John Lee Hooker and the #BlackHistoryMonthChallenge
Day 13: I'll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive
The pieces of my personal Black History are coming back to me in no logical or even chronological order; recovering memories sometimes works this way. I’ve been thinking about the Blues, and the ways the Blues impacted my life between the ages of 15 and 22. It represent a very distinct epoch of my engagement with Black music, and by extension my growing sense of urgency about the problem of anti-Blackness—the particular brand of racist ideology and the systems that represent the greatest existential threat to Black lives.
So this time it’s 1986. I’m sitting alone in a movie theater in Santa Fe, trying to catch a matinée about a White pop musician from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s. Sting, the front-man of the Police, had recently broken up the popular New Wave band to strike out on his own. After a meteoric rise to fame and fortune as part of a rock trio, he was going solo to record a new album with a completely different sound.
Bring on the Night turned out to be s a series of interviews, rehearsals and concert footage edited together to tell the story of his journey from New Wave rocker to jazz fusion artist. It ended with footage from the launch of his solo career, performing live to showcase the songs of his new album, Dream of the Blue Turtles. When I sat down in the theater, I had no real idea what I was about to see and hear—I was just excited to find out where he was headed, because I really liked the Police (in exactly the way that only teenage girls can).
The ticket I had bought was for a double feature, however, and I was curious enough to sit through the second half that afternoon. Ironically, that second movie was the one that would stick with me the longest, and have the most lasting impact on my life. I’ve maybe re-watched Bring on the Night once since 1986, mainly to catch that luminous live performance of “I’ll Burn for You”. But I’ve watched The Blues Brothers at least ten times since I first saw it, and for all I know I’ll watch it ten times more before I die.
Both Bring on the Night and The Blues Brothers are about White musicians who bet their lives and futures on a single concert. And both movies are, to some degree, about White front men teaming up with (and being inspired by) very gifted Black musicians. But the back-up band of side men and singers that Sting was putting together were mainly Black jazz musicians, notably the legendary saxophonist Branford Marsalis. In The Blues Brothers, most of the back-up band for the fictional duo seemed to be other White guys. Nevertheless, a whole series of legendary Blues musicians took on cameo roles as minor characters…apparently as an excuse to let them literally take over the movie for a few minutes to perform a hit number.
In every case when a great Blues musican showed up on screen, it was the titular White characters—Jake and Elwood Blues, played by Dan Ackroyd and John Belushi—who faded into the background. Often they would disappear completely, or serve only as silent back-up dancers or an appreciative audience for these titanic Black talents. There was a great sense of joy and fun when Belushi and Ackroyd were singing or performing in the film, but they didn’t even try to pretend that they were meeting their heroes as peers—they just stepped aside and let the gods of the Blues do their thing.
It is no exaggeration to say that The Blues Brothers changed my life. To me, it was more than funny; it was two hours and thirteen minutes of badly-needed music education. I had been waiting since I was seven to find this music. And here all of a sudden I had legends like Cab Calloway, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, and Ray Charles on the big screen.
In fairness to my younger self, I had at least heard of some of these legends before. Aretha Franklin was still cranking out the hits in the 1980’s, and I had heard “Freeway of Love”, “Who’s Zoomin’ Who”, and “Sisters Are Doing It for Themselves” on the radio and MTV. James Brown had released “Living In America” the previous year, so I recognized him and knew that he had a long history in R&B, including a string of hits. And Ray Charles had just recorded a duet with Billy Joel called “Baby Grand”, which I had seen on TV—but even if I had never seen or heard him play, I probably would have recognized him from Eddie Murphy’s sometimes-unkind impression of him as a stand-up comedian.
The scene that drove me out that theater and into the nearest CD store was this one, featuring a musician I had never even heard of before, and who was never named--John Lee Hooker.
I was lucky. I had enough money to buy my first Blues CD. The one I found remains to this day one of my favorite compilations of his work. It’s a rare one from 1974, which collects flawless recordings of several great songs and opens with a beautiful Spoken Intro which showcases the seductive and velvety depth of his speaking voice—a sound you can also experience on tracks that have a spoken word element, like “Tupelo”.
I was in the record store looking for the stripped-down purity I had witnessed on film, and my first John Lee Hooker CD delivered everything I was looking for and more. These recordings were very plain, often with little accompaniment. It was a man and his guitar; even the percussive beat in the background was just the sound of his heel tapping a strip of wood to keep time.
Many of the repeated musical features that could make other Blues music seem formulaic were gone; you might get a couple of repeated lines, but he was not playing standard 12-bar Blues, and you couldn’t count a predictable verse structure. John Lee Hooker was going to play his own way.
