‘prisons run by sadists’. It had the richest soil and the poorest people in the nation, and it still does today. The most-famous by-product of the Civil War was the end of legal slavery and its eventual replacement by the various bits of segregationist legislation which came to be known as the ‘Jim Crow’ laws, specifically designed to reproduce slavery as closely as possible despite its technical abolition. It may seem surprising that Mississippi was rarely the first state to opt for formal adoption of each new chunk of Jim Crow; this was no indication of any comparative liberalism, but the exact reverse. In Mississippi, the substance of those laws was already common practice and there was no immediate or pressing need for their formal enshrinement in law. The etiquette of oppression crystallized into an obscene and elaborate dance: blacks and whites walked the same streets, but in different worlds. Equality under the law – or, indeed, anywhere else – wasn’t even a theory. In any case, ‘law’ was pretty much for whites only: the black experience of it was the receiving end. They had to make do with the informal protection of the local plantation boss, who would look after his workers – provided that they were in conflict with other blacks rather than with whites – simply because he needed their labour. The lives of blacks were not considered to hold any intrinsic value whatsoever. Lynching remained legal there until 1938.
‘People would get killed, beat up, shot, out in the country,’ John Lee Hooker remembers. ‘It wasn’t such a thing as the po-lice could be right there. The po-lice would get shot and killed. Your boss who owned all the land would take care of all his people. He would come out with the sheriffs, and they’d be a day gettin’ out there. It ain’t like it is now, police there in a moment or a flash if something go wrong and someone get hurt or beat up, get killed. Police right here. You way out in the country, the closest thing be the sheriff in one of those towns, and you couldn’t get to a phone, somebody had go get him. It was just olden days, you know. Nothin’ happen in a flash. Black people, Chinese people, Spanish: they wasn’t important at all. They didn’t count Spanish people as white, they counted ’em right along with us and Chinamen. There was just a very few Chinamen was there, but a lotta Spanish people. We all lived in the same area, in the same houses, shared the same things. So they had to live under the same gun that the blacks lived under. That’s the way it was.’
There was no way, says Hooker, to work around the system. ‘It was just that way, and we never thought it would change. But people had faith that one day it would change, and it did, but we never thought it would change so soon. It was a long, long time.’ By the time he or she was five or six, any black child living in the South would have already learned how he or she was supposed to act around white people. ‘They taught you that when you had the ability to talk. Your parents taught you what you had to do and what you couldn’t do. They [whites] taught they kids not to fool with us, and they taught our kids not to fool with them, so we knowed. We stayed on our own territory. My dad, we had enough land so we didn’t have to fool with them. We couldn’t mix, you know. It was pretty rough and pretty hard. I was fortunate enough to get out of it when I was that age. I was very aware of what it was, what it was like. We had no contact at all, but I knew stuff was going on. I knew some black people did get into lots of trouble, but we knew what to do and not to do; my daddy would tell us. He told me a million things. I can’t repeat just what they said, but roughly: you just got to stay in your place. You can’t do that, you can’t do that. I can’t tell you just what he said – this word and that word – but he said, “You can not mess with those people.” He kept pounding it into our heads. We knew that, we see’d that. Everybody would be in they own place.’
Except that John Lee Hooker decided that he wasn’t going to stay in his.
A certain amount of confusion exists around the precise place and date of John Lee Hooker’s birth; much of it created by Hooker himself. He’s always cited his birthday as 22 August, but the year has been variously reported as 1915, 1917, 1920 and 1923. For a while, Hooker was insistent that he was born in 1920, rather than the more commonly cited (and accurate) 1917. ‘We all was born with a midwife, which was not in a hospital. We had our records in a big old bible, our parents did, they might not have put it in a courthouse.’ Even if they had done so, it would make no difference: almost all records were destroyed in a fire which consumed the county courthouse in 1927. As it is, surviving state records contain no mention of anyone by the name of John Lee Hooker. ‘My parents, they might have been the same. I know my birthdate – August 22, 1920. I grew up knowin’ that, but they birthday I don’t know. They go way, way, way back. My mother was born in Glendora, Mississippi, and my father was born there too.’
More recently, Hooker has recovered from the spasm of age paranoia that struck him on the eve of the release of The Healer, and led him to rewrite his personal history in order to lop those three years from his age. Nowadays, he cheerfully owns up to having been, after all, born in 1917. Not that it made a hell of a lot of difference to most people that he then claimed to be 69 rather than 71 years old, but nevertheless the John Lee Hooker of today has nothing – or, at any rate, very little – to hide.
Hooker has always given his place of birth as Clarksdale, Mississippi, the nearest urban centre of any significant size. ‘That was my town that we would go to,’ as he puts it. ‘We would say, “Well, we from Clarksdale”, because that’s where [Reverend Hooker] did all his business, buy the groceries. Every weekend we would get supplies from Clarksdale, and we would go there. We run out to the candy store, get back on the wagon and go back to the country.’ In fact he was born out in the country on his father’s farm, approximately ten miles south of the city. ‘It was close to Highway 49. It went to Tutwiler and Clarksdale and Memphis,’ Hooker remembers. ‘There were many songs wrote about that Highway 49. We didn’t stray too far from that.’ ‘Clarksdale,’ blues singer Bukka White used to say, ‘is just a little old small town, but a lotta good boys bin there.’ Bessie Smith, the diva of the ‘classic’ blues of the ’20s and ’30s and according to Hooker and not a few others ‘one of the greatest blues singers ever been alive’, died there; John Lee’s younger cousin Earl Hooker, generally acknowledged as one of the finest Chicago guitarists ever to pick up a slide, claimed it as his home-town, as did Ike Turner and harmonicist/vocalist Junior Parker. The unofficial capital of the Delta, it’s the third largest city in the state and even today, after successive waves of northward migration have carried away its best, brightest and most ambitious youth, it boasts a population of over 20,000.
Glendora is a tiny hamlet some twenty-five miles along Highway 49 from Clarksdale: it earns its place in the blues history books as the birthplace of Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, best known as the second of the two major singer/harmonicists who used the name Sonny Boy Williamson. John Lee’s mother, the former Minnie Ramsey, was born there in 1875; his father, William Hooker, a decade or so earlier. The Civil War wasn’t ‘history’ yet – in some parts of the South, it still isn’t – and the shadow of slavery lay heavy across both their births.
Hooker recalls being one of ten children, but as his nephew Archie gleans from his own studies of the family history, ‘I always thought there was thirteen of ’em, but some died. See, what happened was . . . stillbirth you don’t count.’ John Lee’s older brothers were William, Sam and Archie; the younger boys were Dan, Jesse and Isaac; and John Lee’s sisters were Sis, Alice, Sarah and Doll Baby.
‘Doll Baby’s name was Mary,’ opines Archie. ‘One of them’s supposed to have been blind. I think it was Aunt Mary. I think she was the last sister that died. She was the oldest child. They wouldn’t use names. They would use nicknames. Sis might be Mary.’ Minnie kept on having children until she was nearly 50; this, according to Archie, was not uncommon. ‘Womens were different [then]. They could have kids and two days later be back in the fields. More kids you had, the more crops you could produce. Simple. And every one of them had big families.’
The family lived and worked on what Hooker remembers as ‘a big farm, close to a hundred acres’, which would put the Hookers into whatever passed for the middle classes of the Delta. Slightly more than half of the farms in the region were 80 acres or smaller, while 30 per cent were over 300 acres, and the very largest spread to as much as 2,000 acres. ‘It was an old wooden house with a tin-top roof, but we was comfortable, you know, we had a lot