Boogie Man (19 page)

When America entered the war, Detroit underwent a magical transformation: all of a sudden it became the Arsenal Of Democracy. Henry Ford refused to deliver aeroplane engines directly to the
British on the grounds that it was against his principles to supply military equipment to active belligerents, despite the fact that both his British and German subsidiaries were already busy
cranking out war materiel on behalf of their respective host countries as fast as was physically possible. John Lee contributed to the war effort in his own inimitable way: ‘All the men went
off to the war, and the women did the work. Worked in the steel mills, drove the buses, street cars . . . I was working in plants: Ford, General Motors, CopCo Steel, making stuff for the war.
Somebody had to do it. I was on the lines, or I was the janitor. I did that mostly. I was a common labourer, but a janitor more. They used to catch me asleep, fire me and then rehire me when they
needed people, and they needed people
bad
then. They fire you: you could walk across the street and get you another job. I’d be up all night playing my guitar, I’d sweep and then
go in the corners and fall asleep, and they’d catch me a few times before they fired me. Captain’d wake me up and I’d go back to work.’

Around this time, his musical ambitions received some encouragement from an unlikely source. ‘I never will forget this lady . . . I was a young man then. I went to this big carnival they
had in Detroit. I didn’t know her and she walked up to me. I had
never
made not a record, and she walked up to me and said, “Young man, come here.” She was a gypsy woman or
somethin’. She said, “You gonna be famous
aaaaall
over the world. You gonna become very rich, you gonna become very famous.” We were all just a bunch of kids; we just kinda
laughed. I just wondered
how
. I was just plunkin’ on an old guitar, and it come true. I usually don’t believe in things like that, but she come pick me out and it come true. I
never believe in that shit, but
I’m just sayin’ what she told me. She might have been just guessin’. She was a fortune-teller and people would give her a
little somethin’, but I didn’t have nothin’ to give her. She said, “You ain’t got no money,” and I didn’t. She said, “Kid, you ain’t got no
money, but you gonna be famous one of these days.” We was just a bunch of kids; we kinda laughed when she left.’ He shifts into a taunting schoolyard falsetto: ‘“John Lee
Hooker gonna be
faaaaa
-mous! Gonna be
faaaaa
-mous!” All ridin’ me and ribbin’ me . . .’

With so many of the city’s able-bodied men away in the Armed Forces, John Lee found that a soldier suit was no longer a necessary prerequisite for success with the opposite sex. ‘You
can get married, you can have about five or six wives inside of five years if you really want to. Like the big movie star woman, Elizabeth Taylor, have about nine husbands. The first time I got
married it didn’t last long, about two-three months. I was too young. My first wife’s name was Alma Hopes. She was half Indian. I was young and she was young . . . we met at house
parties and stuff, at her mom’s house. I used to hang out there, started courting her daughter. She from Dublin, Mississippi. A lot of people in Detroit from Mississippi, but I left there so
young I didn’t know none of ’em. She said, “Oh, you from Mississippi!”, like that, and we got talkin’ about different towns. I said, “Oh, that’s my home
town.” It wasn’t my hometown, but [Dublin and Clarksdale] wasn’t too far apart. We got to datin’ together, and we got married. Stayed together a few months, then we broke
up.’ Alma Hopes relocated to Chicago, where she raised Frances, the daughter who was her only souvenir of her brief marriage. John Lee stayed in touch and visited them whenever his blues
career took him to Chicago. Fifty or so years later, he invited Frances to California, first to visit and then to live in his five-bedroom house in Vallejo, which he had vacated but not sold.
‘She was my first kid ever. She was my first child. She come up from Chicago and she had no place to go. She was stayin’ there, and I said, “Hey, I never did nothin’ for
you. I never gave you nothin’. This house is yours, this house.”’

Most of the time, John Lee claims a total of three marriages. Most of the time. ‘I been married three times. No, four times! I keep forgettin’! I done left one
out there. I keep sayin’ three times, but it was four times. Didn’t stay with Sarah Jones long, about a year. We didn’t have no kids and so I hardly ever thinks about her.’
The wife he thinks about most often is the one he generally refers to either as his ‘second’ or ‘main’ wife, the former Maude Mathis, ‘who I got all the kids with. I
stayed with Maude longer’n any of ’em. Stayed with Maude about twenty-five years and we grew old together.’

