Trade Centre, like the building which houses radio station WROX, where blues and gospel DJ Early Wright spins Little Milton and Bobby Bland records and thunders out community news and commercials for local businesses – everything is quiet, blanketed in a silence so deep it seems to have remained unbroken forever. This is a place with few distractions; a place where people have no option but to face themselves head-on; to come to some kind of accommodation with their thoughts, with their feelings, and their circumstances. Anyone failing to reach such an accommodation has no options other than to go crazy or else to get out.
This is where you find the richest soil and the poorest people in the USA. The richest soil: a rusty loam sufficiently fertile and welcoming to nourish just about anything you care to put in it. When it’s been raining for a while, the terrain can look as if all the blood spilt there has started bubbling back up. The poorest people: everything in Mississippi is cheap. A shirt, a guitar, a meal, a bottle of beer, a packet of cigarettes, a motel room: they’ll all cost you less than you’d have to pay just about anywhere else in the US. That’s because people around here have proportionately less money than elsewhere in the US. The horses and mules have disappeared, replaced by tractors and BluesMobiles: battered cars with mismatched doors, eczema-scabbed with rust, kept running by faith and ingenuity alone. The shacks which appear so ‘picturesque’ and ‘authentic’ in old photos and on the covers of reissue blues albums look quite different up close on a wet afternoon in Vance. And the spectacle of ten members of one family – three generations ranging from squalling babe-in-arms to wheezing grandmother – crammed into a three-room trailer hoisted up on cinder blocks off to the side of a dirt road makes a complete and utter mockery of the American Dream. These people haven’t failed: they’ve been betrayed.
John Lee Hooker is easily the most famous person ever to come out of Vance. Indeed, he’s the only famous person – ’nuff respect both to Snooky Pryor, a fine musician if not exactly a household name, and to Andrew ‘Sunnyland Slim’ Luandrew, a founding father of Chicago blues piano – the poor burg ever produced. As such, the locals are keen to claim him as one of their own, even though their reminiscences – such as they are, having been filtered through half a century of local folklore – are vague to the point of utter insubstantiality. The church where Rev. William Hooker used to preach, has long burned down. Some of those as yet undesecrated graves near St Mark’s carry the names of members of the families whom Hooker recalls as his childhood neighbours: Cage, Hardman and Johnson, plus one or two Pryors from Snooky’s clan; but ‘Hooker Hill’, where John Lee’s family was buried, has long since vanished into Mississippi limbo; dumped into the bayou during the late ’60s. If we could magically materialize John Lee Hooker at our sides, there’s nothing here, other than the imposing English-style mansion that dominates the virtually empty landscape, which he would recognize.
Slavery was replaced by Jim Crow, Jim Crow displaced in its turn by a statutory equality which nowadays means little more than the right to share an endemic poverty side by side. The old South has gone, taking with it both the institutionalized racism of old, and the warm, yeasty sense of family and community which enabled the descendants of kidnapped Africans to withstand the depredations of a society explicitly constructed not only to keep them under but to discourage them from ever looking up. The new South which was supposed to replace it may have manifested elsewhere in the region – in the proud metropolis of Atlanta, for example – but it never arrived in Mississippi. It wasn’t until 1995 that the state finally got around to passing the anti-slavery laws into the statute books.
‘John Lee’s from Mississippi,’ says Archie, in case anyone should need reminding. ‘Most people that came from Mississippi want to forget it . . . or escape. It’s like a bad nightmare, and most of ’em want to try and sleep it off, sleep it away.’
‘Leaving a place when you’re fourteen [sic], it’s pretty hard at my age to say, “It were right there.”’ confesses Hooker. ‘Things change so. Back then, the big white man had all the land, acres and acres and hundreds of acres and stuff like that. Now it’s all cut up and sold, and all them farmers ain’t there no more. It’s farming, but everybody got they own thing. Everything is equal down there now. It is equal, so it’s cut up, the land is taken. If I went to Detroit now, I’d get so turned around with all these buildings tore down . . . Mississippi probably worse, because they done took all the land from all the big old rich people, and the government took it and made everybody equal, cut it up and said, “This is yours, build on this.” The mules, they gone. They got tractors, they got different things. It’s so turned around down there. It’s a different world. All that’s tore down. There’s apartment buildings where them old houses used to be. People done say, “Mr Hooker, you wouldn’t know where nothin’ at, you went down there now.” I was down in Greenville, Mississippi, and everything was so different. I played down there: Greenville, Dublin, Drew-Mississippi, Jackson . . . it’s built up, and there ain’t no big fields, no cotton belts down there. It’s fields, but everybody got they own little patch, sharecroppers got they own land. So all them old houses are gone. Them old houses? Shoot, man, they gone. It’s history.’
Vance remains helplessly suspended between a painful past and a threatening future. If it was my hometown, I wouldn’t want to go back there, either. Neither would you. Maybe this goes some way towards explaining why, whenever a movie about the Deep South – be it Gone with the Wind, The Color Purple or Mississippi Burning – shows up on television, John Lee Hooker reaches for the remote control, and switches channels.
3
THE REAL FOLK BLUES?
The Mississippi Delta is land both created and shaped by its river. Ambiguous union of fluid and firm, the delta is a liquid land where life responds to both tidal and freshwater urgings. The processes of creation have been going on for a long time here . . . there is about the delta something original, primeval. We look to the delta for many of the oldest continuing life forms . . .
Barbara Cannon, from Mississippi River: A Photographic Journey
[The blues is] the only thing after all these years that still sounds fresh to me. The serious old blues guys get it from somewhere else, it seems to me, and that’s what I want to know about.
Eric Clapton, interviewed in the Guardian
I guess all songs is folk songs – I never heard no horse sing ’em.
Big Bill Broonzy, possibly apocryphal
In 1966, during a brief hiatus between lengthy stints with the Chicago independent label Vee Jay Records and the New York-based major ABC, John Lee Hooker allowed himself a brief dalliance with Chess Records, to whom some of his Detroit sides had been leased a dozen or so years earlier. The sole product of this union was one album: The Real Folk Blues, a title loaded with ambiguities. For a start, Chess released it as a companion volume to a series of albums by three stalwarts of its 1950s electric-downhome roster: Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters and Sonny Boy Williamson. However, the Williamson, Wolf and Waters Real Folk Blues entries were all compilations of previously uncollected singles, whereas Hooker’s album was derived from sessions recorded specifically for album release. Moreover, the use of the Real Folk Blues title was little more than a marketing device, since the music on the album consisted entirely of the kind of rocking small-band electric blues which Hooker had recorded between 1955 and 1964 for Vee Jay, Chess’s principal Chicago rival, providing them with hits like ‘Dimples’ and ‘Boom Boom’ during the late ’50s and early ’60s. The Waters, Wolf and Williamson collections had assembled 45s recorded for Chess’s traditional core clientele – working-class Southern-born blacks, either relocated to the great metropolitan centres or still resident ‘down home’ – and repackaged them for a newly developing audience: white teenagers whose interest in blues had been piqued by the success of the Rolling Stones and other long-haired, blues-based white acts. Some of these newfound customers perceived and experienced blues as a revered ancestor of rock and others as a subset of ‘folk music’, but both factions were linked, above all else, by a shared craving for ‘authenticity’, for a more profound set of human values and a higher degree of