Boogie Man (61 page)

The underlying structures of much of Hooker’s early repertoire derive from the work of one of the biggest names in pre-war Chicago blues: Sonny Boy Williamson. Singer/harpist John Lee
‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson should not be confused, though he often is, with another, better-known, harp virtuoso: Alex ‘Rice’ Miller, an older Delta-based performer who took on
the ‘Sonny Boy Williamson’ name even before its original bearer was murdered in 1948. Miller, whom we’ll call ‘Sonny Boy Williamson II’ for clarity’s sake,
hosted the
King Biscuit Boy
radio show for the pioneering Memphis station WDIA, cut a series of magnificent sides
for Chess in the ’50s, toured and briefly resided
in the UK in the early ’60s, and died back home in the Delta in 1965. The original Sonny Boy, for his part, recorded for Bluebird between 1937 and 1948, often in tandem with Big Joe Williams,
and early hits of his which found their way into Hooker’s bag included ‘Decoration Day’, ‘Bluebird Blues’,
¹¹⁹
‘Bottle
Up And Go’ and ‘Sugar Mam’. (Sonny Boy’s studio partner Big Joe Williams, incidentally, cut variants of ‘Baby Please Don’t Go’ – copyrighted in his
name, fortunately for him – and ‘Ground Hog Blues’, both of which subsequently became Hooker staples).

‘Bottle Up And Go’ and ‘Sugar Mama’ didn’t simply enter Hooker’s repertoire under their own colours. They also became templates for many of Hooker’s own
creations. What’s truly fascinating, though, is that they seem to have arrived in Hooker’s songbook after a detour via the work of yet another near-forgotten Delta bard: Tommy
McClennan.

He sang in a hard, keening high tenor not unlike a Robert Johnson without the shadows or the nuances, but it is his guitar-playing which foreshadows Hooker most eerily: in the insistent use of
modal fills performed without a slide. Hooker’s guitar style is so defiantly personal that it comes as a shock to hear an earlier performer who sounds anything like him, but McClellan’s
instrumental approach includes passages which suggest Hooker far more strongly than anything – apart from a few obvious ‘King Snake’ licks – in the recordings of
Hooker’s actual mentor, Tony Hollins. When it is possible to make direct comparisons, as on the material McClennan and Hooker share with Sonny Boy Williamson and Big Joe Williams, the
McClellan sides sound almost like vague preliminary sketches for the subsequent Hooker versions. McClennan is more, but only a little more, than a historical curio: one of those likeable minor
genre artists who enable archivists to join up a few more of the dots linking major figures. He
landed up in Chicago at the tail-end of the first era of Chicago blues, cutting
records for three years before World War II temporarily shut down the American record industry, and by the time the modern era commenced he was out of the game.

Born in 1908 in Yazoo City, Mississippi, McClellan was already performing his own personal variant of ‘Bottle Up And Go’ when he hit Chicago in 1939. The goodnatured Big Bill Broonzy
took him under his wing, as he was wont to do when promising young singers arrived from Down Home, and advised him that the couplet ‘
nigger and the white man playin’ seven-up/nigger
beat the white man, scared to pick it up
’, which McClennan was fond of inserting into ‘Bottle Up And Go’, was unlikely to go down too well with the locals. McClennan sang it
anyway at his first big-city house party and ended up leaving via a first-floor window with the remnants of his guitar round his neck. (He nevertheless included this troublesome couplet in his
recorded version, which suggests either that folks cut him more slack once he’d made a few records, or else that he’d started employing bodyguards for personal appearances.)

‘Bottle Up And Go’ came complete with a catchy guitar lick, a stomping danceable groove and a neat structure which divided the twelve-bar (or, in John Lee’s case,
twelve-bar-
ish
) stanza into verse and chorus: socking home a different couplet each time and using the title as a punchline.
¹²⁰
It became one of
the templates on which a significant slice of Hooker’s early repertoire is based. Sonny Boy Williamson’s ‘Sugar Mama’, especially the way MacClennan performed it, was a
tautly powerful slow blues whose beat pulsed as remorselessly as your heart. It, too, became a prototype, providing the framework for Hooker’s own ‘Sally Mae’. Hooker recorded
‘Sugar Mama’ itself several times throughout his career, most recently on 1995’s
Chill Out
, but its echoes still ring whenever Hooker plays an
open-tuned slow blues with anything even faintly resembling conventional changes.

Then there were Hooker’s home-grown specialities, both essentially deconstructed equivalents of ‘Bottle’ and ‘Mama’. The latter’s Hookerised twin was an
open-ended, free-form slow blues which never (or hardly ever) changed chord: its avatar was ‘Wednesday Evening’, which Hooker recorded for the first of many times at an Elmer Barbee
demo session a few months before his first encounter with Bernard Besman. And the former’s was, of course, The Boogie.

And those, plus a couple of cousins from the ‘Catfish Blues’ and ‘Rollin’ And Tumblin’’ song families, were pretty much all that Hooker brought to the party
when he first started recording. Conventional notions of composition would suggest that a man who could play four songs would record four songs, and that would be it. As it was, Hooker recorded
well over a hundred sides in the year following the original ‘Boogie Chillen’ session, most of which have been released, and many of which are wonderful. So how did he do it?

