous postwar blues idiom. ‘A lot of them came up from Mississippi,’ says Hooker today, ‘and most of them upped into Chicago. They were all interested because Chicago was the big blues scene. I didn’t want to go to Chicago because, at that time, I had a lot of competition. At that time there were some heavies there, so I didn’t have no idea for going there and living there. Detroit . . . it was my town when I got bigger.’

The Detroit John Lee found when he emerged from the army was a roughneck, blue-collar town dominated by the auto industry and the aftermath of Prohibition. Unions were deemed un-American, the local chapter of the FBI was virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, and it was not considered totally unreasonable for white workers to refuse to man the production lines alongside blacks. Thanks to its close proximity to the Canadian border, the city became such a reliable source of fine imported whiskey that bootlegging was considered second only to cars among the linchpins of the city’s economy. The end result was a city with a thriving gang culture and an eminently bribable police force. It was also a deeply racist town with an extremely active Ku Klux Klan, not to mention a chapter of the Klan’s elite group, the Black Legion. Admittedly, Detroit was something of an improvement over Mississippi, but then that’s not saying very much. Cops were recruited not only from the Irish and Italian communities, but from among white Southern migrants with necks of deepest red; these latter, often not unsympathetic to the Klan, were then sent in to ‘police’ the black community. The city authorities required a minimum IQ of 100 from potential recruits to the Fire Department, but a rating of 65 was considered sufficient qualification for candidates for the police force.

As the city’s heavy industry ramped up, housing became progressively more and more scarce, particularly for black defence workers. It was this issue which ripped Detroit apart during John Lee’s early years in the city. A housing project – named, ironically enough, after Sojourner Truth, the nineteenth-century heroine of the fight against slavery – had been designated specifically for black workers until somebody noticed that the resulting homes, in an area generally considered ‘white’, were actually going to be quite nice. The project was then reassigned for white occupancy, with the promise that some new homes for blacks would be constructed . . . at some unspecified point in the future, and outside the city. Blacks attempted to occupy the building anyway. Whites, led by the Klan, picketed City Hall. FBI agents ‘detected’ pro-Axis agitators among the white opponents of black occupancy. Liberal whites lined up alongside the blacks, and the reassignment of Sojourner Truth to white occupancy was overturned. On 27 February 1942, the Klan burned a cross outside the project. The first black families arrived to move in the following morning, but were barred from doing so by approximately 1,200 picketing whites, some of whom were armed. The result was a pitched battle in the streets which required 200 police to quell. Of 104 people arrested, 102 were black. It was the first of a series of riots, not as celebrated as the legendary ‘Burn Baby Burn’ conflagrations of 1967 but no less significant. Three months later, the building was finally occupied and – surprise surprise – the black occupants and their new white neighbours ended up getting along just fine.

When America entered the war, Detroit underwent a magical transformation: all of a sudden it became the Arsenal Of Democracy. Henry Ford refused to deliver aeroplane engines directly to the British on the grounds that it was against his principles to supply military equipment to active belligerents, despite the fact that both his British and German subsidiaries were already busy cranking out war materiel on behalf of their respective host countries as fast as was physically possible. John Lee contributed to the war effort in his own inimitable way: ‘All the men went off to the war, and the women did the work. Worked in the steel mills, drove the buses, street cars . . . I was working in plants: Ford, General Motors, CopCo Steel, making stuff for the war. Somebody had to do it. I was on the lines, or I was the janitor. I did that mostly. I was a common labourer, but a janitor more. They used to catch me asleep, fire me and then rehire me when they needed people, and they needed people bad then. They fire you: you could walk across the street and get you another job. I’d be up all night playing my guitar, I’d sweep and then go in the corners and fall asleep, and they’d catch me a few times before they fired me. Captain’d wake me up and I’d go back to work.’

Around this time, his musical ambitions received some encouragement from an unlikely source. ‘I never will forget this lady . . . I was a young man then. I went to this big carnival they had in Detroit. I didn’t know her and she walked up to me. I had never made not a record, and she walked up to me and said, “Young man, come here.” She was a gypsy woman or somethin’. She said, “You gonna be famous aaaaall over the world. You gonna become very rich, you gonna become very famous.” We were all just a bunch of kids; we just kinda laughed. I just wondered how. I was just plunkin’ on an old guitar, and it come true. I usually don’t believe in things like that, but she come pick me out and it come true. I never believe in that shit, but I’m just sayin’ what she told me. She might have been just guessin’. She was a fortune-teller and people would give her a little somethin’, but I didn’t have nothin’ to give her. She said, “You ain’t got no money,” and I didn’t. She said, “Kid, you ain’t got no money, but you gonna be famous one of these days.” We was just a bunch of kids; we kinda laughed when she left.’ He shifts into a taunting schoolyard falsetto: ‘“John Lee Hooker gonna be faaaaa-mous! Gonna be faaaaa-mous!” All ridin’ me and ribbin’ me . . .’

With so many of the city’s able-bodied men away in the Armed Forces, John Lee found that a soldier suit was no longer a necessary prerequisite for success with the opposite sex. ‘You can get married, you can have about five or six wives inside of five years if you really want to. Like the big movie star woman, Elizabeth Taylor, have about nine husbands. The first time I got married it didn’t last long, about two-three months. I was too young. My first wife’s name was Alma Hopes. She was half Indian. I was young and she was young . . . we met at house parties and stuff, at her mom’s house. I used to hang out there, started courting her daughter. She from Dublin, Mississippi. A lot of people in Detroit from Mississippi, but I left there so young I didn’t know none of ’em. She said, “Oh, you from Mississippi!”, like that, and we got talkin’ about different towns. I said, “Oh, that’s my home town.” It wasn’t my hometown, but [Dublin and Clarksdale] wasn’t too far apart. We got to datin’ together, and we got married. Stayed together a few months, then we broke up.’ Alma Hopes relocated to Chicago, where she raised Frances, the daughter who was her only souvenir of her brief marriage. John Lee stayed in touch and visited them whenever his blues career took him to Chicago. Fifty or so years later, he invited Frances to California, first to visit and then to live in his five-bedroom house in Vallejo, which he had vacated but not sold. ‘She was my first kid ever. She was my first child. She come up from Chicago and she had no place to go. She was stayin’ there, and I said, “Hey, I never did nothin’ for you. I never gave you nothin’. This house is yours, this house.”’

