Boogie Man (38 page)

And sometimes those on-the-road diversions degenerated into outright farce, particularly if that veteran carouser Jimmy Reed was involved. ‘He had me laughin’,’ chuckles Buddy
Guy, invited to retell his favourite Hooker anecdote, ‘about how him and Jimmy Reed was in the hotel with these two women and they had a few dollars and they was drinkin’ heavy, said
he’ll make sure that the women don’t rip him off. So he take the mattress, and he take the money, and he put it in the centre of the bed in between these two mattresses, and
he gon’ get on it and go to sleep. And ’fore they get the money, they’ll wake him up. So when he woke up, the mattress was on top of him, on the floor, and he
didn’t have nothin’ left but his shorts. So he looked around and he didn’t see Jimmy Reed, so he say, “Now I got to go down to the desk and complain to the desk about my
pants. I don’t have no pants.” So he was trippin’, tryin’ to get downstairs to complain about how he needed some pants so he can leave the hotel, and Jimmy were already down
there – said they had his pants too – and he at the desk raisin’ hell, talkin’ so loud . . . he looked up, saw John comin’, said, “They got you too, huh,
John?” The last time I saw John he told me this. The girls took both of ’em pants, didn’t leave ’em nothin’ but shorts. He said, “I was so drunk drinkin’
that stuff then, man, d-d-didn’t leave me n-n-nothin’ but my sh-sh-shorts.” Him and Jimmy was in the lobby with nothin’ but shorts on.’

The couple’s friends were, inevitably, placed in a very difficult position. ‘Me and Maude was great friends,’ Kirkland asserts. ‘Like sister and brother. I used to go out
with her older sister quite a few years, and I never had anything to do with their problems. I was her friend, his friend too. The only thing I can say about Maude: she treated me like a human
being. I taught her how to drive a car. Search around, sneak around try to find out what goes on between a man and his wife, none of my business. I could listen to John Lee, what he would say about
Maude, but I would never take sides. I’d come over the house, Maude would laugh and talk with me, so I have no jurisdiction to say nothin’ about her. I kept my distance. He would tell
me, and I would listen, but I would never make no comment, say, “John, you oughtta leave her.” I have told him, “Well, John, there’s nothin’ I can tell you because
I’m a friend’a Maude’s too, but I hope you can work things out.” Between you and me, there was a lot wrong between them, but it was none of my affair.’

Sometimes, according to Zakiya, things got very rough indeed. ‘If you notice his hands . . . they were having one of their confrontations
and she cut his finger, cut
the tendon. You’ll notice that one of his fingers is always straight, it doesn’t bend any more. It was a very rocky relationship. I can remember times when it was really good, but she
just was not able to deal with him being a musician, him being gone all the time, and . . . little cheap floozies calling the house.’ Maude could hardly have been unaware of Hooker’s
womanising while out on tour. ‘She knew this and she was not able to deal with this. I don’t know if I could’ve dealt with it . . . if any woman could.’

In January, 1959, Hooker kicked off his latest Vee Jay studio date with ‘Maudie’, a song dedicated to, and named after, his wife. The mood of this particular recording session was
already a nostalgic one, revisiting as it did early ’50s triumphs like ‘Boogie Chillen’, ‘I’m In The Mood’, ‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Crawlin’
King Snake’. ‘He made one for me, you remember that one?’ laughs ‘Maudie’ herself. ‘He got up one morning and said, “I got to go to Chicago and make a
record and I’m gonna make a record about you.” And I didn’t think any more about it, and he really did! He went right over there and that was what he did! When we all heard we was
so surprised and laughin’ about it. Everybody always teased me about it, about that record. They still do, every now and then: somebody say,’ – she launches into the song –
‘“
Ohhh, Maudie . . .why did you do it?
” It was really nice.’

‘Really nice’ is an odd way for its subject to describe ‘Maudie’. Set to a relaxed but swinging Reed-style shuffle beat, it was recorded with only the support of Eddie
Taylor and Earl Phillips: Taylor picking out the bass-line on the low strings of his guitar and Phillips slapping gently at his drums. It is indeed a love song, but not by any stretch of the
imagination is it one which celebrates love’s pleasures and passions. Instead, it’s resigned and sorrowful: John declares his love for Maude, but they are apart, divided. He tells her
that he misses her, but she – not he – is the one who’s ‘
been gone so long
’. A world of hurt resonates between the lines of its telegrammatic lyric: what we
hear in ‘Maudie’ is a man, his voice hollow with regret, singing to a
woman whom he loves but whom he knows, in his heart of hearts, that he has already lost.

It wasn’t until his third year under the Vee Jay regime that Hooker was able to score his first substantial hit, and it came with an uncharacteristically conventional
piece which wasn’t even one of his own compositions. ‘I Love You Honey’, which nosed its way into the lower rungs of the R&B Top 30 towards the end of 1958, had been composed
by one Freddy Williams. Hooker’s rocking version of ‘I Love You Honey’, recorded the previous June at a session which also gave the song its B-side ‘You’ve Taken My
Woman’, boasted a ‘direct-time’ symmetrical metre, tightly-rhymed lyrics, little vocal improvisation and – probably its major selling-point – rollicking boogie-woogie
piano breaks provided by Joe Hunter,
⁴²
a stalwart of Detroit’s jazz and blues club scene whom Hooker had brought with him to Chicago for the session.
His next Vee Jay studio date produced nothing which the company’s executives found sufficiently attractive to release, so after the January ’59 session at which he cut
‘Maudie’,
Hooker took a one-year sabbatical from Vee Jay, and reconsidered his options.