When Maude Mathis met John Lee Hooker, she was even newer to Detroit than he was. The youngest-but-one of Frank and Addie Mathis’s seven children, she and her family had
relocated to Detroit’s Fourth Street from Augusta, Arkansas – ‘a little town in north-east Arkansas, sittin’ on the White River’ according to her younger brother Paul
– in 1942. The Mathis family made the acquaintance of John Lee Hooker sometime in late 1944. ‘We were living in an area of Detroit called Black Bottom, which is no more,’ Paul
Mathis remembers today. The exact boundaries of Black Bottom shifted by a street or two every so often, but it was broadly definable as the blocks enclosed by Russell and Chene Streets to the east
and Van Dyke to the west. Eddie Burns, who was to become one of Hooker’s key musical sidekicks during the late ’40s and early ’50s, places Black Bottom as ‘downtown.
It’s all built up now, but it used to be a whole area there. Now it ain’t Black Bottom any more, it’s some of the most modern part of Detroit.’ Next door and extending as
far east as Woodward Avenue, was Paradise Valley; its spine was the legendary Hastings Street, though the area at its base was generally considered part of the Bottom. Both the Valley and the
Bottom were bounded to the north by the outskirts of suburban Hamtranck, and to the south by the Detroit River, the natural border with Canada. As Burns told blues historian Mike Rowe:
‘Hastings ran north and south and the bottom of Hastings, I would say, was part of the Black Bottom . . . the Valley was off Hastings. It was a neighbourhood of its own,
y’know. Something of everything was happening down there.’

‘They called it Black Bottom, on the east side of Detroit,’ continues Paul Mathis, ‘but it was a mixed neighbourhood. It had Mexicans, Polish, Italian, but we all went to
school together and got on like an house on fire. We had our little scraps, but wasn’t no such thing as prejudice. We used to go to they house, have a sandwich, and they would come to mine,
have a sandwich, you know. It was a good neighbourhood, really. There were seven of us: four boys and three girls. My brother Frank got called to the army – he was the only one in the army at
that time goin’ to war – and the other brothers was workin’ in the factories. I’m the youngest, and Maude. They used to do what they called keno games and house parties, and
I can’t really give you a true picture of how it all came about, but I do remember that this Saturday night the party be at my mom’s house; the next Saturday night it would be at
Lucinda’s house; the next Saturday night it would be at Anna Lou’s house . . . like a circuit. Gamblin’ and sellin’ beer and booze and hamburgers and fish sandwiches and
things of that nature. After the gamblin’ was over, they’d start the party. This particular night, John and a friend of his came by. It was Broomstick Charles. John had this little
small guitar, and he was playing and Charles was beatin’ on the floor with this broomstick, you know, keepin’ time. It sounded quite nice, really.’ He laughs at the memory.
‘Then John . . . I don’t know where he was livin’ at the time, but he moved on the same street that I lived on, Fourth Street. A lady called Miz Simms had a small rooming house,
and John just got friendly with my family. I don’t know how this came about, but he did get friendly with my family. And then he got even more friendly with my sister Maude.’

Today Maude Hooker is a formidably stolid church lady of imposing mien and impassive reserve, but the positively impish grin which
occasionally breaks through suggests a
very different younger self, and she still giggles when she thinks back to her early encounters with John Lee Hooker. ‘I was 16 when I met Johnny. You know, he used to play music, play his
guitar in different places, houses. I don’t know exactly how we met, but any way he’d be playing at different houses and he met my parents and then he started coming to the house, you
know, back and forth. He was living just down the street from us at the time when we met.’ So what specifically attracted the lively 16-year-old Maude to the quiet 27-year-old John Lee?
‘Oh God!’ she laughs. ‘He used to just, you know, buy me nice little things. He was a very nice person and he would buy me nice little gifts, and so that’s the way we met.
Didn’t anything happen like we fell in love with each other, it was just one of those things that happened. A girl and a man, that’s all there was. That’s the way it was. A young
girl and a man, so that’s what happened.’

Paul Mathis is rather less coy. ‘And, you know, they carried on carryin’ on, and Diane was born. He was just part of the family, really, and mom would always fix him some black-eyed
peas and cornbread cooked whenever he came by, because that was his thing, black-eyed peas and cornbread. Miz Addie, you know. She used to jump on his case, because being as young as I was, I was
having it off with an older woman . . . she used to jump on his case, man, she used to give him a bollocking, you know. I’m always being called the baby, you know. “You know what my
baby’s doin’!” “I-I-I-I don’t know, Miz Addie.” He used to stutter profusely, you know. Oh, he get kinda little excited, he couldn’t say a word. Every time
he come by . . . “Is Addie home?” “Yes, she is.” “Well, I be back.” “No, c’mon in here.” That was my mom, God rest her soul. As it happened,
John just be came a part of the Mathis family, and he’s been a part of the Mathis family from that until this.’

