‘And that’s the story. I said, “Can I keep the uniform?” The guy says yeah. I wore it around town a bit, and the girls were thinkin’ I was in the army until they found out I was kicked out and I wasn’t a soldier anymore.’ Which was probably just as well. As the recipient of a dishonourable discharge, Hooker was ineligible for the draft introduced later when, in the immediate wake of Pearl Harbor, America finally entered the war. This meant that he could spend the war years safe in Detroit, working on his music and enjoying his pick of home-front factory jobs, instead of being sent overseas to be shot at by foreigners. ‘Yeah, and I’m glad I got out, because if I’d stayed in I probably wouldn’t have been famous. When you that age, you don’t think. You not scared of nothin’. You don’t even think about that, because you thinkin’ of the glory and the fun, what you gonna do then, right then, how these army suits gonna bring you fun and joy with the women. You don’t think they’re gonna send you over there and kill you. I just settled in Detroit, right. No, I didn’t go anywhere from the army but back to Detroit, where I didn’t leave any more. Just stayed right there. When I come out, that’s when I started my research on trying to get on record, on a label, playing around, stuff like that.’
Well, it’s a great story, but unfortunately that’s not quite the way it happened. That’s how John Lee told it back when he was claiming to have been born in 1920 rather than 1917, but if one readjusts his birthdate back to 1917, the central premise collapses. When the subject is broached nowadays, Hooker gives a superb impression of a clam. All we can say with any certainty is that Hooker, despite being a healthy man in his twenties with no dependents, didn’t go to war; and that by the early ’40s he was living and working in Detroit. Only John Lee Hooker himself knows the full story, and for whatever reason, he’s not telling.
Detroit was hardly the most obvious base for an ambitious young bluesman looking to launch a career. Though the bulk of its black population originated in the south-eastern states – from Alabama or Georgia – it had a small pool of the homesick Delta migrants essential to support the career of any transplanted Mississippi bluesman. However, there was a serious lack of the necessary infrastructure: record labels, booking agents, talent scouts and the like. In sharp contrast, over on the other side of Lake Michigan was Chicago, aka Chi-Town or the Windy City, a primary urban focus for black migrants from the Deep South. The city’s South and West Sides were packed with Delta expatriates, and during the 1940s their numbers were swelling literally by the day. The white blues-harpist Charlie Musselwhite, a close friend of Hooker’s whose own journey from Mississippi to Memphis to Chicago to California unwittingly re-enacted the twentieth-century odyssey of the blues, explains it this way. ‘If you look at the map,’ he says, ‘a lot of people in California came out from Texas or Oklahoma. Philadelphia and New York get the Carolinas. Chicago gets people from the Deep South, from Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas. Highway 51 and Highway 61 both go straight up there.’
Even before the genesis of the distinctive post-war strain of Windy City amplified ensemble blues most frequently associated with Chess Records, Chicago had been a major regional recording centre for about as long as the recording industry had been in existence, a status it owed, indirectly, to the New Orleans authorities’ decision to close down the red-light district of Storyville in 1917, which in turn prompted an exodus of the city’s musicians to Chicago. Many of the great rural blues artists had also travelled there to make their records and, inevitably, some of them decided to settle in Chicago. Equally inevitably, a distinctive local sound began to emerge. Georgia transplant Hudson ‘Tampa Red’ Whittaker soon became one of the kingpins of the pre-war South Side scene, and Big Bill Broonzy was its primary figurehead, but the Godfather of pre-war Chicago blues recording was entrepreneur Lester Melrose: imagine a combination of Leonard Chess and Willie Dixon, who didn’t actually compose or perform, but simply decided who got to record and who didn’t, and who pocketed the resulting income, and you’ve got it. For Chess, Chicago’s leading postwar blues independent label, read Bluebird, the Chicago-based ‘race records’ subsidiary of the formidable Victor label.
Melrose ran Bluebird as a personal fiefdom: it was he, not the artists, who had the contract with Victor. At various times the Melrose stable of Chicago-based blues stars included Broonzy, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, Memphis Slim, Big Joe Williams, Arthur ‘Big Boy’ Crudup, Jazz Gillum, John Lee – the original ‘Sonny Boy’ – Williamson and Washboard Sam. Hooker’s original mentor Tony Hollins was there (albeit running a barber shop), and so was Tommy McClennan, one of the very few blues artists whose recorded work had any audible effect on Hooker’s music. Hooker’s Vance homeboys Snooky Pryor and Jimmy Rogers were there, too. Rogers had been in and around Chicago since 1939, working the Maxwell Street market for tips; a decade or so later, he would eventually join forces with one McKinley Morganfield, a burly extrovert from Rolling Fork, Mississippi, soon to be better known as Muddy Waters, to form the blues band which would end up defining the city’s indigenous postwar blues idiom. ‘A lot of them came up from Mississippi,’ says Hooker today, ‘and most of them upped into Chicago. They were all interested because Chicago was the big blues scene. I didn’t want to go to Chicago because, at that time, I had a lot of competition. At that time there were some heavies there, so I didn’t have no idea for going there and living there. Detroit . . . it was my town when I got bigger.’
The Detroit John Lee found when he emerged from the army was a roughneck, blue-collar town dominated by the auto industry and the aftermath of Prohibition. Unions were deemed un-American, the local chapter of the FBI was virtually a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company, and it was not considered totally unreasonable for white workers to refuse to man the production lines alongside blacks. Thanks to its close proximity to the Canadian border, the city became such a reliable source of fine imported whiskey that bootlegging was considered second only to cars among the linchpins of the city’s economy. The end result was a city with a thriving gang culture and an eminently bribable police force. It was also a deeply racist town with an extremely active Ku Klux Klan, not to mention a chapter of the Klan’s elite group, the Black Legion. Admittedly, Detroit was something of an improvement over Mississippi, but then that’s not saying very much. Cops were recruited not only from the Irish and Italian communities, but from among white Southern migrants with necks of deepest red; these latter, often not unsympathetic to the Klan, were then sent in to ‘police’ the black community. The city authorities required a minimum IQ of 100 from potential recruits to the Fire Department, but a rating of 65 was considered sufficient qualification for candidates for the police force.
As the city’s heavy industry ramped up, housing became progressively more and more scarce, particularly for black defence workers. It was this issue which ripped Detroit apart during John Lee’s early years in the city. A housing project – named, ironically enough, after Sojourner Truth, the nineteenth-century heroine of the fight against slavery – had been designated specifically for black workers until somebody noticed that the resulting homes, in an area generally considered ‘white’, were actually going to be quite nice. The project was then reassigned for white occupancy, with the promise that some new homes for blacks would be constructed . . . at some unspecified point in the future, and outside the city. Blacks attempted to occupy the building anyway. Whites, led by the Klan, picketed City Hall. FBI agents ‘detected’ pro-Axis agitators among the white opponents of black occupancy. Liberal whites lined up alongside the blacks, and the reassignment of Sojourner Truth to white occupancy was overturned. On 27 February 1942, the Klan burned a cross outside the project. The first black families arrived to move in the following morning, but were barred from doing so by approximately 1,200 picketing whites, some of whom were armed. The result was a pitched battle in the streets which required 200 police to quell. Of 104 people arrested, 102 were black. It was the first of a series of riots, not as celebrated as the legendary ‘Burn Baby Burn’ conflagrations of 1967 but no less significant. Three months later, the building was finally occupied and – surprise surprise – the black occupants and their new white neighbours ended up getting along just fine.
When