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
