Boogie Man (40 page)

By contrast, to fans of the rough-edged, rocking electric city blues – or, if you prefer, the ‘souped-up rhythmic monotony and inane lyrics’ – which Hooker had created in
that ‘strange, musically hybrid area known as “rhythm-and-blues”’, it was the acoustic folk-blues posture which represented the
real
sell-out. Tony Glover articulates
this view in the liner-note to a recent reissue of an early-’60s solo live album, wherein his enthusiasm for Hooker’s music in general is tempered only by the faint praise with which he
damns the folkie years in particular. Hooker, he writes, ‘became a storyteller/showman with a slightly cleaned-up and diluted repertoire . . . it’s obvious that he was being careful
about his music and the manner in which he presented it – the raunch and fire of his old sides on Modern and Vee Jay is missing.’ In a similar vein, Colin Escott, writing in
Goldmine
magazine more than thirty years after the release of
Country Blues
, disapprovingly noted that ‘Hooker’s folk blues albums also featured him playing an acoustic
guitar. This was the man for whom the electric instrument might almost have been invented, and these stabs at “authenticity” arguably resulted in some of the least authentic music to
bear John Lee Hooker’s name.’ Only Paul Oliver seemed prepared to step outside these contrived barricades and present the case that the artist himself would make: that, essentially, the
‘folk’ and ‘R&B’ records depicted the same man making the same music – ‘Oh, I changed nothing!’ – and that only the scenery was different.
‘It would seem hard to reconcile [Hooker’s] recent background with the picture
of the country singer that has been drawn of him,’ he pointed out. ‘But
of all city singers who have attained prominence John Lee Hooker has retained the qualities of his rural origins the longest . . . today John Lee Hooker is a city singer and it is artificial and
unwise to make a country singer out of him. Nevertheless [
Country Blues
] is an important record for it shows uniquely the roots of the music that he has shaped into an idiom all his
own.’
⁴⁵

Vee Jay itself also dabbled a toe in this new market, and their Hooker album provided a musical counterbalance to the revisionist image of John Lee promulgated by
Country Blues
.
Hooker’s temporary absence from Universal Studios had been effectively disguised by a dribble of singles from the vault – his remakes of ‘Boogie Chillen’ and
‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ as well as ‘Maudie’, his only new song released that year – and by the release of
I’m John Lee Hooker,
the first album devoted
entirely to his R&B work. Though not billed as such, it was a
de facto
‘greatest hits’ collection, gathering together Hooker’s most popular Vee Jay tracks thus far,
including ‘Dimples’ and ‘I Love You Honey’, alongside the then-current single ‘Maudie’ and his recent remakes of vintage hits like ‘Boogie Chillen’,
‘I’m In The Mood’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ and ‘Hobo Blues’. The packaging was ostentatiously downhome; the front cover eschewing the uptown imagery
associated with the new smooth R&B by depicting a big old coal-fired stove.

Similarly, the folkie-friendly liner notes emphasized Hooker’s rootishness and rurality, as well as continuing that process of self-consciously romanticized mythmaking which has dogged
Hooker ever since. ‘He is an itinerant soul,’ the anonymous author solemnly assured his (surely not ‘her’) readers, recycling Keepnews’s potted biography from the
Riverside album. ‘A body who strayed from the Gulf of
Mexico, from Corpus Christi to Brownsville to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia – and plenty of area in
between. John Lee held many different kinds of jobs. But they only bankrolled him between sessions of pickin’ and singin’ with anyone who cared to join or listen. He absorbed the
authentic folk styles and trends everywhere he travelled . . . but thousands of miles and years of moving intervened before he hit . . . Detroit.’ Hooker was, the writer asserted,
‘first taught by his grandfather to pick out harmony on strips of inner tube nailed in different tensions to the barn door. From this crude and primitive beginning comes the very distinctive
and Hooker-styled strumming you’ll find herein.’ Rather more acutely, the same author pointed out, ‘At times, you’ll find the sound hearkening back to the Orient, while
often, you’ll hear the bag pipe’s drone.’

