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more black people. He was a sharecropper, you know.’

      The practice of sharecropping meant that the larger plantations managed to keep the majority of the black workers on the land, substituting economic ties for forced labour. A tenant farmer would take responsibility for a certain area of land and would work it, together with their families and any sub-tenants and day labourers, with equipment and cash advances supplied by the ‘boss’. When each year’s crop was harvested, the farmer and the landlord split the proceeds, and if the farmer and his team had worked especially conscientiously, there would indeed be a profit after the boss deducted his advances. If the crop failed, or if, for any other reason, sufficient profits did not materialise, the tenants began the following year in debt. Given a few bad years, a sharecropper could easily fall so far in debt that it was impossible ever to break even again. Once that happened, the ’cropper would virtually be enslaved all over again, and entirely legally. William Hooker must indeed have been a skilled and conscientious farmer: the records of the S.N. Fewell Company, based on the Fewell plantation close to nearby Vance (where the Hookers moved a few years after John was born) show that in 1928 ‘Will Hooker Sr and Jr’ made a profit of $28.00. By the standards of the time, this was a more than respectable sum.

      The work was back-breakingly hard, and getting it done was entirely down to the muscle-power of humans and animals. In the rural Mississippi of the ’20s and ’30s, the twentieth century hadn’t quite arrived. Since cars and tractors were still comparatively rare, horses and mules did double duty as agricultural implements and personal transport. Country backwaters like the Mississippi Delta weren’t yet wired up for electricity; Hooker remembers that it wasn’t until his mid-teens, when he first travelled to sophisticated, progressive Memphis, that he saw his first electric light. (For the record, Buddy Guy – nineteen years Hooker’s junior and raised in rural Louisiana – tells substantially the same story: he, too, had to go to Memphis as a teenager to see a lightbulb for the first time.) ‘When I was there [in the Delta],’ Hooker says of electricity, ‘it wasn’t there.’ The telephone was another piece of hi-tech exotica: something that folks had in the city and which you could occasionally see at the movies. The phonograph in the family parlour was ‘the Victrola, the kind you wind up’, where the energy of a weighted pulley drives the turntable and the sound is amplified acoustically through a large horn. There was also an old crystal radio, on which they would listen to Amos And Andy, and ‘music from a radio station in Helena, Arkansas’.

      ‘Sacred’ music only, though. William Hooker was a part-time preacher, a pastor at a local Macedonian church, and family life revolved around farm, church and school. ‘We had,’ says John Lee, ‘to work.’ They also had to sing in church, as Hooker’s nephew Archie, son and namesake of John Lee’s immediate elder brother, explains: ‘He’d been singin’ for, like, years. If you’s ever been a minister’s son, you gonna have to participate in church. They made him go to church, and if you go to church, you gonna learn how to sing basic hymns, so it stuck. It stuck to him, and when he be workin’ he would always try to sing.’ As Hooker himself proudly recalls, ‘I used to sing in the church when I was nine or ten. I was a great gospel singer. Macedonian, where my father was a pastor. It was in the country. I was a very talented young man, and everybody round in the county looked up to me and said, “Oh, that kid is somethin’ else, he can sing better than anybody I ever seen.” When I come into the church everybody look round, and when I started singin’, people start shoutin’ and hollerin’. I had such a tremendous voice. I was nine, ten years old.’

