By the end of World War II, just about every definable section of the American public was ravenously hungry for the new music of which they’d been starved for the previous couple of years. Two separate bans on recording had just ended. One was caused by a shortage of shellac – the basic material from which the ten-inch 78rpm biscuits current at the time were made – for which the war machine’s need had taken understandable precedence over that of the record business. The second was the result of a fierce industrial dispute between the major record companies and the American Federation of Musicians; by the time it was resolved, a thriving crop of independent operators had started up, unimpeded by the battle between the union and the majors, and serving the markets for hillbilly and ‘race’ music in which the majors were no longer so interested. Or, as Eddie Burns puts it, ‘one of the reasons John got in and a lot of us got in, was that the musicians’ union had a ban on the studios. What happened was them Jews found a way to record blues musicians and people like that, but your contract wasn’t worth the paper that it was written on. They had a way of settin’ these dates when they released the stuff, sayin’ it was recorded back then [i.e. before the ban]. So a lotta blues people got in on the deal, which mean that you automatically was gonna get a screwin’, because it wasn’t legal in the first place.’
Together, the bans created an artificial caesura which served only to magnify and dramatise the already immense cultural and demographic shifts in the patterns of both production and consumption of popular music, caused directly by the war. The dominant postwar blues styles were indeed still the post-Basie jumpin’ jive exemplified by Louis Jordan and subsequently customised by Roy Brown, Eddie ‘Cleanhead’ Vinson, Amos Milburn and Wynonie Harris alongside – as Besman indicates – the smooth and sophisticated night club-blues crooning of Johnny Moore And His Three Blazers, featuring the sublime Charles Brown on piano and vocals, plus T-Bone Walker, ruling the roost as both guitar hero and matinee idol alike. Nevertheless, a new set of realities, a new set of circumstances, a new set of ambitions: these all required a new vocabulary of expression, a fresh language of style. Of joyful necessity, old idioms were required to reinvent themselves, and new ones began to emerge. One such was a Northern industrial-metropolitan transformation of the music of the Mississippi Delta diaspora: downhome blues electrically heated into an urgent, stream lined distillation of its rural ancestor, an aural reflection of the new experiences of rural peoples relocated to the rough ends of the big cities. Furthermore, the first completely black-oriented radio station, WDIA, had just commenced broadcasting from Memphis. Audiences, musicians and record labels alike were ready to roll. And they did.
The first signpost hit from this particular New Wave was ‘Short-Haired Woman’, a surprise 1947 hit by Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins (from Texas: regional boundaries aren’t infallible, after all), which racked up the surprising aggregate of 50,000 sales for a tiny Houston in dependent label called Gold Star (and, incidentally, annoyed the hell out of Aladdin, the larger, Los Angeles-based label to which Hopkins was contracted at the time, by outselling the version he’d cut for them). A year later came Stick McGhee’s light-hearted ‘Drinking Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, a cleaned-up version of a much older, much rawer downhome blues – the nonsense syllables replace the Oedipal compound noun – which sold somewhere in the region of 400,000 copies and served as the foundation stone for the Atlantic Records empire. Then there was Muddy Waters’ ‘I Can’t Be Satisfied’, cut for Aristocrat Records in Chicago and featuring the big, booming Delta voice and urgent, amplified slide-guitar of a wartime Mississippi migrant, accompanied only by a fidgety, funkily slapped acoustic bass. Electric downhome had found a standard-bearer; that record, and its maker, laid the foundation stone upon which Chess Records’ Chicago empire would soon be founded. In Detroit, Bernard Besman and his partner Johnny Kaplan had taken over Pan American, a derelict record distribution company, and in a mere three years, they had built it up to a more than respectable size. Besman was well aware that a distributor could sell significant numbers of copies of the right single by a good downhome bluesman, and since downhome music was ridiculously cheap to record, a small label could break even on as few as 5,000 sales. In his other identity as boss of Sensation Records, an archetypal fledgling independent label with a name borrowed from a popular local club, he was equally well aware that he didn’t have such a downhome bluesman under contract. But, in Elmer Barbee, he knew a man who did.
John Lee Hooker and Bernard Besman worked actively together for less than four years. Any direct comparison of the two men’s accounts of their collaboration leads to the inescapable conclusion that they spent much of their time together speaking entirely different, and mutually incomprehensible, musical and cultural languages. Nevertheless, those four years were among the most intensively productive years of Hooker’s career. His two biggest early hits, ‘Boogie Chillen’ and ‘I’m In The Mood For Love’, were both Besman productions, and Besman is undeniably one of the pivotal figures in the entire John Lee Hooker saga. It was Tony Hollins who first set the young John Lee’s feet on the path, and it was Will Moore whose support, tuition and inspiration gave him the keys to the kingdom. Nevertheless, it was Besman’s decision to record the stuttering little guy in the long raincoat, a decision taken – as he claims – on a whim one damp Detroit afternoon, which opened the floodgates for everything which was to follow. The history of the blues is littered with brilliant talents who failed to receive the fame and acclaim to which their gifts rightfully entitled them because they had the misfortune never to be in the right place at the right time, but John Lee Hooker would still have made his professional break through – somehow, sometime – even without Besman’s intervention. The only relevant questions are: how big would that breakthrough have been, and how much longer would Hooker have had to wait?
The Bernard Besman you might meet today is a canny, alert octogenarian with a fondness for biscuit-coloured leisure suits, and a luxuriant silver pompadour which wouldn’t disgrace a superannuated rockabilly singer. He moves somewhat carefully, following a stroke a few years ago, but there is no hint of vagueness about him: he evokes the events of half a century before in crisp and loquacious detail. The trouble is that, in matters both fundamental and trivial, his recollections differ so strongly from Hooker’s that it requires a considerable effort of will to remember that both men are, in fact, telling the same story. For example, we’ve already heard Hooker tell us that Besman and his partner ‘went wild’ when they heard the acetates that he’d cut in the back of Barbee’s store; by contrast, Besman remembers being played a disk from a quarter-in-the-slot record-your-voice booth,5 and simply yielding to the mild curiosity he felt about a downhome bluesman who stuttered when he spoke but found his clarity when he sang. Each of them contradicts the other at almost every turn; and each of them is at some considerable pains to minimise the importance of the other’s contribution to the work they did together. It is as if they both feel that the resulting achievement wasn’t big enough for both of them . . . which, of course, it is. And what’s more: they plainly don’t trust each other the proverbial inch.
The answer to the question ‘So who is Bernard Besman, anyway?’ goes something like this. He was born in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine: a city which had known very little peace during World War I, the October Revolution and the uneasy period thereafter. In the last months