an argument, nor – for that matter – even with an argument. To Hooker, his illiteracy is what provides him with the sensitivity to sonic detail and emotional nuance which he needs to make his music, and he defends it fiercely. ‘I see people right today got college educations, all kinds of different degrees, can’t even get a job. Back then too, they couldn’t get a job. It wouldn’t have made, I feel, too many difference. I had to work my way up, do little jobs, until I got to the big man who could open the door for me because I know I had the music. I know I had the talent. I know I was good. I knew it, but I knew I had to work up to find someone to open that door for me to come in. I was knockin’ on the door, but wasn’t nobody there to say, “Come in.” No matter how much education I didn’t have, that book education didn’t have what was in here’ – he taps his chest – ‘and in here’ – he taps his head. ‘I could’ve been a professor, but I repeat myself to you and to whoever read this book after I’m gone: you cannot get what I got, out of a book. You got to have a talent.
‘I never change, and I won’t change. When I did “The Healer”, the first take was it. Live with the band. The first take was the best one. We did two, but we played it over and over and decided that the first take was it. I can train my voice directly to whatever they play. I can fit my voice into anything, directly like a lock and key, come out with the right words and bars, just lock right in there, automatic. No schoolin’, no readin’, because I don’t have that. But I have the talent. Let me put it this way. Ray Charles, for instance, and Stevie Wonder, they don’t read and write ’cause they can’t see, right? But both of them are genius.’ Against such rock-solid conviction, though, it cuts very little ice to point out that both Charles and Wonder taught themselves to read and write fluent Braille. ‘Yeah, right,’ Hooker grudgingly concedes. ‘Ye-e-e-e-s. But they can’t see. I can see, but . . . I don’t believe in no paper. Take your paper, stick a match to it. My paper’s right in here, and in here. I lay down at night, and a song will come to me. I can be talkin’ to you, and you can say things, and I can make a song out of it.’
As John Lee was reaching his adolescence, serendipity struck again, this time in fairly baleful disguise: Rev. Hooker and the former Minnie Ramsey decided to split up. John never learned why, and he knew better than to ask. ‘They weren’t involved; kids can tell that. We’d know when they was arguin’, we’d see it, but we couldn’t get in and say, “You stop it.” But we knew what was goin’ on, that they weren’t getting along. I repeat, we didn’t get into they business. We knew that they was arguin’ about something that wasn’t right, but we didn’t know who was right and who was wrong. They were very strict on kids in them days. We was raised better: my sisters wasn’t even allowed to date until they was nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.’
In her mid-fifties, Minnie Hooker found herself a new man. He was a local sharecropper named Will Moore, originally from Shreveport, Louisiana, and – like Rev. Hooker – some ten or twelve years Minnie’s senior. As might be expected in the days before ‘family meetings’ and ‘quality time’, John Lee remains unclear about exactly when and where Moore and Minnie first met, or the precise circumstances under which their relationship began. ‘Kids at that time didn’t have their nose into the old peoples’ business, like it is now. Kids in them days, if they put they nose into they parents’ business, they was told that they get a whuppin’ like they never had in they life, you know. They didn’t allow them to sneak around finding what old people was doin’ and what they was up to, stuff like that. They was more stricter on kids; they were raised better. We was raised to be obedient to old people, say yes-ma’am and no-sir. Not yes and no, but yes-ma’am and no-sir. And mind our business and stay out of theirs. That’s why I don’t know how they met.’
The breakup of his parents’ marriage led to the second key decision of John Lee’s life. In many ways, it was the most important choice he ever made. He had come to his first crossroad when he opted to pursue the guitar rather than school and church; and the second appeared before him when William and Minnie separated. Whereas all his brothers and sisters elected to stay with their father, John chose to leave with his mother and take Will Moore to be his stepfather. The main reason was that Will Moore played guitar, and he was a bluesman through and through. He was a popular entertainer at local dances and parties, and would appear alongside the likes of Charley Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson whenever they were performing in the area. ‘I was fourteen. My real father, he didn’t want the guitar in the house. He called it devil music. My stepfather Will Moore, he played guitar what I’m playing now. I learned from what he played: that’s what he played, what I’m playing right now, identical to his style. I went to play my guitar. I didn’t go because I wasn’t treated right; I was treated pretty good. I left because I couldn’t play my guitar in the house, and he didn’t mind me going to my mother’s. I told him, “Dad, I wanna stay with my mom.”’
The Reverend considered the departure of his son to be a sign of failure on his part, but on one thing at least, he and John Lee were in complete agreement. If John insisted on living where he was allowed to play his guitar indoors, he had to go. ‘Well, you know how church people are. He loved the heck outta us, he would give his right arm for us. They believed in the church, in God, in the Lord, and he didn’t want his son . . . he felt that I was givin’ myself to the Devil. He didn’t want me to do that, and that’s they way of thinkin’. He felt like he wasn’t doin’ nothin’ wrong, he felt that he could guide me the right way. That was the way he lived, and he wanted all his children to be churchgoing people. But my mother had as much authority over me as he did, and he said, “You go live with your mom and her husband, if that’s the way you wanna go. You welcome to stay here, but you just cannot do this in the house.”’ Mrs Hooker felt differently. ‘Well, my mother was open-hearted, very open. She wanted me to do what I wanted to do best, because she felt that if I was forced to go to church, it wouldn’t be for real. So she said, “I’m not gonna force you. If this is what you wanna do, you and Will go ahead and I won’t object.”’
Will Moore gave his new stepson his next guitar: an old mail-order Stella to replace Tony Hollins’s battered gift. Moore became John Lee Hooker’s spiritual and artistic father-figure: the father who approved, the father who encouraged, the father who supported, the father who empowered. William Hooker had loved John dearly and raised him according to the best and finest principles he knew, but an unbridgeable abyss lay between them. With all his heart, the Reverend hated, feared and despised that which John Lee wanted, above all else, to become. Inevitably, a battle would have been fought for the erring son’s immortal soul, and whatever the outcome, both father and son would have been irreparably damaged by the conflict. Will Moore appeared when he was needed, and he gave John more than a beat-up guitar and a home with a room of his own in which to play it: he gave him the means to become the man whom he wanted to be.
He gave him the boogie.
Master bluesmen have traditionally adopted ‘sons’ to be schooled in the craft, ethos and lore of the blues. ‘You like my son,’ Muddy Waters famously told a young Buddy Guy one chilly ’50s night in Chicago. Guy, scarcely out of his teens, was fresh up from Louisiana, green as swamp moss, with little more to his name than the Stratocaster with which he was looking to carve up the Southside bars. This particular night, Buddy hadn’t eaten for almost three days. A cutting contest with Otis Rush and Magic Sam was scheduled for that night, and Buddy was so hungry he couldn’t hardly stand up. Then Muddy Waters appears out of nowhere. He sends out for bread and salami. With his own hands, he makes a sandwich. He offers it to the ravenous Buddy. Buddy says no. That’s when Muddy slaps him in the face. That’s when Muddy tells him, ‘You like my son.’ That’s when Buddy eats the sandwich.
That’s when Buddy wins the contest.
Throughout the story of the blues, there are countless examples of such ‘adoptions’. Son House ‘fathered’ both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Sonny Boy Williamson II and Howlin’ Wolf both, at different times, ‘adopted’ James Cotton. Little Walter took Junior Wells as his ‘son’. Later on, Albert King ‘adopted’ Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Albert Collins Robert Cray. These relationships involve more than simply tuition, though tuition is indeed