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
