music alike, and he played hard, too. ‘He and my husband were both big drinkers,’ says Bernethia Bullock. ‘My husband and Johnny and the gang that they were with would come home some nights and I didn’t want the kids to know that my husband had been drinking, so I would sit up and wait for him to come in, and steer him to the bedroom. Sunday morning when they’d wake up, we’d get up, take the kids to church and they didn’t know he’d even had a drink. Sometimes five o’clock in the morning, I didn’t want the neighbours to see ’em coming in. I said, “God, what you going to say about y’all struggling in here at five o’clock in the morning?” He said, “Ain’t nothing they can say, we just been out of town, just getting back in.” It didn’t make Maude no difference, she said some of the time she’d be one place and Johnny would be another and it didn’t make any difference, because she was a nightlifer herself. Me not being a nightlifer, you know, it kind of worried me . . . it was just a little embarrassing to see them coming in that time of morning.’
Initially, Maude Hooker claims, she didn’t make too much of a fuss about her husband’s new project. ‘Not at the beginning, because I knew that he would have to be workin’ here and there and be out half the night. I understood that and I went along with that, you know. As my kids were born, I stayed home and tried to raise them to the best of my knowledge, that I could. Afterwards it got kinda hard, after the rest of the kids was born.’ Her brother Paul recalls that she wasn’t always quite that sanguine. ‘I recollect a little party, just before he started making records, at this lady’s house – the one that I was friendly with, Lucinda – John was playin’ and we was havin’ a good time. Oh, we was really havin’ a good time. And Maude came in and said, “C’mon John, let’s go.” Well, John was havin’ a good time, and John wasn’t ready to go, so Maude promptly yanked the guitar out of his hands and hit it ’cross the amplifier and broke it into smithereens. She tore it into splinters. I don’t think it was so much that she disapproved of his playing. The disapproval was that there was women there. There was women there, you know what I mean, and they shakin’ it, you know what I mean, and he’s playin’, and that was the disapproval.’
By 1948, John Lee was beginning to make some real headway. This was just as well, since his and Maude’s second child, Vera, was born on 1 April of that year. He’d also graduated to playing an occasional show at Lee’s Sensation, a slightly more upmarket club than his usual Black Bottom venues. ‘It was a kind of a swinging, classy joint, not really a blues bar’, according to Eddie Burns. ‘Lee’ was the name of the owner and ‘Sensation’ was the name of the club – as Burns remembers it, anyway – but over the years the names of bar and boss have fused to the point where most people, including Hooker, remember both simply as ‘Lee Sensation’. ‘“The Lee Sensation Bar.” That was a nightclub. Nice nightclub, oh yeah. I used to play there for Lee Sensation. That was a high-class club. I played there, I thought I was in heaven. I thought I’d never get to play there. That was on Oakland, on the north end of Detroit. Lee Sensation, he named his club after his name. That was before I recorded . . . that was a long time ago. I wasn’t too famous then. I’d been wanting to play in that bar for a long time, but nothin’ but big people played there, big names and stuff like that. T-Bone Walker and Ivory Joe Hunter, Jackie Wilson, people like that . . . big people. I was so famous around town that he booked me in there.
‘It was just a matter of findin’ the break. I got discovered out of a little bar by my manager Elmer Barbee. He was a very good person, very smart. He was mixed Indian and black; very nice, very honest person. He knew how to get ’em. He the one discovered me, playin’ around night clubs, little honkytonk bars, house parties. I had a little trio, I was playing electric guitar.’ Before Maude broke it, one assumes. The trio was filled out by pianist James Watkin and drummer Curtis Foster, two musicians who could adapt to Hooker’s rough-hewn, rural approach. ‘I was playing a little bar called the Apex Bar on Monroe Street, and I was the talk of the town. Little John Lee Hooker, they would be callin’ me. And he come in there. He made a special trip to come in that bar and see me. He had never seen me, but he had heard of me. He had a little record store on San Antoine and Lafayette, 609 Lafayette, which is long gone. The building was tore down years gone. He was livin’ in the back with his wife and son, and he come down to that place and saw me and he said, “Kid, come down to my record shop. I’m a manager, and you are the best I ever heard.” I said, “Yeah?” and I did, I went down there, and I went on about six months to a year, just recordin’ in the back of his place.’
‘There was this record store called Barbee’s,’ says Paul Mathis, ‘with a little studio in the back, and he would go down and try to play, and then nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and try to make another record and nothin’ never would happen, and he’d go back and make another record and nothin’ never would happen.’
‘Nobody knew John Lee Hooker ’cept playin’ at little clubs, no record, nothin’,’ says Hooker. ‘The clubs were packed every night with people wantin’ to see me, but I wasn’t known in the States. I come down to [Barbee’s] place one Wednesday, and we started recordin’ and talkin’ all night, drinkin’ wine and goin’ over these different tunes, ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘Hobo Blues’. Finally, he taken me downtown on Woodward Avenue with all this material to a big place like Tower Records, and the guy had a little label called Sensation . . . Bernie Besman and Johnny Kaplan. They was partners, both of them was big wheels, and they heard the stuff and they went wild and they recorded me.’
‘Do you want me to tell you how Hooker got into the picture?’ asks Bernard Besman expansively. ‘I didn’t look for him; he just happened to come in. One of the dealers that we had brought him in. His name was Barbee.’
To John Lee Hooker, still a country boy at heart despite his years in the big city, Elmer Barbee – or ‘E’ Barbee, as he was also known – was a person of some consequence. To the considerably more worldly Besman, whose business had a million-dollar annual turnover, Barbee was simply ‘a very small record dealer who had a store. These people would come in every day bringing in artists. Barbee said, “Here, I have a terrific blues singer for you and I’d like you to hear him.” He brought John by in person, and he brought a record that John had made in one of those auto . . . those music-machine booths . . . a record made in this quarter machine. I think I got it some where, but I don’t know where it is. I haven’t lost it, because we keep everything. I listened to the record, and it was already practically worn out, and you could hardly hear anything on it. Anyway, he sang “Sally Mae” on that thing, a blues number, and I’d never recorded a blues artist up to that time. Although we were selling the blues and I was familiar with the blues, he didn’t sound like any of the blues artists we were selling. The blues we were selling at that time were like Johnny Moore’s Three Blazers with Charles Brown, T-Bone Walker . . . twelve bars, you know. This was something altogether different that I frankly didn’t understand.
‘On top of that, when he sat talking to me, he stuttered. I figured, “Jesus, how can this guy sing for stuttering?” I didn’t believe it was him. I thought, “This guy must be lying. He’s not singing here. This must be a fake.” So I said to Elmer Barbee, “Okay, next time I have a session, bring him over and I’ll make a dub at the studio with him.” So that’s what happened. The reason I recorded him was the fact that he could sing and not stutter. Otherwise I wouldn’t have recorded him. He didn’t mean anything to me.’
Not surprisingly, Hooker remembers these events from a very different perspective. ‘Me, I brought [Besman] a long ways,’ he says. ‘A long ways. He had a little old label named Sensation Records, a little label right there in Detroit, on Woodward Avenue. Barbee brought me in the store there. I had never met Bernie, I didn’t know him from Adam. Me and Barbee played all those tunes [‘Sally Mae’, ‘Boogie Chillen’ et al] for him and Kaplan right there in the store. Barbee had come in and said, “Man, I got a kid. Discover this kid.” [Besman] know Barbee real good, they was good friends. “Sally Mae”, yeah. Me and Barbee did that in a studio on Lafayette and St Antoine; he had a record store.
