Blues genius
John Lee Hooker is gone seven years now, but his big bad boogie style lives on.
Hooker, who would have turned 91 on August 22, got his first guitar from a traveling bluesman named Tony Hollins, who took a shine to his sister Alice. Hollins had a battered Silvertone six-string he played for Alice on the front porch of the Hooker home while John hovered nearby. Eventually he gave that guitar to John.
“My daddy made me keep it out in the barn and he called it the Devil,” Hooker said. “Back then, everybody said the blues was the Devil’s music, even the blues musicians.”
William Hooker’s refusal to allow John to play guitar in his house factored into his son’s decision to stay with his mother and her new man, Will Moore, when the Hooker marriage broke up. And John’s stepfather gave him lessons.
Moore was a popular entertainer at house parties in the northern Delta, performing with Charley Patton and Son House. But Moore didn’t sound like other artists in his region. He never used a slide, the cut-off glass bottlenecks that Patton, House, and others wore on the third finger of their left hand to produce keening bolts of sound, and he avoided the variations on 12-bar chord structures and the deliberate, rhythmic progressions common to many Mississippi blues tunes in the 1920s and ’30s.
If anything, John Lee Hooker’s dramatic modal guitar vamps and shifts in dynamics have more in common with the droning primal funk of rural Louisiana bluesmen like Robert Pete Williams. And for good reason: Will Moore was originally from Shreveport, where the rolling, mesmeric beat of blues had more in common with the African origins of the music than the Delta sound. In Mississippi, where by 1860 half the population was black, insecure plantation owners had suppressed the music of their African slaves for fear that their rhythms held coded messages of uprising. Conditions were equally bleak for Louisiana’s slaves, but their music at least slipped through the net of suppression.
Echoes of Africa abound in Hooker’s most bare-boned performances, like “Down Child” and “Crawlin’ Kingsnake.” His guitar has a drum-like quality, pushing songs forward with a steady, rumbling rhythm that induces a hip-shaking reverie. And the string-popping licks he tosses off are short, conversational asides designed to draw our attention lest we slip too far into hypnosis. Hooker crystallized these elements in his 1948 hit “Boogie Chillen,” defining guitar boogie and his own musical identity in its big beat.
Just as
R.L. Burnside attested to learning licks and cadences from “Boogie Chillen” and other early Hooker discs on Modern Records, Hooker also admitted to being inspired by the recordings of his generation’s blues heroes. He listened to Patton’s sides for the Paramount, Vocalion, and Herwin labels, and the ragtime fingerpicking of Blind Blake on Paramount. But, besides Moore, Blind Lemon Jefferson’s Paramount recordings may have had the most profound impact on Hooker’s style. Hooker’s “Hobo Blues,” which he cut for the Modern label in 1949, is a tribute to Jefferson’s rambling idiosyncratic virtuosity.
Ultimately, though, it was Moore who ignited Hooker’s abilities as a guitarist.
Among other things, Moore taught Hooker some basic tunings he would use for all 53 years of his career. The foundation of much of Hooker’s playing was Open G, which he employed for his 1949 recording of “Crawlin’ Kingsnake.” He would also capo at the second fret to play in the higher-toned Open A. Occasionally he’d place a capo on the fourth fret of his G-tuned guitar to play in Open B, which gives 1949’s “Hoogie Boogie” its bright, chiming sound. Moore also showed Hooker standard tuning, which was far less common among the early Delta bluesmen than
open tunings. That indicates that Hooker’s stepfather was more sophisticated than many of his contemporaries, including House, who played in Open G and Open D. 1951’s “I’m in the Mood” was Hooker’s first notable recorded foray into standard tuning, although it’s debatable whether he was actually in tune.
“He gave me a gift,” said Hooker of his stepfather. “He gave me his music and said ‘Take it,’ and that made me. My stepdaddy taught me, ‘Do it this way or no way. This is my way and this is the blues. Don’t come to no fancy chords; don’t come to no fast playing.’ And he was right. When I moved up north to Detroit, that’s what made me stand out.”