If one middle-class white listener’s experience was anything to go by, Vee Jay’s policy of shifting their Hooker catalogue into the albums market was an unqualified success.
Fourteen-year-old John Hammond was the son and namesake of the man who will probably be remembered as the greatest talent scout in all of twentieth-century popular music, with a track record
stretching from Bessie Smith’s last session to Stevie Ray Vaughan’s first, with names like Billie Holiday, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan, Aretha Franklin and Bruce Springsteen in
between. Though his parents had separated when he was a child, young John still had access to his father’s extensive record and tape library, and had thus already been exposed to some fairly
esoteric country blues, including the works of Robert Johnson, then as yet uncollected on album. Nevertheless, his chance discovery of Hooker’s music blew his mind. ‘The first album
that I had of his was called
I’m John Lee Hooker
, and it included “Maudie” and “Dimples”, all the really heavy-duty ones. And then later on I heard his earlier
recordings, and hearing him play all by himself with his foot on a block of wood and him just making the sounds . . . I found it truly amazing and passionate and delightful.’ Consumed by the
urge to perform the blues himself,
the younger Hammond proceeded to acquire every Hooker record he could find; only a few years later, he and Hooker would become professional
colleagues.

However, it was in the wake of
Country Blues
that John Lee Hooker the acoustic troubadour would be welcomed into places whence John Lee Hooker the raucous city bluesman would have been
indignantly turned away. Like, for example, the Newport Folk Festival.

9

FOLK BOOM . . .

1960’s Newport Festival season proved to be rather more auspicious for some than for others. That particular summer, John Lee Hooker pulled off a memorable double, not
only appearing, complete with acoustic guitar, at the Newport Folk Festival on 25 June, but returning to Freebody Park over the Independence Day weekend, one week later, to perform as a special
guest artist with Muddy Waters’ band during a special Sunday afternoon blues concert. In folkie mode, he played a set accompanied on stand-up string bass by Brooklyn jazz musician Bill Lee,
the latter a quarter-century or so away from composing the score for his then-infant son Spike’s movie debut
She’s Gotta Have It.
The show included impassioned meditations
– if that seems like a contradiction in terms, let it serve as an indication of Hooker’s almost supernatural ability not only to resolve but to embody such contradictions – on
‘Hobo Blues’ and ‘Tupelo’, alongside a fine, rocking version of ‘Maudie’
flawed only slightly by the occasional (and wholly understandable)
failure of Lee, who had never played with Hooker before, to second-guess the bluesman’s idiosyncratic method of telegraphing his chord changes.

The Newport Folk Festival provided Hooker with the biggest single audience he’d ever played to in his life. ‘I feel like I accomplished something there,’ he says. ‘That
was one of the greatest times, Newport. People used to sleep outside, have little tents. You couldn’t get a hotel room; it’d be crowded, packed. Joan Baez was one playing there. When I
think about that, sometimes I just feel like crying, I’m so happy about the old days. The ’60s will never be forgotten, the memory will never die. Great musicians like Brownie McGhee
& Sonny Terry, and Joan Baez and myself, and many, many more, blazed a trail at Newport.’

The Jazz Festival showcased a different aspect of Hooker’s gifts. He appeared, for neither the first nor the last time, with Muddy Waters’ band, which at that time featured Otis
Spann (piano), James Cotton (harp), Pat Hare (guitar),
⁴⁶
Andrew Stephenson (bass) and Francis Clay (drums). The conventional critical wisdom on the Waters
bands of the ’50s tends to favour the line-ups from the earlier half of the decade, particularly the ones which included Jimmy Rogers in the guitar chair and Little Walter on harp, over those
from the latter half. However, as Robert Palmer has persuasively argued, the Waters bands of this period more than compensate for their lack of celeb soloists by a greater degree of teamwork and a
superior ensemble feel. Certainly Muddy had sufficient confidence in this particular crew’s ability to execute his music without
instrumental cues from the leader to lay
aside his own guitar and perform strictly as a vocalist for those sections of the set devoted to his more recent material, though his defiantly down-home Delta slide guitar was strongly in evidence
on the older songs. The cover photo of the subsequent
Muddy Waters At Newport
album, taken at the foot of the steps leading to the stage, caught the immaculately suited Muddy mere instants
before he stepped out before his equally immaculately tuxedoed band, already in full swing with Spann pounding out a rocking boogie shuffle. Ironically enough, the electrified archtop acoustic
guitar Muddy is shown clutching so authoritatively was not his. ‘That was John Lee Hooker’s [guitar],’ Muddy told Tom Wheeler,
⁴⁷
‘and I just grabbed it for the picture. My own guitar was up onstage, the same red Telecaster I got now.’ (In fact, the video evidence demonstrates that the instrument in question was a
different Fender Telecaster altogether: the same early-’50s blond model that he’d taken on his first English tour two years earlier.)

