‘My First Wife Left Me’: The song John Lee Hooker could never sing without crying
Blue. When you’re in school, your English teachers will obsessively tell you that the colour symbolises despair, sadness, sombreness. So it should come as no surprise that the blues can take you there too.
The origin of the genre lends itself to the feeling due to its rooted ties to the Deep South and to Black American artists navigating their feelings after the abolition of slavery, but with racial injustice still an intense daily struggle.
Merging the traditional sounds of spiritual and gospel music with the new techniques they were discovering on guitar, the blues was born there, around the 1860s, and grew from that point on.
A century later, by the 1960s, it was somehow both the same and totally different. It was different because the blues had infinitely blossomed. With new technology and more people picking up electric guitars, the sound had shifted to something bigger. As it began to form the world of rock and roll, new acts took it and ran with it. Some would argue that names like Elvis Presley or The Rolling Stones appropriated it, taking the work of Black artists and stealing it, or at least heavily ripping it off. Others would say that that’s simply how evolution and inspiration work.
One thing is for certain, though, there is no rock and roll without blues, and because of that, a core of the original always remains. Mostly, it remains in the emotion and in the poignant way blues music is always closely tethered to lyrical substance with the instrumental, crafting a song like an immersive feeling. All the greats knew how to do that, and John Lee Hooker was undeniably among them.
Of all his songs, his own reaction to ‘My First Wife Left Me’ shows it well. “It’s so sad that every time I sing it, I feel a teardrop in my eye. I see my audience, even the young folks; they’re sitting there with their heads hanging down,” he said as the heavy emotion he put into the 1961 track never lost its weight.
Just like the origins of blues and the way the songs sang of real-world pain, Hooker’s tune does the same. “It came to me that so many men get married and their wives leave them. So I decided to write a song like that,” he explained, penning a song for the many so they could relate and feel it too.
“When my first wife left me, she left my heart in misery / Ever since that day boy, I don’t think I’ll ever love again,” he croons in the opening verse. Over a classic blues melody, he sings of heartbreak like all the masters did with an aching soul and a desperate yearning to have his love return, promising, “If I can get her back again, I’ll never roam no more”.
Far from the sex, drugs and bravado of rock and roll, this is pure blues. Free from the ego of the genre that morphed from it, Hooker’s sad heartbreak tune is a reminder that the blues was always painted blue.
