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Boogie Man. Charles Shaar Murray
Читать онлайн.Название Boogie Man
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9780857862044
Автор произведения Charles Shaar Murray
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
The ‘bully of the town’ notion definitely doesn’t stand up. If anyone was the family desperado, it was Hooker’s brother Dan, who later killed his wife, and then walked ten miles to turn himself in. ‘I met Uncle Dan,’ recalls Archie. ‘The first time I met him, he was in prison. Doin’ ten years for killin’ his wife. Straight ten years: no parole. I was about five, six. My dad took me down. He was at Parchman, Mississippi. Short, heavy-set man. Cookin’, made trustee. But his violence had to be provoked, because in the process of makin’ trustee, he carried a gun. If a guy was escapin’, he wouldn’t shoot. So that mean for him to really get mad, to hurt somebody, someone had to push him. That mean a woman had to push him. John always said he didn’t have to fight, they always took care’a him. My dad said John was always fragile, never was one to want to be a fighter. He was always kindhearted, and I’m thinkin’, basically, that’s what it is now. John’s not a fighter. That ain’t the way he was raised. He don’t believe in it. My dad didn’t. Unless you pushed him. That’s why his brothers took care of him. They didn’t want him to turn the other cheek. They was tough, they would fight . . . deep down inside, he was more of a minister’s son [than the others]. He might’ve sung the blues for relief, or for money, because you can’t make a lot of money singing spirituals, but deep down inside he always had God in his heart. John may have ran away, true, but he ran away from poverty.’
According to Archie, there were other pastimes, too: ‘Things like stealin’ a neighbour’s chickens. [John Lee] said, “We couldn’t steal granddad’s chickens”, cause he counted ’em, but you’d go out and get a neighbour’s chickens.’ He didn’t want to do the fields, and him and all the boys, they had nothin’ else to do, so that was they entertainment. They started like . . . his music really was his turnaround.’
John Lee could conceivably have stayed down on the farm, working in the fields, singing in church and perhaps following his father into the ministry, acquiring some schooling – the year before he was born, the state of Mississippi had finally gotten around to instituting a public education policy – and raising a family of his own to work the land in their turn. Instead, a chance encounter was to change his life. An itinerant bluesman named Tony Hollins took a powerful shine to John’s sister Alice, and soon he was coming round to court her. He ended up making a bigger impression on his adored one’s little brother than he did on Alice herself.
‘Oh, I loved him so much, couldn’t he play guitar! I was hangin’ round him like a hungry dog hang around a bone. I was just a little kid, seven, eight. He recorded, but I can’t think of what he recorded. Last I heard of him, he was a barber in Chicago. Whether he’s still around or gone, I don’t know, but anyway he got rid of the first guitar he had, an old Silvertone. It wasn’t no heck of a guitar, but it was a guitar, and that was heaven to me because I had never had no guitar. It could have had three strings, but it was a guitar. I never know what happened to that guitar that Tony give me, but anyway we used to sit on the porch on the pasture by the woods, with the cows and stuff like that with my sister, and he would play for us. One day he said, “Hey kid, I got a guitar for you.” I said okay, and that was my first guitar.’
It’s not hard to second-guess Hollins’ reasoning. Giving an old, worn-out guitar to John meant that he could send the youngster off on his own to practice, and – once the young gooseberry was safely distracted and out of the way – enjoy some precious time alone with the loved one. The acquisition of the guitar created an immediate problem with the loving but stern Reverend William Hooker. ‘Finally, you know, I went to play guitar,’ Hooker reminisces. ‘Had an old piece of guitar and be bangin’ on it.’ The main reason that Tony Hollins had to lurk by the front porch when he came by to see Alice was because of Rev. Hooker’s disapproval of his reckless, hard-travelling, blues-singing ways. Reluctantly, William Hooker allowed John to keep the guitar, as long it never crossed the threshold of the family home. ‘I couldn’t play it in the house, because . . . I had to keep it out in the barn. All the time I was pluckin’ on it, and my daddy called it the Devil. He said, “You can’t bring the Devil in this house.” They all feel like it devil music back then. They call blues and guitar and things the Devil’s music. That was just the way they thought. Not only my father, everybody thought that. The white and the black ministers, they thought it was the Devil’s music.’
To the Reverend Hooker, it must indeed have seemed like that. Tony Hollins didn’t stick around very long, but his beat-up old guitar did. The second young John Lee got his hands on the discarded instrument, whatever interest he may have had in his schooling went right out of the window. ‘When I was a kid comin’ up, I would pretend I was goin’ to school and hide out in the woods with my old guitar. When the other kids come out of school, I come back along with them like I’d been to school. I hadn’t been to school for a long time, and then they caught me and used to whup me and beat me.’ For John Lee, the choice was absolutely clear-cut. ‘You never knew this, I’m a very, very wise person. I’m a very good songwriter in the blues, but I never got education because I had two choices. Stay, go to school and get a good education, stay down in Mississippi and be a farmer the rest of my life and never be a musician; and I took the choice of leavin’, comin’ North and being a musician. In my mind, I was very smart. I wouldn’t have been a musician, living in Mississippi, farming, sharecropping. I had two choices: going to school, and become a well-known whatever – I never would have been known just working the rest of my life in Mississippi or wherever – or take off and get famous, which is what happened.’
The Hooker boys were growing up. Archie Hooker remembers the boyhood tales told him by his father. ‘My daddy told me about how when they was growin’ up they would swim in the creek, and my daddy was a moonshine maker, they would make corn whiskey. “I made John drunk once – he was just a little boy – from white lightnin’.” Down in the woods, they would go down to the still and let him sample. “That’s how you could tell how good it was. If it made him drunk, it was good.” My dad was a little bit older than Uncle John, just a couple of years. Not a whole lot, but they was real close.’ John Lee, too, remembers his elder brother’s homebrew experiments. ‘He was making home-brew in a little cabin, and the stuff was good, too. We’d cap it, bag it and take it to a party one night, and I had it on my back and the thing goes to bustin’, beer got warm, explodin’. He made the corn liquor too, same thing as whiskey, made outta corn . . .’
Needless to say, this too contravened Rev. Hooker’s house rules; it’s as well that he never found out what his sons were up to in the little cabin out the back. ‘Oh yeah! Ooohh! Never be caught with a bottle. The Devil in the bottle! It’s funny, but it’s true. The Devil in the bottle. Anything with alcohol, the Devil puts it there.’
In many ways, the Reverend’s hard-nosed attitude to his son’s musical ambitions backfired. If he had allowed John to play his guitar in the house, John might well have stayed in Mississippi. On the other hand, he might not. ‘I could have stayed home and played, but there wasn’t no producers, radio stations and record companies. Weren’t none of that in Mississippi. I could have stayed down there and played and gotten real good, like so many down there right now are real good, but they never come to be a star because there’s nothin’ there. I could have stayed there like you say. You right. If they ever let me stay there and play, I could’ve become a grown-up musician, a real good musician, but there’s nothing down there like producers, managers, record companies, booking agencies could’ve heard me and discovered me. The country people could’ve discovered me, but . . . I was very wise. I was different from any of my family, as night and day. I was just . . . I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em. The rest of ’em grew up, got educations, stayed down there . . . they all gone now. But from twelve or fourteen I wanted to be a city boy, a musician. I wanted to explore my music. I were very humble, very mellow, very nice; I were raised very good, to be a Christian and respect everybody, love people. But it wasn’t what I wanted in Mississippi. I said I’d never reach my goal livin’ there, goin’ to school, sharecroppin’, come home from the fields . . .’
Hooker