As I listened to the full disc for the first time, I felt a great sense of homecoming. In retrospect, I had spent almost ten years of waiting for this moment. It was my first taste of the Real Folk Blues—a title which has been given to pretty much every legendary player of the Delta Blues, including Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and many others that would quickly join a growing pile of CD’s on my bedside table.
Many people over the years have called John Lee Hooker’s music “primitive” or “raw”. For some, that might just be the usual back-handed racist compliment—equivalent to the idiots who tried to call the cold-blooded surgery that Joe Louis performed in the boxing ring somehow “wild” or “animalistic”.
To the degree that a word like “raw” is well-intentioned, it’s probably a response to the spare minimalism of the recordings and arrangements he made both in the very early days of his careers, and in the 1960’s. He may sound especially bare bones if you compare those recordings to other Blues singers that go into a performance with a full orchestra at their backs.
But there is a reason for the spare and minimal quality of some recordings, especially the ones from early in his career—early producers found it impossible to pair him up with back-up musicians, or to lay tracks over him after the fact. The vast majority of ordinary side men and session players simply could not keep up with John Lee Hooker—he kept doing unexpected things, taking twists and turns they could not follow.
Words like “primal” might also come to mind when you listen to him. His voice is powerful, deep and versatile, capable of every nuance from velvet softness to a molten roar. His rhythms and guitar tracks gave me the sense that I was standing very close to the Source of some great river—the wellspring or the heart of modern music. The very fact that his music stomps the way it does, the fact that it does not follow a tired formula, might give anyone the hint that they had arrived at some kind of origin point. And if you did feel that way?
Well. Turns out you might be right.
John Lee Hooker was born in 1917 near Clarksdale, Mississippi, smack in the middle of the Mississippi Delta, and destined to become a legend of the Delta Blues. He was youngest of eleven children in a sharecropper family. When his parents parted ways in 1921, his mother remarried to a Blues musician named William Moore.; her son would later credit Moore with teaching him to play a unique style of guitar, but he didn’t spend long in Mississippi. By 1932, at the age of 15, John Lee Hooker had run away from home.
He fled north and wound up in Memphis Tennessee, living and working on Beale Street through his late teens and early 20’s. He honed his craft and learned to perform playing house rent parties through most of the 1930’s. During World War II, he drifted from city to city in the USA, doing factory labor until he wound up in Detroit. By 1948, the 31-year-old musician worked in a car factory by day, and spent his nights on Hastings Street, the heart of the city’s Black entertainment district—a location that features prominently in his most famous song, “Boogie Chillen”.
In 1948, Detroit was overflowing with piano players, but not guitarists. John Lee Hooker became popular in the Detroit clubs, and traded in his old acoustic for an electric guitar. He was soon discovered by a local record store owner, Elmer Barbee, who recorded some demos of his original songs. Barbee introduced Hooker to Bernard Bresman, a producer at Sensation Records, and it was Bresman who first recorded John Lee Hooker in a studio. Through Bresman, Hooker’s songs would eventually find their way to the Bihari brothers' Modern Records, the label that would one day become Chess Records, and his life as a Blues celebrity began.
Hooker’s first recording was “Boogie Chillen” in 1948, a song which would remain one of his most popular and influential tracks. It became a number 1 jukebox hit, and sold a million copies—but despite the fact that he had become an overnight sensation, John Lee Hooker didn’t reap all the financial rewards of his success overnight.
Black musicians during that period were rarely paid more than a pittance for their recording sessions. Producers like Bernard Bresman and the Bihari Brothers were shameless predators. They gave themselves fake song-writing credits on the music they recorded, so that they could collect royalties and residuals that were properly owed to the artist. The people with the talent got pennies, the guys with the recording equipment and the platform for distribution raked in millions—if that doesn’t sound familiar, it should, because it’s the garbage business model that predatory streaming sites are trying so hard to bring back for all creative people, but especially for musicians.
Hooker responded to this state of affairs by simply going from studio to studio, recording new songs as well as alternate takes and variants of his old songs under half-assed pseudonyms like “John Lee Booker”, “Johnny Hooker”, or “John Crooker”. Of course, this habit of re-recording and use of pseudonyms makes it virtually impossible to assemble a full discography for Hooker, and even in the modern era there are original tracks that have only recently been released.
The upshot of this is that one of the great musicians of the 20th century wasn’t getting nearly as much money as he deserved, but he was getting by. He would never work another day job in his life, and the prolific flow of his musical genius would carry him forward for decades, until his prodigious talent had outlived and outlasted the predatory business model that destroyed so many other gifted musicians.
