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      BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, TAKE A LETTER DOWN SOUTH FOR ME

       In my mind, music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at McDonalds?

      Henry Rollins, interviewed in Rolling Stone

       Alabama’s got me so upset

       Tennessee made me lose my rest

       And everybody knows about Mississippi . . .

       Goddam!

      Nina Simone, from Mississippi Goddam

       I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.

      John Lee Hooker,

       interviewed in Melody Maker, October 1964

      So how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen the big city? Some people just can’t wait to get out of the country, feel some pavement under their feet, scrape the mud off their boots and morph, as smoothly as possible, into urban slickers ready to parade their new-found sophistication at the expense of the rubes fresh off the latest bus from down home. Every big city is full of people from the sticks or the ’burbs who’ve taken on urban coloration like so many concrete chameleons, shedding their country skins, going native on Broadway or in Hollywood, pumped and cranked all the way up, and primed to mud-wrestle the locals for that big-town pay-cheque. For others, the basic fact of who they are changes not one iota no matter where they may find themselves.

      John Lee Hooker left the Mississippi Delta whilst still in the turbulence of adolescence. Nevertheless, Mississippi never left him. Though he’s lived in major conurbations – first Cincinnati, then Detroit, then Oakland, California, and finally the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area – ever since reaching his late teens, he remains a quintessential man of the Delta. His slow, deliberate drawl has never revved itself up to city speed. His manners are still country-courtly. His fondness for traditional Southern food remains unaffected by the temptations of any exotic delicacies from Europe, Asia or, come to that, anywhere else you could name. He’s seen it all and he’s not terribly impressed, but he’s far too much the country gentleman to give offence.

      The Delta formed his voice, and he in turn became the voice of the Delta: the very incarnation of the traditional culture of its African diaspora; a king in voluntary exile. However, the suggestion that ‘Mississippi made him’ would be an outrageous oversimplification. There is only so much for which purely sociological heredity-and-environment hypotheses will account; there is no process, no set of circumstances, which can truly be said to ‘explain’ John Lee Hooker. We can certainly state without fear of significant contradiction that the ‘environment’ of the Mississippi Delta not only produced considerably more than its fair share of blues singers, but was most probably the spawning ground of the primal blues from which all the different varieties of blues-as-we-know-it ultimately derived. The blues of the Delta is the oldest, deepest blues there is; it therefore creates no major rupture of the laws of probability to propose that the Mississippi Delta (as opposed to, say, Surrey, England) would produce the artist with the most profound ability to tap into that primal blues, and the chromatic range of human emotions it explores. Even within the small community in which Hooker spent his formative years, two of his former playmates became blues singers and good ones at that: but not great ones. We can also discard immediate heredity: even considering the complex interaction between the two primary factors of heredity and environment fails to take us significantly further forward. John Lee Hooker came from a large family, but none of his many brothers and sisters became professionally successful blues singers, though his younger cousin Earl did. ‘I was different from any of my family, as night and day,’ he says today, ‘I never know why I was so different from the rest of ’em.’

      This is, of course, the big question. Why was Hooker ‘so different from the rest of ’em’? Of course, almost every person who becomes successful and famous and admired grows up amongst ‘normal’ people (read: people who don’t). Statistically it could hardly be otherwise, even if – in the cable and satellite era – it now seems impossible that anybody at all will be able to live through an entire lifetime without being seen, at least once, on television. It also seems as if every successful person elects to strive for that success from a very young age. Yet John Lee Hooker came up at a time when the majority (read: white) culture had decided that the sons and daughters of black Southern sharecroppers were not supposed even to entertain the possibility that they could escape their fate and take control of their own lives. Their culture was so ‘primitive’ that, by the standards of the times into which Hooker was born, it barely qualified as culture at all. The ‘leaders’ of the black communities, in their turn, decided that blacks not only could but most definitely would ‘make progress’ despite white opposition, but they would do so by self-improvement, by proving their worth to a society which treated them as though they were worthless. By dint of sobriety and study; they would haul themselves, hand over hand, up an American ladder from which most of the rungs had been cut away. Hooker steered precisely the opposite course: that of taking a fierce, incandescent pride in the identity he already had, and exploring the implications of that identity no matter what the consequences.

      The story of John Lee Hooker’s life is, essentially, the story of his resistance to any and all attempts to change him, to dilute an intrinsic sense of self which has successfully withstood all pressures, including those of institutionalized racism, family, church and the music business. That resistance has been, at times, essentially a passive one: throughout his life, Hooker has remained polite, deferential, quiet-spoken and accommodating. Despite the occasional peevish or impatient outburst, he doesn’t argue, he doesn’t bluster, he doesn’t bully. And then finally, when absolutely no alternative remains, he quits. By which I mean: he leaves, he splits, he dusts, he’s outta there, he’s nothin’ but a cool breeze. It doesn’t matter if it’s a marriage, a record contract, a family, a home: once Hooker decides he’s had enough, that is it. No discussion, no recrimination, nothing. Just gone. And the reason he does it is to protect himself. Not because he’s callous, or cowardly. He is neither. But himself – or rather, his self – is that which makes the music, and that will be protected at all costs; yea, e’en to the ends of the earth.

      So Mississippi, after all, made many people, but only one John Lee Hooker. Rather, Mississippi provided the wherewithal for John Lee Hooker to make himself. During his first fifteen or so years, Hooker took three key decisions which set him on a collision course with all the prevailing values of his family and community; he stood by those decisions and received validation beyond his wildest dreams. At a time when most people are still struggling to discover who they are, Hooker knew not only who he was, but who he wanted to be. Like all great bluesmen, Hooker is his own greatest creation, and the creation without which none of his other creations would have been possible. The ‘self-made man’ can be found somewhere near the front of the Great Book of Facile Truisms (right next to the notion that ‘you can take the boy out of the country but you can’t take the country out of the boy’, in fact), but Hooker fulfils it to the nth degree. The self he chose to make is that of a man supremely fitted to sing and play the blues, and virtually little else. After all – as Henry Rollins asks – what would John Lee Hooker be doing if he wasn’t singing the blues?

      If he had decided to play the game through strictly on the hand he was dealt, he would have lived and died a Delta sharecropper and nobody outside his community would ever have heard of him. What would he have had if, even without his music as the spur, he had still headed for the city? A lifetime of the kind of dead-end jobs he plied in the various cities before his artistic breakthrough: janitor, usher and so forth. The kind of jobs a man does when he has neither the physique

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