Boogie Man (18 page)

Nineteen and forty, babe: halfway round the world, thousands of miles away, the Nazis were on the march and Europe was awash in blood and terror. Closer to home, John Lee
Hooker was desperate to join the US Army. These particular circumstances were, however, entirely unconnected. Like the vast majority of Americans at that time, Hooker was sublimely unconcerned with
the geopolitical implications of imminent American intervention in a distant foreign war. His desire to enter the armed forces had rather more to do with the strangely aphrodisiac effect that
military uniforms seemed to exert on the local girls.

Hooker had but recently arrived in Detroit from Cincinnati: he
had a little money in his pocket and, for the first time, he hadn’t had to hitch-hike. ‘I’d
heard about all these big things in Detroit. The Motor City it was then, with the factories and everything, and the money was flowing. You could get a job paying money in any city in the United
States, but this was the Motor City. All the cars were being built there. I said, “I’m going there,” and I went. Took me the Greyhound and I went straight to Detroit. Detroit was
the city
then. Work, work, work, work. Plenty work, good wages, good money at that time.’ He soon settled in, finding himself a job as an usher at the Park Theatre, and lodgings with a
rather friendlier landlady than the one he subsequently immortalised in ‘House Rent Boogie.’ ‘She would give parties too, and I would work in the theatre and come down play on the
weekend, Saturday night parties. It was nothin’ but work goin’ on there.’ Unfortunately, Hooker’s cosy Detroit applecart was soon upset. ‘When I come to town I had a
girlfriend and I lost her. The army was a big thing; the soldiers became heroes and when they come into town all the girls was flocking up to them. She just flocked up to those soldiers, and I
said, “I’m going to go to the army.” I went in on account of girls. They wanted a uniform. Guys come to the army, come out on a break with the uniform on, girls’d eat
’em up. Now uniforms don’t mean nothin’, but back then, uniforms was a big, big thing. I loved army life because that was the thing: the women would go crazy over an army suit.
You get on a suit, you could get any woman, any chick you wanted.’

So Hooker, led by his libido, enlisted in the US army. Stationed just outside Detroit, he spent the next few months a mere spitting distance from the Ford Motor Company’s famous River
Rouge plant. Half a century later, he still has fond memories of what turned out to be an extremely brief taste of military life. ‘I didn’t get too far with basic training; I mostly
stayed around the camp. We would come into town every weekend. I would play on the barracks, go out, work in the kitchen. I never would even go out on the shootin’ range. I never
would do that, just work ’round the barracks. They liked’ed me in there. I would play in there, and they all crazy ’bout me in there.’ Hooker’s sunny
disposition enables him to enjoy, at five or so decades’ remove, a rose-coloured view of race relations within the US army of the ’40s which is entirely uncorroborated by mainstream con
temporary accounts. Ask him if he experienced the army of that time as segregated and he answers in a firm negative. ‘No. Not in Detroit. If they did I didn’t know it. They
loved’ed me in there, white, black and everybody. They didn’t allow that stuff [segregation] in the army. They maybe do it on the sly, but all I can tell you that I didn’t feel
it. We all was together.’

This would have come as something of a shock to President Roosevelt and to his Assistant Secretary of War, Robert Patterson. In 1940, in answer to repeated urgings from black community leaders,
Patterson published a position paper which amounted to a formal statement defining government policy on racial matters within the military. Six of its seven clauses were, broadly speaking,
positive: they established the rights of ‘Negroes’ to receive training in areas, like aviation, from which they had hitherto been barred, and – radical step, this – to
assume ranks and positions for which they had actually qualified. The seventh, however, was the cruncher: it stated that ‘the policy of the War Department is not to intermingle colored and
white enlisted personnel in the same regimental organisation’. A clarifying statement from the office of the Adjutant General insisted that the army would not be manoeuvred into taking
‘a stand with respect to Negroes which is not compatible with the position attained by the Negro in civilian life’. In other words, the army would remain officially segregated until
further notice: until 1950, in fact, when President Truman signed a military desegregation order as America entered the Korean War. Pandering to populist prejudice rather than biological fact, even
blood supplies were segregated during World War II.