Most of the time, John Lee claims a total of three marriages. Most of the time. ‘I been married three times. No, four times! I keep forgettin’! I done left one out there. I keep sayin’ three times, but it was four times. Didn’t stay with Sarah Jones long, about a year. We didn’t have no kids and so I hardly ever thinks about her.’ The wife he thinks about most often is the one he generally refers to either as his ‘second’ or ‘main’ wife, the former Maude Mathis, ‘who I got all the kids with. I stayed with Maude longer’n any of ’em. Stayed with Maude about twenty-five years and we grew old together.’

When Maude Mathis met John Lee Hooker, she was even newer to Detroit than he was. The youngest-but-one of Frank and Addie Mathis’s seven children, she and her family had relocated to Detroit’s Fourth Street from Augusta, Arkansas – ‘a little town in north-east Arkansas, sittin’ on the White River’ according to her younger brother Paul – in 1942. The Mathis family made the acquaintance of John Lee Hooker sometime in late 1944. ‘We were living in an area of Detroit called Black Bottom, which is no more,’ Paul Mathis remembers today. The exact boundaries of Black Bottom shifted by a street or two every so often, but it was broadly definable as the blocks enclosed by Russell and Chene Streets to the east and Van Dyke to the west. Eddie Burns, who was to become one of Hooker’s key musical sidekicks during the late ’40s and early ’50s, places Black Bottom as ‘downtown. It’s all built up now, but it used to be a whole area there. Now it ain’t Black Bottom any more, it’s some of the most modern part of Detroit.’ Next door and extending as far east as Woodward Avenue, was Paradise Valley; its spine was the legendary Hastings Street, though the area at its base was generally considered part of the Bottom. Both the Valley and the Bottom were bounded to the north by the outskirts of suburban Hamtranck, and to the south by the Detroit River, the natural border with Canada. As Burns told blues historian Mike Rowe: ‘Hastings ran north and south and the bottom of Hastings, I would say, was part of the Black Bottom . . . the Valley was off Hastings. It was a neighbourhood of its own, y’know. Something of everything was happening down there.’

‘They called it Black Bottom, on the east side of Detroit,’ continues Paul Mathis, ‘but it was a mixed neighbourhood. It had Mexicans, Polish, Italian, but we all went to school together and got on like an house on fire. We had our little scraps, but wasn’t no such thing as prejudice. We used to go to they house, have a sandwich, and they would come to mine, have a sandwich, you know. It was a good neighbourhood, really. There were seven of us: four boys and three girls. My brother Frank got called to the army – he was the only one in the army at that time goin’ to war – and the other brothers was workin’ in the factories. I’m the youngest, and Maude. They used to do what they called keno games and house parties, and I can’t really give you a true picture of how it all came about, but I do remember that this Saturday night the party be at my mom’s house; the next Saturday night it would be at Lucinda’s house; the next Saturday night it would be at Anna Lou’s house . . . like a circuit. Gamblin’ and sellin’ beer and booze and hamburgers and fish sandwiches and things of that nature. After the gamblin’ was over, they’d start the party. This particular night, John and a friend of his came by. It was Broomstick Charles. John had this little small guitar, and he was playing and Charles was beatin’ on the floor with this broomstick, you know, keepin’ time. It sounded quite nice, really.’ He laughs at the memory. ‘Then John . . . I don’t know where he was livin’ at the time, but he moved on the same street that I lived on, Fourth Street. A lady called Miz Simms had a small rooming house, and John just got friendly with my family. I don’t know how this came about, but he did get friendly with my family. And then he got even more friendly with my sister Maude.’

Today Maude Hooker is a formidably stolid church lady of imposing mien and impassive reserve, but the positively impish grin which occasionally breaks through suggests a very different younger self, and she still giggles when she thinks back to her early encounters with John Lee Hooker. ‘I was 16 when I met Johnny. You know, he used to play music, play his guitar in different places, houses. I don’t know exactly how we met, but any way he’d be playing at different houses and he met my parents and then he started coming to the house, you know, back and forth. He was living just down the street from us at the time when we met.’ So what specifically attracted the lively 16-year-old Maude to the quiet 27-year-old John Lee? ‘Oh God!’ she laughs. ‘He used to just, you know, buy me nice little things. He was a very nice person and he would buy me nice little gifts, and so that’s the way we met. Didn’t anything happen like we fell in love with each other, it was just one of those things that happened. A girl and a man, that’s all there was. That’s the way it was. A young girl and a man, so that’s what happened.’

Paul Mathis is rather less coy. ‘And, you know, they carried on carryin’ on, and Diane was born. He was just part of the family, really, and mom would always fix him some black-eyed peas and cornbread cooked whenever he came by, because that was his thing, black-eyed peas and cornbread. Miz Addie, you know. She used to jump on his case, because being as young as I was, I was having it off with an older woman . . . she used to jump on his case, man, she used to give him a bollocking, you know. I’m always being called the baby, you know. “You know what my baby’s doin’!” “I-I-I-I don’t know, Miz Addie.” He used to stutter profusely, you know. Oh, he get kinda little excited, he couldn’t say a word. Every time he come by . . . “Is Addie home?” “Yes, she is.” “Well, I be back.” “No, c’mon in here.” That was my mom, God rest her soul. As it happened, John just be came a part of the Mathis family, and he’s been a part of the Mathis family from that until this.’

