Boogie Man (12 page)

Essentially, recording did to oral transmission what photography did to painting; in other words, relieved it of the burden of simple representation. It was no longer the painter’s primary
responsibility to produce a permanent visual account of what people and things looked like, but rather to provide some insight into what things meant and, simply, to create objects and images which
were beautiful or intriguing in their own right. Similarly, recording meant that songs and pieces of music did not need to be written down – or even memorized – in order to be preserved
for posterity. A recorded performance is, literally, recorded: short of the destruction of the master tape and all known copies, it will survive, exactly as it was originally performed, long beyond
the lifespan of the musician(s) who played it. Another artist, approaching those same materials afresh, has no need to reproduce what went before except insofar as (s)he wishes to demonstrate the
contrast between the basic themes and the fresh elements with which they are replenished and renewed. Nowhere is this principle better illustrated than in be-bop, where a standard melody –
the ‘head’ – is stated at the beginning of a piece as the springboard for the improvisations which follow. The standard melody and chord changes provide the bread, but the
improvisation puts the meat into the sandwich: it’s what everybody has actually come to hear. And when those improvisations are flowing thick and fast, it would take a fiendishly accelerated
hand and ear to transcribe them in sufficient detail for
another musician to be able to come along the following morning to sight-read and play them precisely as they were
improvised. In a sense, this is what makes improvisation so special: it occurs in the here-and-now, to be imagined, played and heard as part of a single process; and once played, it’s gone
– unless, of course, someone recorded it.

Recording was the first of a series of linked phenomena which forever altered the folk process. Via recording, songs and styles could travel wherever the physical object – i.e. the
cylinder or disc – went, and radio removed even that limitation, permitting the music to transform itself into a phantom of the airwaves, solidified and realized by the presence of an
appropriately tuned radio receiver. And, via copyright, what was once common intellectual property was effectively privatised. A classic example: during the early ’60s, the British folk
singer/guitarist Martin Carthy made the acquaintance of several visiting Americans, two of whom happened to be named Bob Dylan and Paul Simon. During club sessions and late-night jams, Carthy
introduced his new friends to his arrangements of a number of Anglo-Celtic traditional pieces. Dylan set a lyric of his own, later recorded as ‘Bob Dylan’s Dream’, to the melody
and guitar arrangement of ‘Lord Franklin’, a technique literally as old as the folk process itself. Indeed, one of his most famous early songs, ‘With God On Our Side’, uses
the same traditional Irish melody as Dominic Behan’s ‘The Patriot Game’; and, while the combination of that melody with Dylan’s lyric is copyrighted, the melody itself
– one of several known as ‘The Fiddling Soldier’, or ‘The Soldier And The Lady’ – is still ‘out there’. Simon, on the other hand, was particularly
intrigued by a tune called ‘Scarborough Fair’, which he and his partner Art Garfunkel subsequently recorded more or less intact. How ever, Simon and Garfunkel copyrighted the
arrangement, which – after its use in Mike Nichols’ enormously popular 1968 movie
The Graduate
– eventually went on to become a Muzak and AOR radio staple and to generate
serious amounts of money. The issue of whether or not Simon’s action
appropriated Martin Carthy’s creativity and violated his intellectual property is one best left
to m’learned friends in the legal profession (or rather, to those who can afford to hire their services), but the end result was the removal of an ancient song from the public domain and its
transformation into a copyrighted item for the use of which Simon and Garfunkel must receive payment. There was indeed a financial settlement – the details of which remain relevant only to
the participants – but Carthy was more upset by this heisting of what he had considered to be a communally owned cultural asset than by any possible financial loss to himself.

To reverse the argument, the copyrighting of a traditional blues piece has often proved to be the salvation of blues singers who have fallen victim to creative accounting, or – as was
often the case with the storefront independent labels who pioneered blues recording – no accounting at all. Big Joe Williams almost certainly wasn’t the author of that beloved old
chestnut ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – a Delta staple memorably recorded by Muddy Waters as well as by John Lee Hooker – but the royalties generated by the Waters and
Hooker versions (not to mention subsequent covers of the song by assorted blues-rock bands, most prominently the young Van Morrison’s Belfast rude-boy posse Them) provided Williams with some
form of compensation for all the songs which he undoubtedly did write, but for which he was never paid. Skip James’ funeral expenses were met by the royalties generated by Cream’s cover
of his ‘I’m So Glad’; a version which, incidentally, James despised. Still, it says something for Cream’s integrity that they credited him at all (especially considering
that they had rearranged the song so drastically that they could probably have gotten away with claiming it as an entirely new composition), let alone made sure that the money reached him. In the
blues world, the person who copyrighted a song might not necessarily be the person who wrote it, and – by the same token – the person in whose name a song was copyrighted wasn’t
necessarily the one who collected the money.
Case in point: Willie Dixon, who found that while the library of classic songs he composed for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and
other Chess stars was indeed copyrighted in his name, extracting the resulting moolah from Arc Music, Chess’ music-publishing subsidiary, was another matter entirely.