Sadly, Hooker’s military idyll didn’t last long. In his enthusiasm to
don the khaki and get his leg over, he had blithely ignored the then-current proviso that
enlisted men under 21 required the consent of a parent or guardian. A year or so shy of his formal majority, he had temporarily solved this vexing little problem by scoring himself some fake ID
which claimed him to be three years older than he actually was. Hooker hiked his birthdate from 1920 to 1917, creating a miasma of ambiguity and confusion concerning his age which persists to this
day. Having cited his elder brother William as next of kin, he was more than somewhat peeved to find William blowing the whistle on him to the army authorities. ‘They were good to me because
I played guitar and they liked it. They liked’ed me ’til they found out I was too young to be in the army. I went into the army on false pretence, and they found it out real quick. I
was in there four-five-six months. When they found out I lied, they kicked me out. They asked my brother [William], and he told ’em the truth. He didn’t lie. He told ’em how old I
was, and they yanked me out. He was very honest. He was a minister too, but at that time he wasn’t . . . he told me I shouldn’t lie about my age. The army is strict, you know, they got
to go by the rules no matter what they think of you. They called me into the office and said, “You know you lied about your age. You lied, kid.” And I said, “What can I say? I
wanted to serve my country and I wanted to be part of it.” And that kind of got to him when I said that. They didn’t know what I
really
wanted. “Yeah.” he said,
“I’m gonna have to let you go on a dishonourable discharge, but everybody round here really love little Hooker. Everyone round here love you, they love your music, kid.” They let
me went . . . but they let me keep the uniform.

‘And that’s the story. I said, “Can I keep the uniform?” The guy says yeah. I wore it around town a bit, and the girls were
thinkin’ I was in the army until they found out I was kicked out and I wasn’t a soldier anymore.’ Which was probably just as well. As the recipient of a dishonourable discharge,
Hooker was ineligible for the draft introduced later when, in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, America
finally entered the war. This meant that he could spend the war years
safe in Detroit, working on his music and enjoying his pick of home-front factory jobs, instead of being sent overseas to be shot at by foreigners. ‘Yeah, and I’m glad I got out,
because if I’d stayed in I probably wouldn’t have been famous. When you that age, you don’t think. You not scared of nothin’. You don’t even think about that, because
you thinkin’ of the glory and the fun, what you gonna do then, right then, how these army suits gonna bring you fun and joy with the women. You don’t think they’re gonna send you
over there and kill you. I just settled in Detroit, right. No, I didn’t go anywhere from the army but back to Detroit, where I didn’t leave any more. Just stayed right there. When I
come out, that’s when I started my research on trying to get on record, on a label, playing around, stuff like that.’

Well, it’s a great story, but unfortunately that’s not quite the way it happened. That’s how John Lee told it back when he was claiming to have been born in 1920 rather than
1917, but if one readjusts his birthdate back to 1917, the central premise collapses. When the subject is broached nowadays, Hooker gives a superb impression of a clam. All we can say with any
certainty is that Hooker, despite being a healthy man in his twenties with no dependents, didn’t go to war; and that by the early ’40s he was living and working in Detroit. Only John
Lee Hooker himself knows the full story, and for whatever reason, he’s not telling.

Detroit was hardly the most obvious base for an ambitious young bluesman looking to launch a career. Though the bulk of its black population originated in the south-eastern states – from
Alabama or Georgia – it had a small pool of the homesick Delta migrants essential to support the career of any transplanted Mississippi bluesman. However, there was a serious lack of the
necessary infrastructure: record labels, booking agents, talent scouts and the like. In sharp contrast, over on the other side of Lake Michigan was Chicago, aka
Chi-Town or the
Windy City, a primary urban focus for black migrants from the Deep South. The city’s South and West Sides were packed with Delta expatriates, and during the 1940s their numbers were swelling
literally by the day. The white blues-harpist Charlie Musselwhite, a close friend of Hooker’s whose own journey from Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago to California unwittingly re-enacted the
twentieth-century odyssey of the blues, explains it this way. ‘If you look at the map,’ he says, ‘a lot of people in California came out from Texas or Oklahoma. Philadelphia and
New York get the Carolinas. Chicago gets people from the Deep South, from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. Highway 51 and Highway 61 both go straight up there.’

