Boogie Man (10 page)

‘I wrote to [the family] a coupla times,’ says John Lee, ‘wrote ’em a letter an’ we got a good response back. They were glad to hear from me,
glad that I was doin’ all right. Very glad to hear from me before she died. She died when I was livin’ in Detroit, thirty-five or forty years ago. I forgot what time it was at. He died
before she did. He was way up in age, about ten, twelve years older than my mother. She was seventy-five when she died. My father lived to be a hundred and two. A very strong man.’

Allowing for John Lee’s shaky maths – neither Reverend Hooker nor Will Moore survived into their eighties – one can only concur that he’d have had to be.

Today Vance, Mississippi, just about qualifies as a one-horse town. To reach it, you follow Highway 49 south out of Clarksdale, through Matson, and through Dublin. When you
reach Tutwiler, turn onto Highway 3 and pretty soon you’re in Vance, on the Quitman/Tallahatchie county line. The post office and the general store are on your left, and the mansion which was
once the headquarters of the old Fewell plantation on your right. Then you pass a few shacks and trailers on each side of the road, and the graveyard adjoining St Mark’s Baptist Church,
containing those few remaining graves which haven’t yet been ploughed over. A couple of seconds later, you’re out the other side,
en route
to Lambert, Marks and the junction with
Highway 6. John Lee Hooker sighs heavily when he thinks of Vance. ‘Yeah. Zoom-zoom, right through. There’s nothin’ there. It’ll never grow into nothin’.’

Vance is a town waiting to die, except that it can’t quite summon the energy. The only thing that really qualifies it as a town at all is the fact that it still has its own post office.
The official state map – brightly festooned with attractive touristy images of riverboats, Elvis and the Civil War – lists the populations of most of the various towns and cities in
Mississippi, ranging from Jackson, the state capital, which
can boast over 200,000 souls and actually has its own airport, down to the likes of Learned, in Hinds County, with
its registered population of 113. Places with a head count below three figures don’t carry a listing at all. Vance is one of those.

In blues parlance, Delta landscapes like those surrounding Vance are dubbed ‘the lowlands’. That’s because they’re about as perfectly flat as a landscape can possibly
get, and the long straight highways scythe through them to the horizon, decisive grey slashes designed to take you somewhere else as fast as possible. Around those parts, a ‘thousand-yard
stare’ implies chronic short-sightedness. Every place you go in the deep country, you see field: cotton, soya, pecans, all growing green or gold wherever the red earth is not puddled and
paddied with water. Your line of vision ends only when you sight the light woodlands far in the distance. Away from the comparative bustle of Clarksdale – where any building over three
storeys high dominates its immediate vicinity like some Delta equivalent of the World 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?

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 emotional truth than were available from either the white or black pop mainstreams of the time. And since
this new audience was considerably more affluent than the blue-collar blacks who were the traditional supporters of the blues economy, what they wanted they got.

Their desire for authenticity was partially rooted in a rejection of the conformist social norms of the ’50s. Spearheaded by the ubiquity of television, the explosive expansion of
commoditized mass culture
had threatened the survival of unique ethnic and regional cultures and identities which youthful cultural dissidents deemed valuable and deserving of
preservation. This resistance to the seeming homogenization and blanding-out of once-vital forms of popular expression often manifested itself as a fear of pop; or rather, a fear of the
implications of a new form of linkage between pop’s two central ideas: the people’s voice and the people’s choice. Broadly speaking, folkies attempted to preserve and protect the
former against the remorseless incursions of the latter. They infinitely preferred the art which people made for themselves to the art which they chose to buy once someone else had created it. By
the same token, their combination of nostalgic tastes and progressive politics represented no implicit contradiction; both were cut from the self-same cloth. Their notion of a ‘popular’
idiom was one of and by the people; by contrast, the commodity culture defined it as that which was most obviously and demonstrably
for
the people: i.e. the one chosen by the largest
possible audience and voted for with the largest number of dollars. The two cultures had spectacularly collided in 1950, when The Weavers had scored a huge hit with a sentimental version of
Leadbelly’s ‘Goodnight Irene’; unfortunately, Leadbelly himself didn’t live to enjoy either the success and the money, or the manifold ironies of their spectacularly belated
arrival. However, since The Weavers’ overtly leftist cultural and political stance was considered unacceptable in the Eisenhower ’50s, their speedy exile to the blacklists left a vacuum
deftly filled by the depoliticised, anodyne Kingston Trio. Their clean-cut collegiate version of the hootenanny defined the mass perception of ‘folk music’ until the liberal but
wholesome Peter, Paul & Mary enabled Bob Dylan to infiltrate the pop mainstream via the side entrance by peeling the husk and bark off Dylan songs like ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’
and ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’, rendering them AM-radio-friendly in a way that their composer never could. The next thing you knew, there was an entire sub-industry
called ‘folk-rock’. Purism never stood a chance.