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