1959 found the denizens of Planet Blues coping with a series of major upheavals. During this pivotal year, a veritable forest of signposts to the future appeared. Right under Hooker’s
nose, a new musical revolution was brewing in Detroit: Berry Gordy, whose record store had gone under a few years before, had sold a few songs to his cousin, Jackie Wilson. One of them,
‘Lonely Teardrops’, reached No. 7 in
Billboard
’s pop chart; Gordy invested the proceeds – plus everything else he could beg, borrow or otherwise scare up – into
independent record production for, among others, United Artists and Chess. In 1959, he moved up a gear, starting up his own record company. He named it Anna, after his wife: the following year, he
founded two more labels, which he called ‘Tamla’ and (after the black contraction of Detroit’s ‘Motortown’ nickname) ‘Motown’. Gordy’s gameplan was
the creation of a new kind of rhythm-and-blues – slick, sweet and tuneful, but still soulful and funky – which would draw its backroom team, including pianist Joe Hunter, from the
city’s clubs and bars, and its frontline talent from the hungry, ambitious youth of the housing projects. Gordy’s intention was to build a new music; one which would profit
simultaneously from tapping into black America’s need to move on up, and white America’s desire to get on down.

In Chicago, Vee Jay was pulling further and further away from Southside blues. Never as thoroughly identified with transplanted Delta music as Chess, Vee Jay may not have had big-name rock and
roll stars like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley on its team, but it could certainly punch its weight when it came to the post-gospel sweet soul which was becoming an increasingly important part of the
Windy City tradition. Intrigued by a promising young vocal group called The Impressions, Bracken and his team cut the successful ‘For Your Precious Love’, but released it under the name
of the band’s lead singer, Jerry Butler, whom they signed as a solo artist. This left the rest of
the group, including guitarist/songwriter/auteur Curtis Mayfield, at
liberty to take themselves and their music elsewhere. Mayfield continued to write, arrange and produce Butler’s records for Vee Jay (generating another major hit, ‘He Will Break Your
Heart’, in 1960), but the dazzling string of landmark hits subsequently notched up by the Mayfield-fronted trio version of The Impressions benefited the New York-based major ABC (a subsidiary
of the television company) rather than their hometown label.

Meanwhile, as the traditional blues audience continued to shrink, an unexpected new market began to grow: white academics, intellectuals and jazz and folk fans started to take an interest in the
music, albeit in its root forms rather than its contemporary extensions. Rinehart published Samuel Charters’
The Country Blues
, unleashing a torrent of scholarly works which focused
critical attention onto the hitherto neglected field of rural blues, and giving it, for the first time, the kind of academic respectability which had been lavished on jazz, particularly in Europe,
for quite some time. Despite Charter s’ disdain for contemporary blues – and for contemporary blues singers – Hooker and Muddy Waters were the exceptions singled out as recipients
of the author’s approval. ‘From Charley Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson and Bukka White to Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker,’ wrote Charters, ‘there has been an almost
unbroken line of great [Delta] singers.’ The British scholar Paul Oliver’s equally influential
Blues Fell This Morning
arrived the following year courtesy of the Cambridge
University Press; like Charters, Oliver was an admirer of Hooker’s music, and later sought him out in Detroit during a lengthy research trip to the US.

In Europe, where early forms of African-American music, notably New Orleans jazz, were the objects of fanatical fundamentalist worship, blues singers had been welcome for years, provided that
they were sufficiently ‘traditional’ and ‘folkloric’, and were willing to present themselves as ‘untainted’ by ‘commercialism’. Big Bill Broonzy,
Muddy
Waters’ predecessor as the kingpin of the Chicago blues scene, had been a regular transatlatic visitor from 1951 until his death in August 1958. Broonzy played the
‘folkloric’ role to the hilt, arriving for shows in overalls, carrying on like he’d never before left his Mississippi farm, and assuring his more credulous listeners that he was
‘the last of the blues singers’. That Big Bill’s reversion to a style he hadn’t touched for decades might have been prompted by purely commercial motives was a possibility
that few of his new friends were prepared to entertain. Muddy Waters himself had visited Britain in 1958, where purist critics and audiences were shocked into paroxysms of fear and loathing by his
slicing electric guitar and rumbustious performance. (The punch-line to
that
particular joke came in 1964, when Muddy returned to the UK with an acoustic guitar and a traditional repertoire,
only to be confronted by a new generation of blues fans weaned on the Rolling Stones and the Yardbirds and desperate to have their mojos worked to death.) The impressive share of this European
bonanza which was waiting for Hooker had been prefigured by an admiring piece in the French magazine
Jazz-Hot.
Its author, Jacques Lemètre – who, as Oliver would also do a year
or so later, had visited Hooker in Detroit during a trip undertaken with his colleague Marcel Chauvard – was the first to describe Hooker as ‘one of the most primitive (from a musical
point of view) and, I would say, one of the most African of blues singers’.

In a parallel development, the Newport Jazz Festival, which had been running in Freebody Park, near Newport, Rhode Island, since its establishment in 1954, acquired a sibling event, the Newport
Folk Festival. Due to the domination of its rosters by clients of major agents like Albert Grossman and Harold Leventhal, it speedily became known amongst the more traditional folk musicians as the
Newport Folk Agents Festival. The Newport Folk Festival formula involved the juxtaposition of popular whitebread folkies like the Kingston Trio alongside rather more authentic performers like Pete
Seeger and the New Lost
City Ramblers, while also featuring ‘world’ acts like the Oranim Zabar Israeli Troupe, bluegrass virtuosi Lester Flatt & Earl Scruggs,
and – making her major-league debut – the young Joan Baez, as well as those bluesmen who, like the guitar/harp duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, were already active on the East
Coast folk scene.