The spur-of-the-moment guitar switch turned out to be fortuitous as well as expedient. Not only did Muddy gain a short-notice photo-prop, but the iconographic significance of clutching a big
sunburst archtop acoustic rather than a Fender solid-body was considerably more appropriate, in marketing terms, to the preconceptions of the white folkies and jazzers at whom the bulk of his
future work would be aimed.

Much of that Sunday afternoon blues show has been preserved in a series of short films, collectively entitled
Jazz USA
, made under the auspices of the United States Information Agency and
introduced by an amiable, bespectacled stiff named Willis Conover, host of a long-running Voice of America jazz radio show. Unfortunately, the format of the films demanded that the footage be
edited into
bite-sized chunks, following one piece by each of the artists – Waters, Hooker, cabaret-blues vocalist Betty Jeanette and old-timey guitar/fiddle duo Butch
Cage & Willie Johnson, plus piano-instrumental contributions by Spann, and excerpts from evening shows by Dave Brubeck and Ray Charles – with a number by another, thereby destroying the
continuity and pacing of each performer’s set. By contemporary concert-footage standards, the filming is impossibly sluggish and pedestrian. The camera spends what seems like eternities
wandering interminably over the front rows of the audience, catching platoons of middle-aged, middle-class white people in inappropriate clothing clapping spectacularly out of time in the blazing
afternoon sun. However, it provides us with unparalleled glimpses of two of the major Delta expats in their performing prime. Most existing film of Muddy Waters was shot in the ’70s, after he
had lost much of his physical mobility to the after-effects of injuries sustained in a major car crash, but the Waters shown here is a vastly different proposition from the more familiar burly,
avuncular figure, perched on a bar stool plucking at his guitar. Here, unencumbered by his instrument, he’s rockin’. His knees shimmy, his arms gesticulate, his feet fly and –
during Spann’s piano solo on the climactic ‘Got My Mojo Workin” – Muddy rushes across the stage to James Cotton, gathers the bulky, pompadoured harpist into his arms and
sweeps him into a gleefully impromptu lindy-hop. He effortlessly dominates the large open-air stage, whetting the viewer’s appetite for a chance to see a performance of similar intensity
compressed into the pressure-cooker atmosphere of a South Side tavern.

For his part, Hooker is physically more reticent – gently bouncing to the beat on the balls of his feet, guitar slung across his right shoulder rather than around his neck – but
musically he is equally eloquent. Backed by the core of the Waters band – Spann, Hare, Stephenson and Clay – the film clips depict him performing ‘Maudie’, ‘It’s
My
Own Fault’ and a piece introduced by Conover as ‘Come Back Baby’, alternately crooning and snarling his lines through his chipped front teeth whilst the
band, fully accustomed to the vagaries of Delta singers, effortlessly cover his every musical bet. Lean and dapper in his slim-cut Italianate suit, Hooker came across as what he was: a country man
utterly at home in city clothes.

Hooker could therefore be said, without significant fear of contradiction, to have had a ‘good Newport’. The festival organisers, on the other hand, had a rotten Newport, and they
couldn’t even claim that it wasn’t their own fault. As Jack Tracy puts it in his
Muddy Waters At Newport
liner notes,