John and Maude’s first child, Diane, was born on 24 November 1946. The couple set up their first home in a rooming house on
Madison Street. By this time, with the war
long since ended, the boomtime was officially over. ‘Well, all the men come back home, most of them, and some of them didn’t have jobs,’ remembers John Lee. ‘They come back
and there was still work, but not enough work for everybody. After the war, things got rough.’ Maude recalls: ‘I remember my brother Frank was in the service, and he came out of the
service and he couldn’t get a job, so he went back in the Air Force. It was very hard to get a job there for a while.’

Increasing competition in the job market provided a progressively greater incentive for Hooker to work harder and harder at his music. Giving up the day-to-day jobs altogether in favour of
full-time music was less of an option than ever, though: after all, there were still bills to pay, each and every week. Paul Mathis’ admiration for the tenacity and grit displayed by Hooker
in those years remains wholly undiminished by the passing of time. ‘He didn’t sit around and say, “Well, it’s gonna come along one day; I’m just gonna sit here and
won’t move, and all of a sudden a bag of gold’ll drop into my lap.” The playing was strictly a weekend thing. Five days a week, he was punchin’ a clock. Friday night,
Saturday night, Sunday night, he was here, there and everywhere. He always had a job. Ushered movie houses, swept floors, pressed steel, helped assemble cars . . . the lot. He did it. It was hard
graft. When I say “hard graft”, I mean the finger-bleedin’ type’a hard graft. It was just a rough life. We never had a lotta money, but we always had plenty food. We always
had a nice suit’a clothes to wear, but there never was a lot of money. But we always did eat good, and I’ll sit here and testify that in those lean years, John never did falter.
Determination kept him going. He was determined that he was gonna make it. He was workin’ the steel mills. CopCo Steel. On Friday nights – which was pay day – we’d have
barbecue ribs. He stopped by the barbecue place, meet me at the barbecue place, we’d have barbecue ribs, which was a treat, you know, which was nice. I was throwin’ papers,
sellin’ coal and ice, and doin’ odd jobs. Anything anybody
wanted to do, I would do it. Lookin’ at John now, and I believe he will verify this, this is the
day he thought he’d never see, where John Lee Hooker’s name is universal. Everybody knows John Lee Hooker. But his success hasn’t changed his train of thought, though he’s
grown a little less conservative than before his success. He used to hold onto that nickel, you know. But now he’s a successful man and he’s achieved his goals, and he don’t mind
givin’ a stranger . . . “Hey, take this twenty dollars and go get something to eat.” That sort of thing, you know. Before that, there was no money. It was very, very, very
hard.’

It was also very, very, very discouraging. ‘I was a hard-working person,’ John Lee insists. ‘I didn’t like handouts. I’d get out there and work, earn a living and
stuff like that, but that wasn’t what I was going to do the rest of my life. I knew that. That was a hard road, right up to now. It was a
hard
road. Many, many, many, many,
many
times I questioned [what I was doing]. Then my mind was saying, “Don’t go back. You done left there, you made a mistake.” One mind was sayin’ I should have stayed, one mind
said no. I was so strong into being a musician. All the rest of my sisters and brothers got good education but me. I could’a had, too. I could’a had number-one education, but I
didn’t want that. If I’d’a had that, I’d be down there right now. Maybe might’a been dead. Maybe got old just farmin’ as a share cropper, playin’ an old
guitar on the corner or in a roadhouse, but I was such a
strong
young man. Such
determination
. I would go out there, pretend I was goin’ to school and wouldn’t go, hide
out in the woods with my old guitar and play. I was determined to be a musician, and my parents was determined that they wanted me to sit down and go to school. I had these two choices. I said,
“I’m not goin’ to stay out here as a farmer”, and I didn’t. I thought many a time, did I make the right decision? You know I thought about that! I thought that way,
sure, but on the other hand, the other mind would say, “You got to work to get up to this. You got to keep doin’ this until you get what you want. You got to keep playin’ here and
there in little places ’til you
find your goal.” And one mind would say, “I ain’t gonna make it. I didn’t leave home for
this
.” Two
minds: one sayin’ “Keep workin’”; the other sayin’, “This ain’t what you left for, to push a broom.” And the mind that said “Keep on
doin’ it” paid off, but if I had been a little weak, and not strong, I’d’a said, “Aw no, I give up, I’m goin’ on back to Mississippi.”’