John and Maude’s first child, Diane, was born on 24 November 1946. The couple set up their first home in a rooming house on Madison Street. By this time, with the war long since ended, the boomtime was officially over. ‘Well, all the men come back home, most of them, and some of them didn’t have jobs,’ remembers John Lee. ‘They come back and there was still work, but not enough work for everybody. After the war, things got rough.’ Maude recalls: ‘I remember my brother Frank was in the service, and he came out of the service and he couldn’t get a job, so he went back in the Air Force. It was very hard to get a job there for a while.’

Increasing competition in the job market provided a progressively greater incentive for Hooker to work harder and harder at his music. Giving up the day-to-day jobs altogether in favour of full-time music was less of an option than ever, though: after all, there were still bills to pay, each and every week. Paul Mathis’ admiration for the tenacity and grit displayed by Hooker in those years remains wholly undiminished by the passing of time. ‘He didn’t sit around and say, “Well, it’s gonna come along one day; I’m just gonna sit here and won’t move, and all of a sudden a bag of gold’ll drop into my lap.” The playing was strictly a weekend thing. Five days a week, he was punchin’ a clock. Friday night, Saturday night, Sunday night, he was here, there and everywhere. He always had a job. Ushered movie houses, swept floors, pressed steel, helped assemble cars . . . the lot. He did it. It was hard graft. When I say “hard graft”, I mean the finger-bleedin’ type’a hard graft. It was just a rough life. We never had a lotta money, but we always had plenty food. We always had a nice suit’a clothes to wear, but there never was a lot of money. But we always did eat good, and I’ll sit here and testify that in those lean years, John never did falter. Determination kept him going. He was determined that he was gonna make it. He was workin’ the steel mills. CopCo Steel. On Friday nights – which was pay day – we’d have barbecue ribs. He stopped by the barbecue place, meet me at the barbecue place, we’d have barbecue ribs, which was a treat, you know, which was nice. I was throwin’ papers, sellin’ coal and ice, and doin’ odd jobs. Anything anybody wanted to do, I would do it. Lookin’ at John now, and I believe he will verify this, this is the day he thought he’d never see, where John Lee Hooker’s name is universal. Everybody knows John Lee Hooker. But his success hasn’t changed his train of thought, though he’s grown a little less conservative than before his success. He used to hold onto that nickel, you know. But now he’s a successful man and he’s achieved his goals, and he don’t mind givin’ a stranger . . . “Hey, take this twenty dollars and go get something to eat.” That sort of thing, you know. Before that, there was no money. It was very, very, very hard.’

It was also very, very, very discouraging. ‘I was a hard-working person,’ John Lee insists. ‘I didn’t like handouts. I’d get out there and work, earn a living and stuff like that, but that wasn’t what I was going to do the rest of my life. I knew that. That was a hard road, right up to now. It was a hard road. Many, many, many, many, many times I questioned [what I was doing]. Then my mind was saying, “Don’t go back. You done left there, you made a mistake.” One mind was sayin’ I should have stayed, one mind said no. I was so strong into being a musician. All the rest of my sisters and brothers got good education but me. I could’a had, too. I could’a had number-one education, but I didn’t want that. If I’d’a had that, I’d be down there right now. Maybe might’a been dead. Maybe got old just farmin’ as a share cropper, playin’ an old guitar on the corner or in a roadhouse, but I was such a strong young man. Such determination. I would go out there, pretend I was goin’ to school and wouldn’t go, hide out in the woods with my old guitar and play. I was determined to be a musician, and my parents was determined that they wanted me to sit down and go to school. I had these two choices. I said, “I’m not goin’ to stay out here as a farmer”, and I didn’t. I thought many a time, did I make the right decision? You know I thought about that! I thought that way, sure, but on the other hand, the other mind would say, “You got to work to get up to this. You got to keep doin’ this until you get what you want. You got to keep playin’ here and there in little places ’til you find your goal.” And one mind would say, “I ain’t gonna make it. I didn’t leave home for this.” Two minds: one sayin’ “Keep workin’”; the other sayin’, “This ain’t what you left for, to push a broom.” And the mind that said “Keep on doin’ it” paid off, but if I had been a little weak, and not strong, I’d’a said, “Aw no, I give up, I’m goin’ on back to Mississippi.”’

Instead, he got more and more serious about his music. Hooker had always played house parties whenever he had the chance, but now that he was beginning to think seriously about turning professional, he started to practise in earnest, refining the songs he’d brought with him from the Delta in the light of his new urban context. He and Maude had moved house again, this time to a shack behind a larger property on Monroe and Orleans which they shared with another couple, Jake and Bernethia Bullock, who had been fellow residents of the boarding house on Madison. As recent arrivals from Texas, the Bullocks were fairly unimpressed with the social climate of Detroit, not to mention the cramped conditions and squalid housing in the Black Bottom. ‘In 1946 my husband and I moved from Houston to Detroit under the impression that there was no segregation,’ says Mrs Bullock. ‘In Texas we knew that it was segregated. We know that the blacks live on this side of the street and the whites live on that side of the street. We had as nice a home on this side of the street as they had on that side of the street. When we come here, when we moved in – it was nothing. The housing, to me, was horrible. They were needing painting, and most of them had no basements, they just had what you call cellars.’

