Boogie Man (6 page)

‘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!’