The conventional notion of song copyright resides in a song’s lyrics, melody and chord changes: register those, and the piece is yours. If someone cops your song – in other words,
borrows your melody or lyrics – you can, given sufficient funding to hire heavy-duty lawyers, take them to court and hose them down, big time. (Just ask George Harrison about the ‘My
Sweet Lord’ court case, but be prepared to duck.) You can’t copyright a rhythm or a bass line, let alone a ‘groove’; if you could, Bo Diddley would be a seriously wealthy
man and James Brown would be infinitely richer than he already is. You can, of course, copyright a recorded performance, and if someone samples a snatch of one of Mr Brown’s records and
recycles it without authorization or payment, they’ll soon be hearing from legal eagles representing Mr Brown and/or Polydor Records. ‘I know they say that they’re only taking a
little bit of the record,’ says Brown of the sampler-happy hip-hoppers who’ve squeezed so much juice from his inimitable grooves, ‘[but] how would you like it if I cut the buttons
off
your
suit?’ But if somebody wants to assemble a bunch of musicians to play your beat themselves, they’ve got it; and if this wasn’t the case, then most of the history
of the blues would consist of lawsuits rather than records. Imagine if someone had successfully copyrighted the twelve-bar blues structure, or the shuffle beat, or the ‘Dust My Broom’
slide-guitar motif (from Elmore James out of Robert Johnson, Son House, Charley Patton and beyond), or even the line ‘Woke up this mornin”. Then imagine how many bluesmen would have
been able to function freely under the resulting restrictions.

So let’s take stock. On the one hand we have a tradition based on a relatively free-flowing interaction of musical ideas and motifs; on
the other a copyright system
which tends to reward the cunning and well-connected as well as (in some case, read ‘rather than’) the creative and imaginative. In its own post hi-tech way, the sampling technology
which drives rap and dance music would seem to be a way of reviving that free-flowing oral tradition (by ‘quoting’ existing works with all the digital fidelity of a 44,100-Mhz
(slices-per-second) sampling rate), but said oral tradition developed in a time when there weren’t millions of dollars’ worth of royalties at stake. There are powerful arguments on both
sides: on the ‘oral’ wing, we have the flow of ideas, the collective development of fresh variations of time-honoured traditions, the entire notion of folk and community culture. On the
other side of the fence, we have the basic fiscal facts of the entertainment industry, the concept of inviolable intellectual property, and the impregnable right of the individual to receive and,
wherever possible, enjoy the rewards of his or her creative labours. And in between, we have an artist like John Lee Hooker, whose work is uncompromisingly based in a deep and rich tradition and
which draws freely on the resources of that tradition, but whose indisputable individuality rests on the uniqueness of his relationship with that tradition. The central issues that his
oeuvre
raises are these: how an artist can simultaneously be an utterly unique creative personage whose achievement, identity and agenda are totally and completely personal, while remaining
inextricably linked, in the deepest roots of his creative being, to the cultural tradition of the community in which he was raised; and how that artist, born in 1917 and first recorded at the tail
end of the 1940s, could achieve spectacular sales with music which seemed ‘older’ than the earliest country blues records, cut almost a quarter of a century before. The solution to such
seeming paradoxes lies in the nature of the relationship between an individual and a tradition; and the innate flexibility of a tradition that not only permits, but specifically demands, that each
individual who works within it should make it completely his or her own.

When John Lee Hooker says that he was ‘born with the blues’, he speaks naught but the literal truth: for all practical purposes, he and his chosen art-form are
exact contemporaries. Hooker is not
actually
as old as the blues – no living performer could be – but he is almost exactly the same age as
recorded
blues. It’s a
shame that we have to abandon the 1920 birthdate, because it implies a lovely symmetry; it would have meant that he was born the year that the first blues record – ‘Crazy Love’, a
vaguely bluesy urban ballad sung by the otherwise unremarkable Mamie Smith – was released; a mere three years before the first rural blues records were made (by the little-known Sylvester
Weaver), and an even less significant five before the Texan street-singer Blind Lemon Jefferson became the music’s first superstar. Hooker’s childhood 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.