The shack was in a lamentable state of disrepair. Before the place could be certified as fit for human habitation, John Lee and Jake had to run water and power lines out from the main house, and exterminate the sizeable congregation of rats who’d taken up occupation. Worse! The shack was directly across the street from an exuberantly odoriferous stable. According to Bernethia Bullock: ‘Whenever we got ready to serve a meal, we had always to close the door if it was windy, because that dry manure would just blow right on into the house. My husband got busy and started working with the horse people, and what he would do on Saturday: he would help them clean the stable so that we wouldn’t get the odour and what-not from it. Maude and I would always wash and wash the floors; we couldn’t just mop, we had to actually put down water and soap and scrub and scrub the floors – the kitchen, bed rooms and everything – and then mop it up.’ Despite their best efforts, the place never quite developed that all-important patina of gentility. Jake Bullock’s family never came to visit, and Maude’s mother, aunt and brother were the only ones who would brave the inescapable essence de cheval. ‘Nobody else wanted to come over there, into that hoss-piss odour. They just didn’t want to smell it.

‘While they was living with us, Johnny decided that he was going to play the guitar, and he was going to start practising. So he said to Jake, “Would you mind if I do a little guitar practising?” Jake said, “No, I don’t mind; just don’t practise while I’m sleeping unless you’re going to sit outside.” So one day Johnny was practising, and he was just playing “Step By Step” and my husband was getting ready to go lay down and take a nap so that he could go to work at eleven o’clock, and he said to me, “Lord, I’ll be so happy when Johnny get up them steps.” Johnny would always practice out. If the weather was nice he would sit outside in the back. He worked days, and he’d come home in the evening and he’d sit out there and practice after he’d had his dinner. Sometimes he’d sit out there three or four hours, just picking different songs and different tunes or what-not, and then he’d come in and maybe get him a snack and he’d ask us, “How did I sound?” I said, “Well, you soundin’ good, man. Keep up the good work.” I was a Baptist and I wasn’t too much of a blues singer, but I figured that if there’s something you love to do and you want to do it, right on with you for doing it. My husband sang with a [gospel] quartet, and they sang every Sunday morning. Sometimes he and Johnny would get out there and he’d be singing and Johnny would be playing . . . I said, “You going to form a band or something of the kind?” He said, “Me and Johnny might just do that. I’ll do the singing and he’ll do the playing.” I said, “All Johnny’s going to sing is the blues and you’re not going to be making him sing no church songs, so shut up.”’

Jake Bullock turned out to be something of a soulmate to John Lee, acting as chauffeur and cheering section as Hooker made his first forays into graduating from the house-party circuit into the more demanding environment of the Detroit club scene. ‘My husband and Johnny would go to the nightclubs and I’d stay home. You see, Johnny didn’t do a lot, didn’t drive. I don’t think he never did do very much driving. He would say, “B-b-boy! Whatcha doin’, Jake?” Jake would say “Well, I think maybe what I’m going to do tonight is go in early.” Johnny said, “N-n-no, come on there, come on there. We gonna leave these gals at home and we’re going out for a little while.” Maude went with them quite a bit. She was younger than I was and had a chance to get out, and they would go places. Johnny would play, just take his guitar and while he was there, he’d probably ask if he could play a number, or if he could be on the show or what-not, and that’s how he’d finally, you know, he got recognised. By doing things like that.’ Paul Mathis confirms: ‘We used to see John play at all the little bars around Detroit: the Caribbean Club, Apex Bar, Henry’s Swing Club which was in the Bottom, as we called it, Sensation . . . that was up north on Oakland. I can’t really remember all those bars now, because it’s been such a long time, but he played in every bar. He was playin’ “Boogie Chillen” and the “Hobo Blues”, “Sally Mae” and the “Crawlin’ King Snake”, those was some of the tunes that put him where he is. Blues was strugglin’. It was jitterbug and jivin’ back in those days. The blues singers was playin’ for a nickel over here, and the guy playin’ the jitterbug, he’s gettin’ a quarter, that sort of thing.’

‘There wasn’t too many clubs that you could play blues in during those days,’ confirms Eddie Burns. A sharp social division existed between the plusher, more sophisticated black night clubs, catering to a more moneyed crowd and featuring jazzier, more urbane music, and the blue-collar, spit-and-sawdust taverns and bars which served as urban equivalents of the jook joints of the Delta, downhomes away from down home. It was to the latter which Hooker gravitated, partly because the plusher bars were far more likely to demand that a musician produce a union card than would the taverns, which were only one step away from the house parties. Inevitably, John Lee found himself drawn to Hastings Street. ‘It’s a freeway now, the Chrysler Freeway. Oh, that was the street, the street in town. Everything you lookin’ for on that street, everything. Anything you wanted was on that street. Anything you didn’t want was on that street. Stores, pawnshops, clothing stores, winos, prostitutes. Like in “Walkin’ the Boogie” and ‘Boogie Chillen’ . . . “when I first come to town, people, I was walkin’ down Hastings Street.” Everybody was talkin’ about Hastings Street, and everybody was talking about Henry’s Swing Club. That was a famous place. A famous street. Best street in all the world. Too bad they tore it down.’⁴ Bernethia Bullock remembers the heyday of Hastings Street with rather less affection. ‘Oh, Hastings Street. There was a lot of guys on the street, a lot of hanging out. Hastings was one of the predominant places where most families wouldn’t allow their children to go. Hastings was a rough street, that was the understood thing. If my husband and Johnny went to Hastings, I didn’t have a knowledge of it. Because that’s what Hastings was like. If you had any type of respect, you stay off Hastings.’