Even before the genesis of the distinctive post-war strain of Windy City amplified ensemble blues most frequently associated with Chess Records, Chicago had been a major regional recording
centre for about as long as the recording industry had been in existence, a status it owed, indirectly, to the New Orleans authorities’ decision to close down the red-light district of
Storyville in 1917, which in turn prompted an exodus of the city’s musicians to Chicago. Many of the great rural blues artists had also travelled there to make their records and, inevitably,
some of them decided to settle in Chicago. Equally inevitably, a distinctive local sound began to emerge. Georgia transplant Hudson ‘Tampa Red’ Whittaker soon became one of the kingpins
of the pre-war South Side scene, and Big Bill Broonzy was its primary figurehead, but the Godfather of pre-war Chicago blues recording was entrepreneur Lester Melrose: imagine a combination of
Leonard Chess and Willie Dixon, who didn’t actually compose or perform, but simply decided who got to record and who didn’t, and who pocketed the resulting income, and you’ve got
it. For Chess, Chicago’s leading postwar blues independent label, read Bluebird, the Chicago-based ‘race records’ subsidiary of the formidable Victor label.

Melrose ran Bluebird as a personal fiefdom: it was he, not the
artists, who had the contract with Victor. At various times the Melrose stable of Chicago-based blues stars
included Broonzy, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Jazz Gillum, John Lee – the original ‘Sonny Boy’ –
Williamson and Washboard Sam. Hooker’s original mentor Tony Hollins was there (albeit running a barber shop), and so was Tommy McClennan, one of the very few blues artists whose recorded work
had any audible effect on Hooker’s music. Hooker’s Vance homeboys Snooky Pryor and Jimmy Rogers were there, too. Rogers had been in and around Chicago since 1939, working the Maxwell
Street market for tips; a decade or so later, he would eventually join forces with one McKinley Morganfield, a burly extrovert from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, soon to be better known as Muddy
Waters, to form the blues band which would end up defining the city’s indigenous postwar blues idiom. ‘A lot of them came up from Mississippi,’ says Hooker today, ‘and most
of them upped into Chicago. They were all interested because Chicago was the big blues scene. I didn’t want to go to Chicago because, at that time, I had a lot of competition. At that time
there were some heavies there, so I didn’t have no idea for going there and living there. Detroit . . . it was my town when I got bigger.’

The Detroit John Lee found when he emerged from the army was a roughneck, blue-collar town dominated by the auto industry and the aftermath of Prohibition. Unions were deemed un-American, the
local chapter of the FBI was virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, and it was not considered totally unreasonable for white workers to refuse to man the production lines
alongside blacks. Thanks to its close proximity to the Canadian border, the city became such a reliable source of fine imported whiskey that bootlegging was considered second only to cars among the
linchpins of the city’s economy. The end result was a city with a thriving gang culture and an eminently bribable police force. It was also a deeply racist town with an extremely active Ku
Klux Klan, not to mention a chapter
of the Klan’s elite group, the Black Legion. Admittedly, Detroit was something of an improvement over Mississippi, but then
that’s not saying very much. Cops were recruited not only from the Irish and Italian communities, but from among white Southern migrants with necks of deepest red; these latter, often not
unsympathetic to the Klan, were then sent in to ‘police’ the black community. The city authorities required a minimum IQ of 100 from potential recruits to the Fire Department, but a
rating of 65 was considered sufficient qualification for candidates for the police force.

As the city’s heavy industry ramped up, housing became progressively more and more scarce, particularly for black defence workers. It was this issue which ripped Detroit apart during John
Lee’s early years in the city. A housing project – named, ironically enough, after Sojourner Truth, the nineteenth-century heroine of the fight against slavery – had been
designated specifically for black workers until somebody noticed that the resulting homes, in an area generally considered ‘white’, were actually going to be quite nice. The project was
then reassigned for white occupancy, with the promise that some new homes for blacks would be constructed . . . at some unspecified point in the future, and outside the city. Blacks attempted to
occupy the building anyway. Whites, led by the Klan, picketed City Hall. FBI agents ‘detected’ pro-Axis agitators among the white opponents of black occupancy. Liberal whites lined up
alongside the blacks, and the reassignment of Sojourner Truth to white occupancy was overturned. On 27 February 1942, the Klan burned a cross outside the project. The first black families arrived
to move in the following morning, but were barred from doing so by approximately 1,200 picketing whites, some of whom were armed. The result was a pitched battle in the streets which required 200
police to quell. Of 104 people arrested, 102 were black. It was the first of a series of riots, not as celebrated as the legendary ‘Burn Baby Burn’ conflagrations of 1967 but no less
significant. Three months later, the building was finally occupied and
– surprise surprise – the black occupants and their new white neighbours ended up getting
along just fine.