London, but come morning the pressure begins to build, as the limo noses through Long Island under gunmetal skies, en route to the Wantagh resort of Jones Beach. The ensemble is decanted into a courtyard ringed with small, cell-like dressing-rooms: Hooker and his crew here, Etta James and her team next door, the Robert Cray Band across the way, and B.B. King’s posse somewhere over there. Hooker’s has a puddly shower as its annex: Cupp and Fischer, who use it as their changing-room, must be grateful for their high-heeled shoes. The bands and crew, preparations more or less complete, lounge around the courtyard, chomping their way through the backstage catering, and beginning to shiver in their summer clothes. Outside, Hurricane Bob is closing in on the New York area, and the blues lovers of Wantagh, Long Island, huddle damply and resentfully in their rainwear, awaiting performances by Hooker, King, Cray and the gargantuan James, and slapping irritably at the clouds of mosquitos which boil around them, intoxicated by the scent of fresh prey. The air is thick and humming with the sense that something is about to happen. ‘They don’t give this old boy nuthin’,’ complains Hooker, reclining mock-mournfully on his dressing-room sofa. ‘No radio, no TV, can’t watch no baseball . . .’
The show is the standard set which Hooker and his gentlemen and ladies performed the day before, and the day before that, but this time it’s different. The Newport show, apart from that stunning performance of ‘Highway 13’, was sunny, in every sense of the word; this one is stormy, ominous, full of foreboding. Cupp’s curtain-raising ‘Cold Cold Feeling’ is as appropriate a prologue as any novelist or movie director could have chosen, and she rises to the occasion: singing her heart out before striding back to the wings through the mosquitoes, chest heaving, as Hooker emerges to commence the main event. This time, he rides the building storm to the final explosive boogie climax. Afterwards, the team dissolves into its component parts: Cupp is commencing a new day job the following Monday and thus will travel back to San Francisco with the band, but since Hooker has a few days’ business in New York City, Lizz Fischer has been asked to stay on in order to keep him company. New to the organisation and unfamiliar with its ways, she is a trifle concerned. Naturally, she is thrilled, but nevertheless she worries about exactly what such companionship will entail and what she might be expected to . . . umm . . . Just a few minutes ahead of the relentless downpour which will, the following day, have the flood warnings out on every radio station, John Lee Hooker rolls into Manhattan in a long black limousine. He will give a handful of interviews and, in a week of hurricanes, celebrate what he will claim to be his 71st birthday.
‘When I die, they’ll bury the blues with me,’ he states proudly to a well-wisher at the exit. ‘But the blues will never die.’
2
BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, TAKE A LETTER DOWN SOUTH FOR ME
In my mind, music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at McDonalds?
Henry Rollins, interviewed in Rolling Stone
Alabama’s got me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi . . .
Goddam!
Nina Simone, from Mississippi Goddam
I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.
John Lee Hooker,
interviewed in Melody Maker, October 1964
So how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen the big city? Some people just can’t wait to get out of the country, feel some pavement under their feet, scrape the mud off their boots and morph, as smoothly as possible, into urban slickers ready to parade their new-found sophistication at the expense of the rubes fresh off the latest bus from down home. Every big city is full of people from the sticks or the ’burbs who’ve taken on urban coloration like so many concrete chameleons, shedding their country skins, going native on Broadway or in Hollywood, pumped and cranked all the way up, and primed to mud-wrestle the locals for that big-town pay-cheque. For others, the basic fact of who they are changes not one iota no matter where they may find themselves.
John Lee Hooker left the Mississippi Delta whilst still in the turbulence of adolescence. Nevertheless, Mississippi never left him. Though he’s lived in major conurbations – first Cincinnati, then Detroit, then Oakland, California, and finally the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area – ever since reaching his late teens, he remains a quintessential man of the Delta. His slow, deliberate drawl has never revved itself up to city speed. His manners are still country-courtly. His fondness for traditional Southern food remains unaffected by the temptations of any exotic delicacies from Europe, Asia or, come to that, anywhere else you could name. He’s seen it all and he’s not terribly impressed, but he’s far too much the country gentleman to give offence.
The Delta formed his voice, and he in turn became the voice of the Delta: the very incarnation of the traditional culture of its African diaspora; a king in voluntary exile. However, the suggestion that ‘Mississippi made him’ would be an outrageous oversimplification. There is only so much for which purely sociological heredity-and-environment hypotheses will account; there is no process, no set of circumstances, which can truly be said to ‘explain’ John Lee Hooker. We can certainly state without fear of significant contradiction that the ‘environment’ of the Mississippi Delta not only produced considerably more than its fair share of blues singers, but was most probably the spawning ground of the primal blues from which all the different varieties of blues-as-we-know-it ultimately derived. The blues of the Delta is the oldest, deepest blues there is; it therefore creates no major rupture of the laws of probability to propose that the Mississippi Delta (as opposed to, say, Surrey, England) would produce the artist with the most profound ability to tap into that primal blues, and the chromatic range of human emotions it explores. Even within the small community in which Hooker spent his formative years, two of his former playmates became blues singers and good ones at that: but not great ones. We can also discard immediate heredity: even considering the complex interaction between the two primary factors of heredity and environment fails to take us significantly further forward. John Lee Hooker came from a large family, but none of his many brothers and sisters became professionally successful blues singers, though his younger cousin Earl did. ‘I was different from any of my family, as night and day,’ he says today, ‘I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em.’
This is, of course, the big question. Why was Hooker ‘so different from the rest of ’em’? Of course, almost every person who becomes successful and famous and admired grows up amongst ‘normal’ people (read: people who don’t). Statistically it could hardly be otherwise, even if – in the cable and satellite era – it now seems impossible that anybody at all will be able to live through an entire lifetime without being seen, at least once, on television. It also seems as if every successful person elects to strive for that success from a very young age. Yet John Lee Hooker came up at a time when the majority (read: white) culture had decided that the sons and daughters of black Southern sharecroppers were not supposed even to entertain the possibility that they could escape their fate and take control of their own lives. Their culture was so ‘primitive’ that, by the standards of the times into which Hooker was born, it barely qualified as culture at all. The ‘leaders’ of the black communities, in their turn, decided that blacks not only could but most definitely would ‘make progress’ despite white opposition, but they would do so by self-improvement, by proving their worth to a society which treated them as though they were worthless. By dint of sobriety and study; they would haul themselves, hand