One of Hooker’s first fans from those early club appearances was a tall, thin electrical engineer from Pensacola, Florida, who called himself Famous Coachman. Improbably enough, it was his real name. ‘My daddy’s name was John Coachman. When I was born, my mother told my daddy, “John, I hope he’ll be a famous man” and my daddy said, “Why don’t we name him Famous?” They named me Famous, so I’m catchin’ hell tryin’ to be famous.’ Coachman came to Detroit in 1947, and he happened across John Lee playing out on a club on Lafayette. ‘It was a very small club and he was playing there every night for small change, and I used to come out to see him play on the weekend, and we would all be around and about at different clubs and different places, and so we just had a good time together. He and I used to pal around a bit and go out and chase around and eat fish. When I first met John I thought he was just an old guy – well, he was a younger guy then – a guy from outta the South that has migrated to Detroit to get a job and he’s just picked up a git-tar. I thought he was just tryin’ to learn how to play,’ Coachman laughs. ‘I was fooled. That’s what he’s been playin’ ever since; I guess he’s still learnin’, but that’s his style. He’s just doin’ Johnny Lee, and that’s all it is. You can’t take him away from bein’ himself. But he played around Detroit, and he played in many, many clubs and places. Johnny Lee haven’t had it easy. He haven’t had it easy, he had it pretty tight, raisin’ a family and gettin’ no money from gigs and what-not. I mean, he worked in some places for a small amount, but he hadn’t worked that much, and he tried to make music, take care of him and his family. It was just small money, that’s all.’

By this time, Hooker had gained his first celebrity admirer: none other than the great Aaron ‘T-Bone’ Walker, a Texas-born, Oklahoma-trained guitarist whose influence on postwar Western popular music is almost impossible to underestimate. At the time, according to Hooker, Walker was ‘the hottest thing out there’. The first to adapt the single-string improvisatory flourishes of the progressive country blues guitarists to the electric instrument and juxtapose the resulting joyful noise with the brassy blare of a swing band, Walker created a style and a repertoire which has long outlived him: wherever electric blues guitar is played, you’re still hearing what T-Bone Walker developed in the ’30s and ’40s. His ‘T-Bone Blues’ was first recorded in 1940, and he cut ‘Mean Old World’ and a few others for the then-tiny Los Angeles-based Capitol label in 1942, but it was the seminal sides recorded between 1946 and 1948 for Capitol’s Black & White subsidiary which caused the revolution. In Memphis, the young B.B. King heard Walker’s 1947 recording ‘Stormy Monday Blues’ (aka ‘Call It Stormy Monday’) and went straight out to buy himself an electric guitar. Others like Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, Lowell Fulson and Albert King were right behind him, and the word soon spread to hundreds and thousands more. T-Bone’s mellifluous crooning vocals, sly lyrics, dry woody guitar tone and jumping jazzy back drops made him the role model for an entire generation of bluesmen. A former dancer, he was also a hugely extrovert performer, copyrighting many of the guitar-badman stunts (favourite: playing the guitar behind his head while sinking into a perfect splits) which subsequently provided such sterling service for athletic performers like Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, Guitar Slim, Buddy Guy, Albert Collins, Johnny Guitar Watson, Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan. ‘Stormy Monday’ itself became part of the core repertoire of the blues. Hooker met him at what later became the Rainbow Bar on Hastings Street. At that time it was Sporty Reed’s Show Bar; subsequently immortalized as ‘Sportree’s’ in some of Elmore Leonard’s Detroit-set novels. ‘T-Bone was playin’ there,’ remembers Eddie Burns, ‘because they used to bring a lotta out-of-town acts into that club. It was a real nice club with padded leather walls.’

‘He played there, and he used to take me there with him,’ says Hooker. ‘I’d sit up there and watch him. He put me on the bandstand after the first time I went there, and I like freaked out. Boy, it was a high-class place, y’know, women with evening gowns an’ stuff on . . . and I was just a kid. He give me some liquor and I got on the bandstand . . . “Drink this down, kid.” So I drink it down to build up my nerve, and I had the house a-rockin’. He liked to drink, and he was sittin’ out there drinkin’. He was a stone ladies’ man. He was a ladies’ man. Always was sharp, all the time; stayed dressed up all the time. You never see him in jeans an’ stuff, he always would wear nice suits an’ slacks an’ stuff like that, but he had the money to buy that with. He’d just had “Stormy Monday” and the streets were filled with women, looking for romance. He were just a great man . . . the great T-Bone Walker.’ The great man presented his protégé with a gift that would change his life: his first electric guitar. ‘It was like a gift from God, just like a gift from God, the Supreme Being, handed down from heaven. I tell everybody, “Ol’ T-Bone Walker give me that guitar.” “You’s a liar!” “Oh yes he did! He did too!” “He too big, he’s a big star, he ain’t give you nothin’ like this!” But he was my buddy. He was crazy about me. He liked to call me “kid”. “C’mere, kid. Go do this, kid. Do this for me, kid.” I jumped like a frog an’ do anything he said. I was in love with that man, and followed him around like a little puppy.’

Hooker was almost 30 years old at the time; he was a father and a three-time husband, yet in most of his anecdotes from this time, people seemed to persist in calling him ‘kid’. ‘Yeah! They were, ’cause I was little and skinny. They called me the Iron Man at one time. The Kid. The Iron Man. “Man, that kid can sing.” I didn’t look old. Till I was forty, forty-five, almost fifty, I looked like twenty-one or -two.’

Hooker worked hard at his day-jobs and his music alike, and he played hard, too. ‘He and my husband were both big drinkers,’ says Bernethia Bullock. ‘My husband and Johnny and the gang that they were with would come home some nights and I didn’t want the kids to know that my husband had been drinking, so I would sit up and wait for him to come in, and steer him to the bedroom. Sunday morning when they’d wake up, we’d get up, take the kids to church and they didn’t know he’d even had a drink. Sometimes five o’clock in the morning, I didn’t want the neighbours to see ’em coming in. I said, “God, what you going to say about y’all struggling in here at five o’clock in the morning?” He said, “Ain’t nothing they can say, we just been out of town, just getting back in.” It didn’t make Maude no difference, she said some of the time she’d be one place and Johnny would be another and it didn’t make any difference, because she was a nightlifer herself. Me not being a nightlifer, you know, it kind of worried me . . . it was just a little embarrassing to see them coming in that time of morning.’