      And there was farm-work, though John Lee was neither physically nor mentally suited to the toil of agricultural labour. He just flat-out didn’t like working in the fields, and down there working in the fields was all there was. ‘My daddy,’ says Archie Hooker, ‘was more a mechanical type. He worked with his hands, and Uncle John didn’t.’ However, there was also play. In the rural South, you either made your own entertainment, or else you got very, very bored. ‘There was this old mule we had, an old mare mule, and she was very stubborn, but she was a gentle old mule and she know us kids. She was a very wise old mule. She wouldn’t hurt us, and she really cared about us. We’d ride her back and she’d let us ride ’til she get tired, and then she rub up against a barbed-wire fence. You know what a barbed-wire fence is? She’d just swing you right into the barbed-wire fence and scratch you and you’d have to jump right off her back! You’d get so mad with her you’d start bitin’ her lip and be cussin’ her: “You bitch! You . . . !” There’d be one behind kickin’ her, bam! Right up against the barbed-wire fence! Whoo! Whoo! Old Kate, that was her name. She’d drag you right into a barbed-wire fence! You had to hop right off her or get stuck with the wire! Yeah! She’d see us comin’ and if she didn’t want to be bother, she just lay down, get on her knees and lay down. Old Kate. Hell of an old mule. She knew when twelve o’clock come and we’d been workin’ in the fields, when time to eat she started hollerin’ Whoo! Whoo! and she wouldn’t go no further. She lay down in the middle of the field ’til she knew that you were gonna take her and get her somethin’ to eat. A lot of memories in that old mule.’

      Chicago drummer S.P. Leary, a veteran of the Muddy Waters Band who worked with Hooker on the 1966 sessions for The Real Folk Blues, would certainly agree on that: ‘Everyone I worked [with] taught me something but John Lee Hooker. Me and him fell out. You have to watch your p’s and q’s with John Lee; he’d tear a house up, he’d tear the top off a house. If you make him mad, you talk about a mule . . . ha ha. I think a mule showed John Lee a hard time.’

      And then there was the usual kid stuff.

      ‘I met a midget once. Did I tell you about the midget? There was some pretty little girls around, and I was the big bully of the town. I was a bully. There was a little midget, ’bout this high. There was about four or five little girls around, and he was peekin’ on one girl, and I said “Leave him to me.” I was showin’ off for the girls. I was nine years old, and I thought I was gonna walk all over him. They said’ – Hooker shifts his voice into a taunting, little-girl falsetto – ‘“We gon’ make John whup your ass. John, will you hold him for us?” I said’ – roughening to a stylised ‘tough’ voice – ‘“Yeah, I’ll take care of it.” And I slap him, pow! And he said, “Don’t hit me no more.” I say,’ – toughly again – ‘“What you say?” Bop! He say, “I said don’t hit me no more.” I say, “You little short thing, I’m gonna whup the piss outcha.” He said, “Y’all don’t hit me no more.” I hit him again, and, boy, he grabbed me. He was a tough ’un. He whupped me and he tore off all my clothes, and the girls was there: “Get up, John! John, get up! Get him! Don’t let him getcha! John, get up! Get up! Get up! Get him off the ground! John, he on top of you!” We get up and he say, “Now, I don’t wanna hurt you, so don’t slap me no more.” I said, “I’m gonna see you again, and the next time I see you I’m gonna be ready.” And Loreen – the girl – said,’ – in falsetto – ‘“John wasn’t ready then!” But I never jumped on another midget. Yeah, he showed me!’

      The idea of John Lee Hooker as ‘the bully of the town’ seems somewhat unlikely. He was small for his age and tormented by a chronic stutter; his only known attempt at a macho act was to slap a midget, and that particular exercise in boyish swaggering ended rather less than gloriously. Singer/guitarist Jimmy Rogers, a veteran of the great Muddy Waters bands of the ’50s and a Chess Records hitmaker in his own right during that time, grew up around the Vance area and counted Hooker and harmonicist Snooky Pryor among his playmates. Rogers paints a slightly different picture: ‘Oh, he was just a youngster just like me and Snooky [Pryor] was, just a young country boy . . . we would play marbles together, play ball . . . there weren’t nothin’ special goin’ on in his life at all, nothin’ different from any other youngster back then. We was kids then, and he was just a regular guy. There weren’t nothin’ special about him that I know of. We just met up, and Snooky knew him before I did. He didn’t mean nothin’ to me; he was just another boy. It’s been so long since I been in Vance; I was a kid then and I’m 68 now. I know he’s a good four, five, six years older than me, at least five.’ It’s hard to imagine ‘the bully of the town’ spending much time playing marbles and ball with kids half a decade his junior

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