From the point of view of an archetypal R&B producer of the ’40s or ’50s, committed to squeezing the maximum number of usable sides out of the minimum amount of
studio time, the ideal performer would be one with a vast repertoire of distinctive original songs and the ability to perform each one consistently from take to take. Hooker was the exact reverse
of that ideal: he knew comparatively few songs, and performed them differently each time. For Bernard Besman, this was a nightmare. ‘Out of the 250 records that I did with him,’ Besman
claims, ‘there are at least twenty songs using the “Boogie Chillen” thing. It’s the same thing: all he’d do is change the words. If I [had]
let
him, he’d do “Boogie Chillen” or “Sally Mae” over and over again. He has the talent to do that; not many people could do that. But he wouldn’t remember what he
did on the first song, or the second song. So that was frustrating.’

In William Gibson’s novel
Idoru
,
¹²¹
there is a character whose short attention span makes him the perfect cyberspace researcher: he zaps
intuitively from database to database, following connections apparent only to him. Technically, his concentration deficit is a disability; but he has found a context in which what might otherwise
be a crippling flaw instead becomes a unique asset. Hooker, by the same token, has built his entire approach to music around the quirk which so infuriated Besman. In
Totemism
,
¹²²
Claude Lévi-Strauss observes that,

Whether Hooker is a compulsive improviser whose vision drives him to reinvent a song every single time he performs it, or a musical
naïf
so scatterbrained and
undisciplined that he cannot remember what he’s done from one moment to the next, is almost not the point. What matters is that, for Hooker, the feeling of the moment is all; and a
song –
any
song – is simply an empty vessel waiting to be filled with that feeling.

And that feeling manifests itself through the body. In most music, the demands of the composition, the piece, assume the highest priority. In order to perform the piece correctly – or, in
cases where ‘correctness’ is a less rigid notion, perhaps we should substitute the term ‘appropriately’ – the musician will use his or her body to manipulate the
instrument so that it produces the required sounds. The sounds in question are the desired result, the instrument is the medium, and the body – through limb or digit movement, breath or
whatever – is therefore the ‘servant’ of the piece or composition. In the case of John Lee Hooker, this process is reversed. The body acts to express the emotion, the
‘feeling of the moment’, and the instrument is there to express and to reflect that feeling. If the feeling dictates that Hooker should, at any given moment, strike a guitar string hard
enough to make it ring a microtone sharp of ‘correct’ pitch – or so that an adjacent string to the one actually struck should sound out alongside it – then he will do so,
and never think once about it, let alone twice. Or if he is singing a song, and has not extracted the necessary degree of meaning from a line, he will sing it again . . . and again, and again. Only
then will he move on to the next line, and if this plays hell with some pedant’s notion of what the song structure
ought
to be – or if the musicians accompanying him start to
panic and lose their nerve – then so be it. It’s not his problem. The feeling rules the body, the body rules the instrument, and the music is the result. The music is the servant of the
feeling, as mediated firstly through the body, and secondly – via the body – through the instrument.

In his 1970 essay ‘Musica Practica’,
¹²³
Roland Barthes creates a distinction between two kinds of music: ‘the music one listens to,
the music one plays’. Which is to say: music which is performed in order to be
listened to, and music which is listened to only incidentally, because its primary purpose
is the function which it fulfils for the performer. Regarding the latter, he writes:

In the blues, as in no other music; and the music of John Lee Hooker, as in that of no other bluesman, this distinction collapses. Hooker’s work takes a private music
– ‘private’ in the sense of ‘personal’ rather than ‘secret’ – into a public sphere whilst retaining all aspects of the characteristic described by
Barthes above.

By way of illustration, let’s take a detailed look at a specific Hooker performance: ‘Dark Room’, as recorded live in concert at New York’s Hunter College in February
1976 and most recently released as part of the Tomato Records double-CD
Alone
. It’s neither one of Hooker’s most celebrated songs – in fact it is, if the reader will
forgive the oxymoron, quite spectacularly obscure – nor does it date from any of his generally acknowledged ‘classic’ periods. Its origins lay in a song called ‘Seven Days
And Seven Nights’, which Hooker had recorded twice: first during the November ’64 London sessions with the Groundhogs, and again in August ’66 whilst cutting the
Live At Cafe
Au Go-Go
album with Muddy Waters and his band. Its next metamorphosis occurred in November of 1970 when it was cut, as ‘Sittin’ In My Dark Room’, during the three-day San
Francisco session which produced the ABC double-album
Endless Boogie.

Endless Boogie
’s version of this ominous, muted free-form slow blues was a team-handed affair: as well as a rhythm section (bassist
Gino Skaggs and drummer
Billy Ingram), Hooker was backed by two other guitarists (Steve Miller and Mel Brown) plus two pianists (Mark Naftalin and Cliff Coulter, respectively playing acoustic and electric instruments).
Their accompaniment is subtle and sensitive – dark, roiling undercurrents of bass and piano, lit and pierced by sharp splinters of guitar – and they
listen
. Hooker sings as a man
coming to terms with the departure of his lover: he sits weeping in his bedroom, and even when his friends stop by to visit, his emotions still overwhelm him to the point where he must abandon his
guests so that he can grapple with his sorrow in his darkened bedchamber, alone. It is a fine, moody performance, but it somehow doesn’t go deep enough: it is not so much that Hooker
doesn’t have his heart in it, rather that the piece has not yet grown large enough to accommodate that heart.