Initially, Maude Hooker claims, she didn’t make too much of a fuss about her husband’s new project. ‘Not at the beginning, because I knew that he would have to be workin’ here and there and be out half the night. I understood that and I went along with that, you know. As my kids were born, I stayed home and tried to raise them to the best of my knowledge, that I could. Afterwards it got kinda hard, after the rest of the kids was born.’ Her brother Paul recalls that she wasn’t always quite that sanguine. ‘I recollect a little party, just before he started making records, at this lady’s house – the one that I was friendly with, Lucinda – John was playin’ and we was havin’ a good time. Oh, we was really havin’ a good time. And Maude came in and said, “C’mon John, let’s go.” Well, John was havin’ a good time, and John wasn’t ready to go, so Maude promptly yanked the guitar out of his hands and hit it ’cross the amplifier and broke it into smithereens. She tore it into splinters. I don’t think it was so much that she disapproved of his playing. The disapproval was that there was women there. There was women there, you know what I mean, and they shakin’ it, you know what I mean, and he’s playin’, and that was the disapproval.’

By 1948, John Lee was beginning to make some real headway. This was just as well, since his and Maude’s second child, Vera, was born on 1 April of that year. He’d also graduated to playing an occasional show at Lee’s Sensation, a slightly more upmarket club than his usual Black Bottom venues. ‘It was a kind of a swinging, classy joint, not really a blues bar’, according to Eddie Burns. ‘Lee’ was the name of the owner and ‘Sensation’ was the name of the club – as Burns remembers it, anyway – but over the years the names of bar and boss have fused to the point where most people, including Hooker, remember both simply as ‘Lee Sensation’. ‘“The Lee Sensation Bar.” That was a nightclub. Nice nightclub, oh yeah. I used to play there for Lee Sensation. That was a high-class club. I played there, I thought I was in heaven. I thought I’d never get to play there. That was on Oakland, on the north end of Detroit. Lee Sensation, he named his club after his name. That was before I recorded . . . that was a long time ago. I wasn’t too famous then. I’d been wanting to play in that bar for a long time, but nothin’ but big people played there, big names and stuff like that. T-Bone Walker and Ivory Joe Hunter, Jackie Wilson, people like that . . . big people. I was so famous around town that he booked me in there.

‘It was just a matter of findin’ the break. I got discovered out of a little bar by my manager Elmer Barbee. He was a very good person, very smart. He was mixed Indian and black; very nice, very honest person. He knew how to get ’em. He the one discovered me, playin’ around night clubs, little honkytonk bars, house parties. I had a little trio, I was playing electric guitar.’ Before Maude broke it, one assumes. The trio was filled out by pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster, two musicians who could adapt to Hooker’s rough-hewn, rural approach. ‘I was playing a little bar called the Apex Bar on Monroe Street, and I was the talk of the town. Little John Lee Hooker, they would be callin’ me. And he come in there. He made a special trip to come in that bar and see me. He had never seen me, but he had heard of me. He had a little record store on San Antoine and Lafayette, 609 Lafayette, which is long gone. The building was tore down years gone. He was livin’ in the back with his wife and son, and he come down to that place and saw me and he said, “Kid, come down to my record shop. I’m a manager, and you are the best I ever heard.” I said, “Yeah?” and I did, I went down there, and I went on about six months to a year, just recordin’ in the back of his place.’

‘There was this record store called Barbee’s,’ says Paul Mathis, ‘with a little studio in the back, and he would go down and try to play, and then nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and try to make another record and nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and make another record and nothin’ never would happen.’

‘Nobody knew John Lee Hooker ’cept playin’ at little clubs, no record, nothin’,’ says Hooker. ‘The clubs were packed every night with people wantin’ to see me, but I wasn’t known in the States. I come down to [Barbee’s] place one Wednesday, and we started recordin’ and talkin’ all night, drinkin’ wine and goin’ over these different tunes, ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘Hobo Blues’. Finally, he taken me downtown on Woodward Avenue with all this material to a big place like Tower Records, and the guy had a little label called Sensation . . . Bernie Besman and Johnny Kaplan. They was partners, both of them was big wheels, and they heard the stuff and they went wild and they recorded me.’

‘Do you want me to tell you how Hooker got into the picture?’ asks Bernard Besman expansively. ‘I didn’t look for him; he just happened to come in. One of the dealers that we had brought him in. His name was Barbee.’

To John Lee Hooker, still a country boy at heart despite his years in the big city, Elmer Barbee – or ‘E’ Barbee, as he was also known – was a person of some consequence. To the considerably more worldly Besman, whose business had a million-dollar annual turnover, Barbee was simply ‘a very small record dealer who had a store. These people would come in every day bringing in artists. Barbee said, “Here, I have a terrific blues singer for you and I’d like you to hear him.” He brought John by in person, and he brought a record that John had made in one of those auto . . . those music-machine booths . . . a record made in this quarter machine. I think I got it some where, but I don’t know where it is. I haven’t lost it, because we keep everything. I listened to the record, and it was already practically worn out, and you could hardly hear anything on it. Anyway, he sang “Sally Mae” on that thing, a blues number, and I’d never recorded a blues artist up to that time. Although we were selling the blues and I was familiar with the blues, he didn’t sound like any of the blues artists we were selling. The blues we were selling at that time were like Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers with Charles Brown, T-Bone Walker . . . twelve bars, you know. This was something altogether different that I frankly didn’t understand.

‘On top of that, when he sat talking to me, he stuttered. I figured, “Jesus, how can this guy sing for stuttering?” I didn’t believe it was him. I thought, “This guy must be lying. He’s not singing here. This must be a fake.” So I said to Elmer Barbee, “Okay, next time I have a session, bring him over and I’ll make a dub at the studio with him.” So that’s what happened. The reason I recorded him was the fact that he could sing and not stutter. Otherwise I wouldn’t have recorded him. He didn’t mean anything to me.’

