“You can’t go no deeper than me and my guitar.” – John Lee Hooker (1917-2001)
The concept of cool is one that is often besmirched by square cynics who think it’s a pointless juvenile ego-flex that has no place in the sacred museum of the arts. But in the cocktail of all the best modern music, there is always a fair glug of swagger thrown into the shaker, and when you are crowned as the King of The Boogie, as John Lee Hooker was proudly known, you have to be an undoubted beholder of cool. His simplicity was a world away from the wizardry of pompadour-wearing prodigies of the past, but between the notes, there was so much personality, style and life that his beat is a prime example of why expertise is not the be-all and end-all in music. If John Lee Hooker was any more laid back, he’d be lying down, and his timeless originality remains a paradigm for the importance of putting the individual into the art.
Born, like just about every other blues great, amid the Tupelo tree territory of the Mississippi Delta, John Lee Hooker was brought up on a sharecropping plantation where his stepfather, William Moore, provided the soundtrack to days toiling under the sun. It was from Moore that John Lee Hooker learnt his way around a six-string. In his early years, his biological father had brought Hooker up on a strict musical diet of religious songs, thus when he first heard the so-called devil’s music, he was stirred, like so many of us, by its power to perturb. Hooker once said, “Nobody can teach you, but I watched him night and day and I played like him.”
This notion of the blues not being taught was one that Hooker reiterated in various poetic snippets throughout his life, “You can’t write the blues,” he once said, “You just feel the blues.” And in an even more dramatic rehashing, he declared, “The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has meaning.” Well, if the blues comes from within and it tells a story of meaning and depth, then The King of The Boogie felt it rising within from an early age and saw the story and meaning of his life laid out ahead of him on the road Beale Street, Memphis.
Seeing the hardship entailed in toiling the plantation land all around him, Hooker sought a different path and fled home with a six-string under his arm and not a lot else at the age of fourteen. He straight for a spot dubbed The Black Main Street of the South and set about forging an azure blue future away from the darker tones of despair back home. Naturally, things far from fell into place right away for a young fourteen-year-old wannabe competing with more bluesmen than a music episode of The Smurfs in the genre’s capital, starting point and continued epicentre. As he said himself, “I had a good life, and I had a rough life. I’ve had both.” And both ineffably fed into his unfettered art.
After he arrived in Memphis, his trail gets hard to trace. He wove a serpentine path through the South, linking up with various other performers and hints of his passing can be caught here there and everywhere. These wayfaring years were a blues scholarship and one thing it taught him was that to make a go at it you had to stand out in some way. His first plan on this front was simply to get away from everyone else, “Too much competition there,” Hooker once said of his Delta days, “I wanted to go to Detroit where there was no competition.”
His rise would not be what you could call rapid by any modern standards whereby stars are made overnight and forgotten about come morning, but sure enough, he began to plant his blues flag in the unclaimed land of the North. By the late 1940s, Hooker made use of electricity, “I loved electricity,” he said, “You barely have to touch the guitar and the sound comes out so silky. I felt drawn into it.”
With Thomas Edison on his side, an inherent helping of the blues and a keen eye for that undefinable embellishment of cool-ness, Hooker ‘the Hook’ had a style to call his own and people were developing an attitude for it just in time to devour his debut recording of ‘Boogie Chillen’. The 1948 track was a one-man riot that with just a few rattling notes would have had Sir Douglas Bader stamping his feet in a pucker-up of post-War bravura. With this one simple track, John Lee Hooker rose to stardom and he had a swathe of fans nodding in agreement when he declared, “My style is all to myself.”
Throughout the years that followed Hooker continually moved with the times, forever staying relevant owing to a combination of intrinsic timelessness and a simple way of sizing up the zeitgeist and finding his place within it. There wasn’t ever any notion of selling out during these style changes, merely a sense he was a bluesman without any hung-up of pretence or judgement and scarcely a damn to give for those who thought otherwise. In short, he was a man who put so much of himself in his music that he could be singing ‘Happy Birthday’ and you’d think he’d written it that afternoon on the cuff of his shirt.
All that being said, the synth-sedation of music in the 1980s was a bridge too far for any bluesman to endure and John Lee Hooker drifted out of sight, but in 1989 he wandered right back into his reclaimed limelight with The Healer. The 1989 record remains to this day one of the most successful blues albums ever produced. With it, his autumn years were assured to basked in the boon of a munificent harvest of fruits of his labour in a career of graft and individualism.
What those who mock the perceived egotism of coolness, can’t grasp is that when it is done timelessly it is about celebrating a true sense of self rather than propagating a false one or acquiescing to a personality-less void. Hooker’s style may have been profoundly simple but and dramatically interchangeable, but it would ultimately be defined by his mantra of: “[I’ve got] the same beat that I’ve always had. I’d never change that, ‘cause if I change that, I wouldn’t be John Lee Hooker anymore.” It was this very notion that made him a fixture in the record collections of all who would follow from Nick Cave to David Bowie, each of which were inspired by his careworn realism and such undeniable coolness that he could rightfully be crowned The King of The Boogie.