From the release of those first recordings in 1948-1952, John Lee Hooker would go on to influence every significant Blues musician of the next century, as well as many rock and roll musicians. An incomplete list:
“Boogie Chillen” is one of a very short list of tracks that are in the running to be called the first rock and roll single. It has been covered by countless other musicians--most recently by Tommy Petty and the Heartbreakers--but it has also been sampled in a surprising number of famous rock songs that have little else in common other than lifting some of Hooker’s magic. Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”, ZZ Top’s “La Grange”, Norman Musbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky”, Cujo’s “Curfew” and “Boogeyman” by Monkey Safari all use some elements of the track.
“Boom Boom”* was covered by several White pop groups in the 1960’s and 1970’s, including The Animals, The Yardbirds, and Dr. Feelgood. Most recently the guitar from this track was lifted for Brandy’s “Beggin’ and Pleadin’”, in 2016.
“Crawlin’ Kingsnake” became a hit for The Doors in 1970, and was most recently covered by The Black Keys in 2021.
“Hobo Blues” was covered by Jeff Beck in 2002.
“Burning Hell” was covered by Tom Jones in 2010.
“I’m Gonna Kill That Woman” was covered by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds in 1986.
“I’m In the Mood” was covered by Junior Wells and Buddy Guy in 1981.
“Blues For Christmas” was covered by Everlast in 1999.
“Little Wheel” was covered by Canned Heat in 2003.
“Forgive Me”, “It Serves Me Right, “Decoration Day” and “I’ll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive” were all covered by the Cowboy Junkies in 1986.
As I said—there’s no way I could assemble a complete listing even of his original tracks in this essay, much less a complete listing of every musician who owes a debt to John Lee Hooker in some way or other. I haven’t even included the duets he sang in the 1990’s and 2000’s with younger musicians, for example the version of “In the Mood” he recorded with Bonnie Raitt. But I think a representative sample of extremely famous Rock, Folk, Pop and R&B acts that covered or sampled his music should be enough to get the point across—you’ve might have never have heard OF John Lee Hooker, but you’ve been hearing him all your life.
The overall pattern of his career was that many original songs were written and recorded in the late 1940’s and throughout the 1960’s. The young Rock and Folk artists of the 1960’s rediscovered John Lee Hooker and other Black artists in a big way, and popularized the old tracks with new covers and collaborations—this was especially true of emerging British acts like The Rolling Stones, The Animals, The Yardbirds, Led Zeppelin and Cream. In response to this new audience for his work, Hooker returned to his roots and re-recorded a great many of his classic tracks on acoustic guitar. He attained superstar status touring colleges and folk festivals alongside artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and BB King, among others, and moved to California to collaborate with rock acts like Canned Heat—a collaborate LP called Hooker ‘n’ Heat became his first charting album in 1971.
Throughout his later years, Hooker maintained an open-hearted relationship with White musicians who had been fans (and by extension promoters) of his music. His appearance in The Blues Brothers raised awareness of his music again in 1980, and in 1989 he released his first Grammy Award-winning album; The Healer was a compendium of duets and collaborations with the contemporary artists who had been inspired by his life’s work, assembled and performed when he was 72 years old. Bonnie Raitt, Robert Cray, George Thoroughgood, Los Lobos and Carlos Santana joined him on various tracks on the album, as well as some members of Canned Heat.
He won more Grammy’s in the 1990’s for his album Chill Out, a collaboration with Van Morrison called Don’t Look Back, and a richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award. True to form, he continued playing until the very end—his last concert took place only a week before he passed away at the age of 84.
I saw him play live only once before his death in 2001. This was in the late 1990’s, when he took the stage at the Bumbershoot Festival in Seattle. In his 70’s, the man was still absolutely killing it—to such a degree that it almost frightened me.
The moment I remember the most vividly from that show was when he took notice of his White back-up singer, a cute girl who may have indulged in one too many of her kittenish cougar screams on stage. John Lee Hooker walked over to her slowly, never missing a beat of the extended jam, and put his arm around her shoulders and neck. He bent the two of them over, his head bowed, as if he was about to give her the most sorrowful news in the world. And then he opened his mouth and unleashed a howl into his microphone so vast and deep and full of anguish that it could have come echoing out of hell—it was as close to the cry of a blaspheming angel as I’d ever care to be.
I’ve never heard any heavy metal or death metal musician even come close to it, and I doubt I ever will. He was one of a kind.
*Bonus Track: There has also been a spate of German musicians covering or creating new arrangements of the song over the last decade. Of those, my favorite is by a producer duo called 2WEI, and features the voice of Black pop singer Bri Bryant, who has worked with them to produce a number of powerful and crunchy Blues covers.
Resources:
Track List: The Best of John Lee Hooker (1974)
Chicago Tribune: The Hard Life and Good Times of John Lee Hooker
New World Encyclopedia: John Lee Hooker
Reissue CDs Weekly: John Lee Hooker - Documenting The Sensation Recordings 1948-1952