Not surprisingly, Hooker remembers these events from a very different perspective. ‘Me, I brought [Besman] a long ways,’ he says. ‘A long ways. He had a little old label named Sensation Records, a little label right there in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue. Barbee brought me in the store there. I had never met Bernie, I didn’t know him from Adam. Me and Barbee played all those tunes [‘Sally Mae’, ‘Boogie Chillen’ et al] for him and Kaplan right there in the store. Barbee had come in and said, “Man, I got a kid. Discover this kid.” [Besman] know Barbee real good, they was good friends. “Sally Mae”, yeah. Me and Barbee did that in a studio on Lafayette and St Antoine; he had a record store. We would sit there all night . . . we’d be playin’ guitar all night, me’n him, his wife and so on. Then he told me, “I got a friend, Bernie Besman and Johnny Kaplan. I’m gonna take you down to they store; they got a record store and a distributing company there.” Me’n him went down there. They had blanks then: they didn’t have tape recorders, they had wax disks. We recorded [an acetate] on that, we went down there and we played it for them. “Sally Mae”, “Boogie Chillen” . . . I was playin’ that in little old night clubs round then, all the stuff that I recorded I was playin’ around. All the stuff I played for Barbee I was playin’ in parties, nightclubs, the Apex Bar. Barbee would come round nights when I wasn’t playin’, and we would play these tunes: “Boogie Chillen”, “Sally Mae”, “Hobo Blues”, “When My First Wife Left Me”.’

By the end of World War II, just about every definable section of the American public was ravenously hungry for the new music of which they’d been starved for the previous couple of years. Two separate bans on recording had just ended. One was caused by a shortage of shellac – the basic material from which the ten-inch 78rpm biscuits current at the time were made – for which the war machine’s need had taken understandable precedence over that of the record business. The second was the result of a fierce industrial dispute between the major record companies and the American Federation of Musicians; by the time it was resolved, a thriving crop of independent operators had started up, unimpeded by the battle between the union and the majors, and serving the markets for hillbilly and ‘race’ music in which the majors were no longer so interested. Or, as Eddie Burns puts it, ‘one of the reasons John got in and a lot of us got in, was that the musicians’ union had a ban on the studios. What happened was them Jews found a way to record blues musicians and people like that, but your contract wasn’t worth the paper that it was written on. They had a way of settin’ these dates when they released the stuff, sayin’ it was recorded back then [i.e. before the ban]. So a lotta blues people got in on the deal, which mean that you automatically was gonna get a screwin’, because it wasn’t legal in the first place.’

Together, the bans created an artificial caesura which served only to magnify and dramatise the already immense cultural and demographic shifts in the patterns of both production and consumption of popular music, caused directly by the war. The dominant postwar blues styles were indeed still the post-Basie jumpin’ jive exemplified by Louis Jordan and subsequently customised by Roy Brown, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Amos Milburn and Wynonie Harris alongside – as Besman indicates – the smooth and sophisticated night club-blues crooning of Johnny Moore And His Three Blazers, featuring the sublime Charles Brown on piano and vocals, plus T-Bone Walker, ruling the roost as both guitar hero and matinee idol alike. Nevertheless, a new set of realities, a new set of circumstances, a new set of ambitions: these all required a new vocabulary of expression, a fresh language of style. Of joyful necessity, old idioms were required to reinvent themselves, and new ones began to emerge. One such was a Northern industrial-metropolitan transformation of the music of the Mississippi Delta diaspora: downhome blues electrically heated into an urgent, stream lined distillation of its rural ancestor, an aural reflection of the new experiences of rural peoples relocated to the rough ends of the big cities. Furthermore, the first completely black-oriented radio station, WDIA, had just commenced broadcasting from Memphis. Audiences, musicians and record labels alike were ready to roll. And they did.

The first signpost hit from this particular New Wave was ‘Short-Haired Woman’, a surprise 1947 hit by Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins (from Texas: regional boundaries aren’t infallible, after all), which racked up the surprising aggregate of 50,000 sales for a tiny Houston in dependent label called Gold Star (and, incidentally, annoyed the hell out of Aladdin, the larger, Los Angeles-based label to which Hopkins was contracted at the time, by outselling the version he’d cut for them). A year later came Stick McGhee’s light-hearted ‘Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, a cleaned-up version of a much older, much rawer downhome blues – the nonsense syllables replace the Oedipal compound noun – which sold somewhere in the region of 400,000 copies and served as the foundation stone for the Atlantic Records empire. Then there was Muddy Waters’ ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’, cut for Aristocrat Records in Chicago and featuring the big, booming Delta voice and urgent, amplified slide-guitar of a wartime Mississippi migrant, accompanied only by a fidgety, funkily slapped acoustic bass. Electric downhome had found a standard-bearer; that record, and its maker, laid the foundation stone upon which Chess Records’ Chicago empire would soon be founded. In Detroit, Bernard Besman and his partner Johnny Kaplan had taken over Pan American, a derelict record distribution company, and in a mere three years, they had built it up to a more than respectable size. Besman was well aware that a distributor could sell significant numbers of copies of the right single by a good downhome bluesman, and since downhome music was ridiculously cheap to record, a small label could break even on as few as 5,000 sales. In his other identity as boss of Sensation Records, an archetypal fledgling independent label with a name borrowed from a popular local club, he was equally well aware that he didn’t have such a downhome bluesman under contract. But, in Elmer Barbee, he knew a man who did.

