‘Burnin’ Hell’ was a song Hooker first recorded in 1949, at the very outset of his career. Set to the remorseless, foot-stomping beat of Will Moore’s primal boogie, it takes as its point of departure the line quoted above, which first cropped up on record as the second verse of Son House’s ‘My Black Mama (Part 1)’, which House originally recorded in 1930. Its folk origins are undisguised, but both its form and its agenda are uniquely Hooker’s. Accompanied only by the piercing harmonica of Eddie Burns – originally from the neighbouring community of Dublin, Mississippi – Hooker chants his credo of defiance to the church and its philosophy of endurance on earth to earn rewards in heaven. But the song is no simple hymn to secular values, no straightforward rejection of the spiritual life: in its own way, it is an affirmation. In its central section, Hooker goes down to the church, and falls down on his knees. He asks the preacher – ‘Deacon Jones’, the folkloric archetype of the black divine – to pray for him. He prays all night long, and having thus paid his respects, in the morning he goes on his way freed from the constraints of belief, but a believer nonetheless. ‘Ain’t no hell! Ain’t no hell!’, he shouts triumphantly; even if there is a hell for others, it can no longer claim him. He has traded the promise of salvation for freedom from damnation; thus liberated, he can make his own way in the world. It is one of the most powerful works in his extensive catalogue and – revisionist though the notion may be – I’d argue that the 1970 remake (recorded with the late Alan Wilson, of the blues-rock band Canned Heat, replacing Burns on harp) – is more powerful still: if only because, during the two decades which separate the recordings, the original version’s slight tentativeness has been burned away by Hooker’s increased confidence in both his hard-earned artistic powers, and in the validity of his philosophy. In purely musical terms, it is a perfect example of Hooker’s ability to link the deeply traditional with the startlingly radical; while its content demonstrates how, time and time again, he can dig deep into his personal history to produce a universal metaphor for the contradictions of belief. It is where the adult John Lee replies to his father, restating both his challenge and his love. Finally, it is yet another variation on a perennial Hooker theme: the need to respect one’s past whilst still reserving the right to define one’s own values, write one’s own future, and find one’s own way in the world.
So Moore’s notion of a loving and compassionate Supreme Being displaced, in John’s vision, Rev. Hooker’s vengeful Old Testament deity; just as the Rev. Hooker himself was replaced in John’s life by Will Moore. In other words, having visualized God in Rev. Hooker’s image, John remade him in Will Moore’s. And it is Will Moore’s Supreme Being in whom John Lee continues, to this very day, to believe. ‘As years go by, I learned more and more about the world. The world growed, and I growed with the world and learned more about the world. When I was in Mississippi, I was strictly in a spiritual world. When I was with Will Moore and my mother, my mother was spiritual, but she didn’t object to me playing the blues. I was restricted to a lot of things I couldn’t do there, but when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty, I filled up with all these things. I could do what I wanted to do.’
And thus, armed with everything which Will Moore could teach him, John Lee Hooker was ready to take his third key decision, which was to leave. As we’ve seen, he had already figured out that there was nothing in Mississippi which could further his ambitions and desires. He knew full well that all of the great Mississippi blues singers had had to go elsewhere in order to make their names and to do what John most wanted to do: to make records. Mississippi had no record companies, no recording studios, no booking agents. All it had was an abundance of talent, the kind of talent he had, and the kind that Will Moore had. However, Moore had stuck with his farming and rarely left the Delta, and had thus been denied the opportunity to have his music heard across the Southland, let alone across the nation, and – most especially – across the world. So in 1933, at the tender age of fifteen, only a year or so after he first began to learn his future trade at the knee of his mentor, John Lee Hooker made his third life-changing decision. He grabbed his guitar and some clothes, and upped and split for the bright electric lights of Memphis, Tennessee.
‘Yeah, I left home then. I went to Memphis because it was the closest, about ninety miles from Clarksdale. That was the closest I could go with no money, by the direct route.’ For someone in the Delta who has a mind to travel anywhere else (other than further south, of course), Memphis was – and is – the only place to go. That holds true metaphorically as well as literally; Memphis was a cultural as well as a geographical crossroads; the unofficial capital of the black South, a place where hix-from-the-stix could rub shoulders with their more sophisticated cousins from the Southwest Territories, the gateway to the big Northern cities like Chicago or Detroit. It was also a wide-open town which at one time enjoyed the dubious honour of having the highest per-capita murder rate in America. Its epicentre was Beale Street (‘The Home of the Blues’) but it was still fundamentally a racist Southern town despite its relative enlightenment and sophistication. It was different, but not that different. ‘Oh yeah, a little different. Not a lot, but a little looser. You could spread a little bit more, but then you weren’t allowed to ride on the bus and trains with ’em [whites], but then we had our places we could go and them not go. All the towns down there was like that. Oh, it was rough for years and years. I didn’t go back down there too much after I grew up until all that was over. I played down there after I got famous when I was in my late twenties and it was like that, we had to play in certain places. There was certain places you couldn’t. You couldn’t be flirtin’ with the white; you stay here and they stay there. You could go out with Chinese, with the Spanish, but I never seen what difference that it made. We was the same colour they was.’
Many wonderful and intriguing stories have arisen surrounding John Lee’s sojourn in Memphis. Some – including Hooker’s own autobiographical lyric to the title song of his 1960 album That’s My Story – place him there for as long as two years. Others depict him as leading a gospel quartet, or attending house parties with the young likes of B.B. King and Bobby Bland. The latter tale, unfortunately, collapses as soon as you consider that B.B. didn’t relocate from the Delta to Memphis until 1947 – by which time John Lee was a full-grown adult husband and father living and working in Detroit – and that even if Riley B. King had been in Memphis in 1933, when John Lee hitched his way into town, he would have been barely eight years old, and Bland still a mere toddler. The truth is somewhat more mundane.
‘I had an aunt named Emma Lou – I forget her last name, just Emma Lou – on my mother’s side in Memphis, and she had this big boarding house on a backstreet. The boarding house is long gone now, and she gone too. I worked there [in Memphis] as an usher, you know, seatin’ people in the New Daisy Theatre for about two, three dollars a week. You could live on that: a nickel would get you almost two loaves of bread. You could just about get along on that, it was good. You had five bucks, you had a lotta money. There was two of them: New Daisy and Old Daisy on Beale Street. I would sing and play in my room, and once in a while I would sit outside and do it. She let me stay there about two weeks, and then she called my mother and told her. They could have got the mail, and they never did tell me how she know. I was two weeks there, so she must have wrote. After so long, they came and got me and I went back to Mississippi.’ This enforced return to hearth and home was most definitely not to John’s liking. He took it for as long as he could, and then he legged it once more. This time he headed for somewhere where the support of his extended family couldn’t be used as a net with which to drag him home.
‘I didn’t like working in the fields. I stayed there maybe another two or three weeks, I ran off again. I didn’t