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 could mean, for example, that in a society which places little value on the lives of the majority of its people, much of their existence and experience takes place away from official scrutiny, unrecorded as formalised data, but preserved as folklore and collective memory. It can also mean that the region’s ostensible political culture, and its accompanying rhetoric, bears little relation to the daily lives of its citizens, much less their inner lives. Or that, in a community which sustains a hidden world of mystical and spiritual experience behind, below and beside its orthodox religious life, anything can happen. Or even simply that only the initiated know what’s really going on, and that even if outsiders are capable of asking the right questions – i.e. questions that make sense to those questioned – the answers cannot be guaranteed to make sense to the outsider. The hidden (African) world which shares Mississippi’s 300-odd square miles with the mundane, statistical world of factuality is, to shoplift an aphorism from Carlos Castenada, a ‘separate reality’.
All of which adds up to this: that of course there are ‘facts’, but these facts explain comparatively little of what actually goes on in a culture which is, despite increasingly widespread literacy, primarily an oral one. Mississippians of African descent have little faith in so-called ‘objective’ reality: ‘facts’ tend to be part of outside descriptions of their lives; accounts of who they are into which their input has rarely been sought, and rarely accepted when proffered. So they replace these imposed facts with their own, and the distinctions between ‘truth’ and ‘folklore’ tend to blur until the distinction becomes all but meaningless. At best, it is irrelevant. This is as true of Mississippi as it is of Jamaica: Mississippi is old country, secret country, deep country. In whitebread terms, popular American mythology demands that the nation’s moral centre should coincide with its geographical centre: amidst fields of waving Midwestern corn, where adorable tow-headed children with freckles, accompanied by appropriately cute pets, forever chase baseballs and fish in the creek. This is, after all, where Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two introverted Jewish kids from the decidedly unlovely urbs of Cleveland, Ohio, chose to place the adoptive home of Superman, the American saviour from the stars. Nevertheless, the secret heart of America is located in the South: for the descendants of those who involuntarily became African-Americans, it’s where the unhappy story of their lives on this continent began, and the Mississippi Delta is the wounded heart of that South. Mississippi was the hardest of hardcore Jim Crow.
African slaves were first imported en masse into Mississippi in the 1830s, around the time that the Native American Chickasaw and Choctaw tribes were finally dispossessed. The slaves’ first task was the clearance of massive tracts of forest in order to render the land arable; their second to pick the cotton which briefly made Mississippi, in the period immediately prior to the Civil War, the wealthiest state in the Union. After the war, it became the poorest, and it shares with Alabama the dubious distinction of emerging from the Civil War as the most racist state in the Union. The worst thing that could happen to a slave would be to be ‘sold