John Lee Hooker and Bernard Besman worked actively together for less than four years. Any direct comparison of the two men’s accounts of their collaboration leads to the inescapable conclusion that they spent much of their time together speaking entirely different, and mutually incomprehensible, musical and cultural languages. Nevertheless, those four years were among the most intensively productive years of Hooker’s career. His two biggest early hits, ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’, were both Besman productions, and Besman is undeniably one of the pivotal figures in the entire John Lee Hooker saga. It was Tony Hollins who first set the young John Lee’s feet on the path, and it was Will Moore whose support, tuition and inspiration gave him the keys to the kingdom. Nevertheless, it was Besman’s decision to record the stuttering little guy in the long raincoat, a decision taken – as he claims – on a whim one damp Detroit afternoon, which opened the floodgates for everything which was to follow. The history of the blues is littered with brilliant talents who failed to receive the fame and acclaim to which their gifts rightfully entitled them because they had the misfortune never to be in the right place at the right time, but John Lee Hooker would still have made his professional break through – somehow, sometime – even without Besman’s intervention. The only relevant questions are: how big would that breakthrough have been, and how much longer would Hooker have had to wait?

The Bernard Besman you might meet today is a canny, alert octogenarian with a fondness for biscuit-coloured leisure suits, and a luxuriant silver pompadour which wouldn’t disgrace a superannuated rockabilly singer. He moves somewhat carefully, following a stroke a few years ago, but there is no hint of vagueness about him: he evokes the events of half a century before in crisp and loquacious detail. The trouble is that, in matters both fundamental and trivial, his recollections differ so strongly from Hooker’s that it requires a considerable effort of will to remember that both men are, in fact, telling the same story. For example, we’ve already heard Hooker tell us that Besman and his partner ‘went wild’ when they heard the acetates that he’d cut in the back of Barbee’s store; by contrast, Besman remembers being played a disk from a quarter-in-the-slot record-your-voice booth,⁵ and simply yielding to the mild curiosity he felt about a downhome bluesman who stuttered when he spoke but found his clarity when he sang. Each of them contradicts the other at almost every turn; and each of them is at some considerable pains to minimise the importance of the other’s contribution to the work they did together. It is as if they both feel that the resulting achievement wasn’t big enough for both of them . . . which, of course, it is. And what’s more: they plainly don’t trust each other the proverbial inch.

The answer to the question ‘So who is Bernard Besman, anyway?’ goes something like this. He was born in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine: a city which had known very little peace during World War I, the October Revolution and the uneasy period thereafter. In the last months of the war, the southern Ukraine was annexed by Germany, and the Polish Army seized Kiev itself in May 1920. They were ejected the following month, but the resulting military adventure put paid to the Ukraine’s brief and ill-fated struggle for independence from the new-born Soviet Union. It gained them little more than the personal attentions of young Joseph Stalin himself, first as Political Commissar and then as Ukrainian Chairman of the Council of Labour Armies. Not surprisingly, Besman’s family fled in 1921, after the suppression of the Kronstadt uprising put paid to any significant challenge to Bolshevik hegemony. However, it wasn’t until 1926 that they finally arrived in Detroit, having had to cool their heels for a British sojourn in Whitechapel, at the heart of the East End of London.

‘I went to school there, at 32 Leman Street, because the quota had closed down for the United States, and I had to wait five years before we could come out. I came from a very musical family, and from the age of three I was playing piano. When I finally got to Detroit I formed a band with another fella, called Milt, and we called our band Milt Bernard. That’s how I went through college, making my money by playing piano. My style was like Eddie Duchin or Tommy Cavallero. That’s dance music, society-type smooth dance music, ball room dancing. We played hotels and resorts. We played jazz as part of the programme, but mainly it was for dancing, because that’s all there was. Later I became a booking agent for bands, and I did pretty well. I made records in 1936. I had a band, and I booked bands, and I made demonstration records because as a booking agent, people would come to get a band and I’d play them these records for them to see which band they liked. When the war came along I had to close up, and go into the service, but while I was in the service I was in Special Services, and I did shows. I was with 5th Air Force, and we’d put on shows, and I had a band. We took care of the dances, scheduled dancers, things like that. So actually, I pursued the music club through the service. About three days after I was discharged, I was waiting for a friend of mine that was in the service with me, and one of our other friends walked by where we were waiting in downtown Detroit. He was in the photographic business before he got in the service and he had some records under his arm and he said, “Say, Bernie, I was just in California and somebody there gave me these records and they wanted me to get into the business, but I know nothing about this business.”’

Besman’s buddy was carrying an armful of Latin American records he’d been given by a company named Pan American. ‘I didn’t know anything about the record business at first, and he didn’t want the business anyway. I’d only been out of the service three days so I said, “Well, let me check into it and see what happens.” I called those people and they said, “Sure, you can be a distributor, but you have to pay immediately for the records.” I put the money in advance in the bank before I even got the records. So I had about $6,000 at that time; that was my whole fortune. This friend of mine that I met, I told him about this deal and said, “I have $6,000, I don’t know how long it’ll last, do you want to be a partner with me?” He says, “You try it for about three weeks, see what happens,” and later he came up with $6,000 and we became partners. The point was that when I did get the records and went out to sell them, nobody wanted them because they were primarily made in a Spanish vein, or Mexican type of music. But the people I went to see told me that if I had this record or that record, they’d buy it from me. So that’s how I got involved, selling records primarily by black artists, and I was the first independent record distributor using these off-brand labels. The $12,000 didn’t last very long, buying records on credit, and after three months it got too big for the area I rented. I rented this basement in one of the houses to start with, and we’d get the records through the window off the sidewalk, so we moved into much larger quarters at 3747 Woodward Avenue, which was the main street in Detroit. Four thousand square feet, and the rent was up from $30 a month to about $400, and I wondered how the hell we were going to make that, because it was quite a jump. But we were very, very successful. By the time I sold my share of the business to my partner to come to California for some other ventures that I had, we did close to a million and a half dollars a year.’