and early adolescence coincided with the first great boom in blues recording: in strict chronological terms, this places him squarely in the centre of the generation of musicians who dominated the first wave of postwar blues. Again, that 1920 birthdate would have made him five years younger than Muddy Waters or Willie Dixon and five years older than B.B. King; ten years younger than T-Bone Walker and Howlin’ Wolf and ten years older than Otis Spann and Bobby Bland; twenty or more years younger than Leadbelly or Blind Lemon Jefferson or Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, the man best known as the second Sonny Boy Williamson . . . but here the analogy begins to break down, because the generation of bluesmen born between the mid-’30s and the mid-’40s is the one which begins with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and takes in the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. Let’s leave it with this: had he really been born in 1920, Hooker would have been thirty-five years younger than Leadbelly, and thirty-five years older than Stevie Ray Vaughan.
As Hooker himself would put it, ‘At that time there wasn’t no songwriters, there wasn’t no publishers, nothin’. They just made songs up in the cotton fields and stuff like this.’ Needless to say, there wasn’t no recording studios, neither, so information about what the blues sounded like before it was first recorded is, by definition, anecdotal. We know who first copyrighted the basic blues themes, but that doesn’t tell us an awful lot of about who might have originally created them. Staples like ‘Catfish Blues’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, ‘Walkin’ Blues’ or ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” certainly long predate their earliest recorded manifestations, and each exist in numerous variations, none of which could with any certainty be described as ‘earlier’ or ‘more authentic’ than the others. Virtually every Delta singer had his (only very rarely ‘her’) distinctive personal version of the standard fistful of guitar or piano riffs and lyrical motifs. Generally, blues tyros learned from an older singer in their neighbourhood, who may well have learned it either from one of the many itinerant bluesmen who would pass through the saloons, levee camps or plantations, or from a city-based performer taking a swing through the South with a tent show.
Hooker’s earliest musical experiences came through the oral tradition: from direct contact with Tony Hollins, who taught him his first chords and songs, and from Will Moore, who gave him the boogie. Hollins was a professional bluesman, though not a particularly successful one, who travelled the highways and by-ways of the South and eventually wound up in Chicago; Will Moore was a popular and respected player among his local community, but was never recorded. Hollins’s only direct legacy is a fistful of songs cut in Chicago between 1941 and 1951which, at the time of writing, mostly remain unreissued – including some which, like ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ and ‘Crosscut Saw’, became ‘standards’ only through other artists’ recorded versions. Moore, as previously noted, never recorded at all. Hooker was their only direct inheritor. He eagerly imbibed songs and ideas from whatever early blues recordings came his way, but his most profoundly formative influences came from direct, face-to-face encounters with musicians who had themselves learned their stuff the hard way, the old way, the traditional way: from their elders, the elders who were themselves the first generation of bluesmen.
They were his folk. According to the online thesaurus thoughtfully provided by Microsoft as part of my word-processing software, ‘folk’ is not only synonymous with ‘clan’, ‘kith’ and ‘family’, but also with ‘house’, ‘kindred’, ‘lineage’ and ‘race’. The Concise Oxford Dictionary goes a little further: its primary definition of ‘folk’ cites ‘a people’ and ‘a nation’.
The music [blues] is not indigenous to a time or place, it’s indigenous to the people.
Taj Mahal, quoted in Tom Nolan’s
liner note to Taj’s first album, 1968
That stuff [the blues] transcends music and gets into realms of language. It goes beyond good taste into religion.
Frank Zappa, interviewed in Musician
Maybe our forefathers couldn’t keep their language together when they were taken away, but this – the blues – was a language we invented to let people know that we had something to say. And we’ve been saying it pretty strongly ever since.
B.B. King speaking at
Lagos University, 1973;
quoted in Valerie Wilmer’s
Mama Said There’d Be Days Like This
Listen to the blues, and it will tell you its own story. It will tell you who it is, what it is, and how it came to be: who made it, and why. The details of the precise circumstances of how this music came to exist are present in its every nuance, just as DNA, the basic source code of life itself, is present in each and every molecule of each and every organic entity.
It is the story of millions of people – men, women and children – who are forcibly abducted from their native lands. As an integral part of this process, they are separated not only from their families and friends, but from anybody else who speaks the particular language of their tribe and region. They are crammed like cargo into rotting, leaky ships headed for a variety of destinations; chained in the dark for weeks fed on scraps, sluiced with unclean water, left to wallow in their own excrement. Invariably, over half of the captives imprisoned in each vessel die of disease, malnutrition and maltreatment during each long journey to their new homes. Many of them are forced to lie chained to the decaying dead for days on end. Periodically the sick, the dead and the dying are simply pitched overboard to take their chances with the sharks. Once docked in the particular one of these new ‘homes’ with which we are specifically concerned here, they are not only sold into servitude, but subjected to a process designed to strip them systematically of everything they own and everything they are, leaving them with nothing other than their capacity for physical labour and their ability to reproduce. Denied the use of their own languages, they are taught only enough of their captors’ language to enable them to comprehend and obey simple commands. As with their languages, their own spiritual beliefs are withheld from them. They are taught only as much of their captors’ religion as is judged necessary to convince them to accept their new status: somewhere just below the lowest rung of humanity.
Their new masters were often, in their own terms, highly religious and deeply spiritual men. As such, they would have encountered severely distressing ethical and moral dilemmas if they were required to enslave those whom they considered to be their fellow humans and spiritual equals. On the other hand, in order to found the new society – indeed, the New World – which they believed was theirs by divine right and manifest destiny, they desperately needed the labour which slavery would provide. So, in order to salve their consciences, they justify this ‘peculiar institution’ with a cunning and sophisticated variety of arguments. Since there are minor physiological differences between captors and slaves – the enslaved peoples have darker skin, more crisply textured hair, thicker lips and broader noses – it is suggested that they are not actually human beings, but some sort of humanoid animal, or great ape, entitled to no better treatment than any other beast of the field or jungle. Others regard this view as overly cynical. They prefer to believe that these unfortunate creatures are indeed humans; albeit of some degenerate variety, so dreadfully backward and savage that enslavement – of their minds as well as their bodies – provides the best possible way to wean them from their primitive ways, and lead them by the hand into the civilized world. To achieve this laudable end requires nothing less than the enforced induction of a kind of collective amnesia. They are Adam and Eve reborn, the juices of the forbidden fruit still dripping from their chops. Its seductive flavour must be cleansed from their palates; its tainted knowledge erased from their minds. The masters have a similar attitude to the native peoples of the land which they have colonized; the majority of these are exterminated, the remainder herded onto reservations often far from their home territories, and their lands confiscated to serve the needs of those better qualified to inhabit and cultivate them.
Naturally, the slaves pay a price for the unsolicited gift of the civilizing process. They are denied their languages, and the right to language; denied their beliefs, and the right to those beliefs; denied family, and the right to family; denied culture, and the right to culture; denied their