pride in the identity he already had, and exploring the implications of that identity no matter what the consequences.
The story of John Lee Hooker’s life is, essentially, the story of his resistance to any and all attempts to change him, to dilute an intrinsic sense of self which has successfully withstood all pressures, including those of institutionalized racism, family, church and the music business. That resistance has been, at times, essentially a passive one: throughout his life, Hooker has remained polite, deferential, quiet-spoken and accommodating. Despite the occasional peevish or impatient outburst, he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t bluster, he doesn’t bully. And then finally, when absolutely no alternative remains, he quits. By which I mean: he leaves, he splits, he dusts, he’s outta there, he’s nothin’ but a cool breeze. It doesn’t matter if it’s a marriage, a record contract, a family, a home: once Hooker decides he’s had enough, that is it. No discussion, no recrimination, nothing. Just gone. And the reason he does it is to protect himself. Not because he’s callous, or cowardly. He is neither. But himself – or rather, his self – is that which makes the music, and that will be protected at all costs; yea, e’en to the ends of the earth.
So Mississippi, after all, made many people, but only one John Lee Hooker. Rather, Mississippi provided the wherewithal for John Lee Hooker to make himself. During his first fifteen or so years, Hooker took three key decisions which set him on a collision course with all the prevailing values of his family and community; he stood by those decisions and received validation beyond his wildest dreams. At a time when most people are still struggling to discover who they are, Hooker knew not only who he was, but who he wanted to be. Like all great bluesmen, Hooker is his own greatest creation, and the creation without which none of his other creations would have been possible. The ‘self-made man’ can be found somewhere near the front of the Great Book of Facile Truisms (right next to the notion that ‘you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’, in fact), but Hooker fulfils it to the nth degree. The self he chose to make is that of a man supremely fitted to sing and play the blues, and virtually little else. After all – as Henry Rollins asks – what would John Lee Hooker be doing if he wasn’t singing the blues?
If he had decided to play the game through strictly on the hand he was dealt, he would have lived and died a Delta sharecropper and nobody outside his community would ever have heard of him. What would he have had if, even without his music as the spur, he had still headed for the city? A lifetime of the kind of dead-end jobs he plied in the various cities before his artistic breakthrough: janitor, usher and so forth. The kind of jobs a man does when he has neither the physique or inclination for hard manual labour, nor the education for anything else. He could conceivably have sung gospel – which would, at least, have pleased his preacher father – but his extreme distaste for what he came to perceive as the narrow-mindedness and bigotry of the ostentatiously devout would surely have precluded that. John Lee Hooker would not be John Lee Hooker if he wasn’t singing the blues. And the blues he sings is the blues that only he can sing.
When his first hit record ‘Boogie Chillen’ was released in late 1948, it fitted easily into a burgeoning market for downhome blues. Two years earlier, the Texan bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins had bucked the existing trends by enjoying a surprise ‘race’ hit with ‘Short-Haired Woman’; one year after that Muddy Waters – a Delta-raised, Chicago-based near-contemporary of Hooker’s – had done likewise with ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’. Both records were deep-country blues with only the faintest discernible urban gloss but, by comparison with ‘Boogie Chillen’, they were downright conventional. Both used a standard twelve-bar blues structure (though Muddy, characteristically, dropped one bar in each verse) and each boasted the cleanest and clearest recorded sound that the impecunious independent record companies of the time could manage.
‘Boogie Chillen’, however, definitely proved that there was something new under the sun. Its insistent, droning one-chord vamp, driven by an obsessive, impatient foot-tapped beat as impossible to resist as a ’flu bug, harked back to the rural prehistory of the blues, a style so archaic that it seems to predate even the earliest blues recordings that can be found today. At the same time, it was contemporary and urban in a way that the Hopkins and Waters records weren’t: it seemed to crackle with electricity. Hooker’s guitar and voice were recorded with a rough, distorted electric edge, his pounding feet reverberated with the hard slap of city pavements. This was back-porch, fish-fry, house-party country blues adapted to the accelerated pace and claustrophobic ambience of the big city. The lyrics told two linked stories: one of a youth defying his parents in order to live the rockin’ life; the other of a country boy hitting the big town and deciding that it was good. Both stories were Hooker’s own: the song was an empowering parable of the experience of the thousands upon thousands of Southern migrants who had established their foothold in the big Northern cities, but the record provided the sonic metaphor for that experience. Even if you didn’t listen to the words, the record itself told you that the people of the Delta had come to the big industrial cities and become part of them without compromising the fundamentals of who they were.
On one level ‘Boogie Chillen’ was an extraordinarily simple record: a one-man show with zero chord changes, repetitive lyrics and little melody. On another, it was a work of sheer genius in which one man’s personal story deftly encapsulated the collective experience of a community in the throes of profound and far-reaching social change. Plus – in the finest traditions of what was, a little later, to become rock and roll – it had a great beat and you could dance to it. To call ‘Boogie Chillen’ a ‘hit’ is actually an understatement. Hopkins’ and Waters’ records were ‘hits’ by the standards of the time: ‘Short-Haired Woman’ sold somewhere between 60,000 and 70,000 records, and ‘Can’t Be Satisfied’ did slightly better than that. ‘Boogie Chillen’ was a smash: it sold around a million copies. It was the record that John Lee Hooker, 31 years old at the time it was recorded, had spent more than two-thirds of his life preparing to make. Or rather, he had spent more than two-thirds of his life becoming the only man who could have made it.
To choose one single mission in life and methodically unfit yourself for all else is a demonstration of the deepest, most profound faith in oneself and the promptings of one’s inner voice. To stay with that course when it seems like it’s getting you nowhere is either folly of near-suicidal proportions, or the sign of the truly dedicated. The point here is that John Lee Hooker didn’t choose to sing the blues because it was a cool career move or because he had a prophetic vision of having his music featured in TV commercials, but because singing the blues completes him, realises him, soothes him, arouses him . . . the blues is John Lee Hooker’s key not only to the highway, but to the universe. It is his means of satisfying that most powerful of all human urges: to find a means of comprehending the world around him and interpreting it to others. He does so in his own terms, through his own vision. That vision was formed in Mississippi, and has never really changed. Hooker’s own inner Mississippi travelled with him wherever he went, his own unique personal property: a Mississippi of the mind which sustained and forever defined the man whom he chose to become; a Mississippi in which the weeping scars of both the childhood Mississippi he left behind and the real, contemporary Mississippi which exists in his, and our, present have healed.
If this book could be boiled down to one sentence . . . I’d be a fool to admit it. But if, and only if, it could, that sentence would run: John Lee do not do, he be. In fact, he do as little as possible; but he be all that an artist in the twentieth century can be. His gift to us is not so much his music – monumental though that music is – but the sensibility that created that music, a sensibility which gives us the ultimate gift: a new way to see ourselves, and to experience ourselves. A new way to understand and, finally, to live with ourselves.
Chris Blackwell, the Anglo-Jamaican enterpreneur who founded Island Records and forever changed the course of popular music by promoting Bob Marley & The Wailers to an international audience, used to be fond of saying that ‘there are no facts in Jamaica’. In impeccably Jamaican style, this remark is capable of sustaining a considerable variety of interpretations. It
