LITMIR.BIZ

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Started hoboin’

       I took a freight train to be my friend

       Oh Lord . . .

      John Lee Hooker, ‘Hobo Blues’

      Like the Memphis sojourn, the period between John Lee’s departure from the South and his arrival in Detroit has become the stuff of legend, conjecture and romantic embroidery. The liner notes to some of the albums he cut during the late ’50s and early ’60s for the Chicago-based Vee Jay label are full of such myth-making. The text accompanying 1961’s The Folklore of John Lee Hooker refers to ‘a life of drifting and restless traveling’ and goes on to claim ‘The itinerant’s life lasted for sixteen years – during which time John Lee had spent relatively long stays in Memphis . . .’ while I’m John Lee Hooker goes further still. ‘He is an itinerant soul, 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.’

      Now, hype is the raw material of which the music business, in all its forms, is built and, as hypes go, this is all good stuff; the kind of rhetorical flourish that’s perfectly suited and highly appropriate for cementing the public image and professional status of the artist whom Vee Jay was successfully marketing as the king of electric downhome blues. The problem is that it’s bullshit. Hooker’s present account is radically different.

      ‘Between Memphis and Cincinnati I was in a little town, I don’t know what you call . . . Knoxville? Stayed there a lttle while.¹ Me and a guy called Jerry went there. He was older than I was. I followed him there, and we stayed there about six months, maybe a year. I got no stories to tell you about it. It was about like Memphis. I was about seventeen, maybe eighteen. We left there and come to Cincinnati, and when we crossed the Mason-Dixon line, it was a big difference, you know. Ooh! Much different! You could go wherever you wanted there. You could ride with ’em [whites] on the same buses, go to the same places they go. That felt good. I stayed in Cincinnati a good long time, two-three years, two and a half years. I worked at the Philip Tank & Pump Company up on Walnut Hill. I was working in the plant making rings for cars. I was a helper for one of the people run the machines, and that was way out in the hills. Redd and Rose, this main street that had nothin’ but used cars, new cars, and it was way out there, so we had to take a bus out there every day. I finally got an old car, an old Ford, and I thought I had somethin’. An old ’37 Ford! But it run good; I thought I was livin’ in heaven. I had an old guitar I played, and I stayed in a little restaurant called Mom’s Place, was workin’ as a janitor, dishwasher before I got a job sweepin’ and janitor at the old Philip Tank & Pump Company plant. I was always smart. I never did like to sit around. I always had me a job to pay my little rent, any kind of little handy job I would do. I would make about ten bucks a week. Oh, that was big money then. The Depression never did bother me. I never did feel it. My daddy always had a lot of food; it never did bother any’us.’

      In Cincinnati, the once-sheltered boy began taking his first serious steps into adulthood. He began to mingle at the kind of house parties and blues dances of which Rev. Hooker had disapproved, and from which Will Moore had excluded him. And, for the first time, he began to play his guitar to others. Nothing ambitious at first – ‘Aww, it was routine stuff, just songs in general. Nothin’ that I wrote too much. Oh yeah, I was playing “King Snake”, stuff that I’m playing right today, stuff that I come up on’ – but his social life was beginning to pick up. ‘Mom, she had a daughter called Coon.’ You’re kidding, John. ‘No!’ Hooker laughs uproariously at the memory. ‘Daughter named Coon! They called her Coon, and they had this big house where she would give house party on the weekends in Cincinnati, and I started playing at the party for her. Boy, I wasn’t quite into women then because I was younger, not quite twenty, but she was so good to me. Everybody would love me and like me because I was a malleable kid. I was very intelligent, I had class, and I knew how to treat older people and young people, so everybody would take a liking to me. I would play there for her on a Saturday night and weekends, and do janitor work, you know. And I would work in theatres, seating people. Wasn’t making much money, but it was good money.’

      Nevertheless, John wasn’t quite ready to shoot for the big time. ‘Cincinnati was a good town. There was more happenin’ in Cincinnati than in Memphis or Mississippi, that was for sure, but as far as record companies . . . there was a big record company there [King Records, a small but hardworking label dealing in both R&B and country music, later became best-known in the ’50s and ’60s as the musical home of James Brown, the Godfather of Soul], but I wasn’t known, wasn’t even thinkin’ about it. I didn’t have a chance then.’

      As far as John’s family – or, to be more precise, his families – back in Vance, Mississippi, were concerned, their boy had simply disappeared back in 1933. John Lee Hooker had ‘just vanished out of the world’. As far as John himself seems to have been concerned, so had they. There was a desultory exchange of correspondence over the years, mainly to reassure them that he was alive and well, but John Lee never saw William Hooker, Will Moore or Minnie Ramsey Hooker Moore ever again.

      ‘I never met grandmother when I was little,’ says Archie. ‘I only knew what my mom and dad told me. They said she had long pretty hair. Said she was on a bed of affliction when I was born. That meant she only lived eight, nine months after I was born, and I was born in ’49. That meant grandmama had to die in ’50. That meant she was dead when [John Lee] came back [to Mississippi]. I seen John when I was four years old. He had made it.’

      ‘I wrote to [the family] a coupla times,’ says John Lee, ‘wrote ’em a letter an’ we got a good response back. They were glad to hear from me, glad that I was doin’ all right. Very glad to hear from me before she died. She died when I was livin’ in Detroit, thirty-five or forty years ago. I forgot what time it was at. He died before she did. He was way up in age, about ten, twelve years older than my mother. She was seventy-five when she died. My father lived to be a hundred and two. A very strong man.’

      Allowing for John Lee’s shaky maths – neither Reverend Hooker nor Will Moore survived into their eighties – one can only concur that he’d have had to be.

      Today Vance, Mississippi, just about qualifies as a one-horse town. To reach it, you follow Highway 49 south out of Clarksdale, through Matson, and through Dublin. When you reach Tutwiler, turn onto Highway 3 and pretty soon you’re in Vance, on the Quitman/Tallahatchie county line. The post office and the general store are on your left, and the mansion which was once the headquarters of the old Fewell plantation on your right. Then you pass a few shacks and trailers on each side of the road, and the graveyard adjoining St Mark’s Baptist Church, containing those few remaining graves which haven’t yet been ploughed over. A couple of seconds later, you’re out the other side, en route to Lambert, Marks and the junction with Highway 6. John Lee Hooker sighs heavily when he thinks of Vance. ‘Yeah. Zoom-zoom, right through. There’s nothin’ there. It’ll never grow into nothin’.’

      Vance is a town waiting to die, except that it can’t quite summon the energy. The only thing that really qualifies it as a town at all is the fact that it still has its own post office. The official state map – brightly festooned with attractive touristy images of riverboats, Elvis and the Civil War – lists the populations of most of the various towns and cities in Mississippi, ranging from Jackson, the state capital, which can boast over 200,000 souls and actually has its own airport, down to the likes of Learned, in Hinds County, with its registered population of 113. Places with a head count below three figures don’t carry a listing at all. Vance is one of those.

      In blues parlance, Delta landscapes like those surrounding Vance are dubbed ‘the lowlands’. That’s because they’re about as perfectly flat as a landscape can possibly get, and the long straight highways scythe through them to the horizon, decisive grey slashes designed to take you somewhere else as fast as possible. Around those parts, a ‘thousand-yard stare’ implies chronic short-sightedness. Every place you go in the deep country, you see field: cotton, soya, pecans, all growing green or gold wherever the red earth is not puddled and paddied with water. Your line of vision ends only when you sight the light woodlands far

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