Boogie Man (5 page)

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
n
th 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.