Review: 'Boogie Man' well-crafted bio of John Lee Hooker

"Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century"
By Charles Shaar Murray
St. Martin's Press
Biography
544 pages

In this story: Infatuation with 'the devil's music' Scrappy survivor RELATED SITES

By Adam Dunn
Special to CNN Interactive

(CNN) -- Blues and biography fans alike will doubtless enjoy "Boogie Man," a well-crafted biography of one of the masters of that truly American musical idiom known as the blues: John Lee Hooker.

Author Murray, whose previous biography on Jimi Hendrix, "Crosstown Traffic," won the Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award, was given rare and unrestricted access to the closely guarded musician, as well as to his family, friends, and musical comrades. Murray traveled with the then-septuagenarian bluesman throughout 1991 on Hooker's "Mr. Lucky" tour, which featured such fellow travelers as Robert Cray and Los Lobos.

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Murray aptly conveys Hooker's enduring power to move audiences with his voice and guitar: "Slouched in his chair and protected by his shades, Hooker works through his tales of lust and anger, sorrow and loneliness, regret and despair. ... The inevitable climax is the joyful catharsis of his trademark boogie ... that electrifying instant when he casts his guitar aside, tears off his shades, leaps to his feet and prowls the stage, all frailty or fatigue forgotten, exhorting both band and audience to greater effort. From the bluesman ... he is transformed into the preacher, who cajoles and bullies us toward salvation."

"Boogie Man" painstakingly reconstructs Hooker's hard road out of Glendora in the Mississippi delta, where "lynching remained legal until 1938," the author writes. One of between 10 and 13 children born to a preacher and his wife (family records indicate some infant mortality, Glendora being an unelectrified rural farm hamlet at the time of Hooker's birth around 1917), the precocious young Hooker was drawn to music at an early age, preferring to sing in the church choir rather than doing sharecropper's work in the fields.

The hopes of his spiritually-minded father were dashed when an traveling bluesman named Tony Hollins gave Hooker an old guitar with which to amuse himself so that Hollins could make time with Hooker's older sister Alice.

Charles Shaar Murray

Hooker's unbridled infatuation with what his father called "Devil's music" received further support through Hooker family troubles. After his parents' separation, Hooker's mother took up with a Louisiana sharecropper named Will Moore, who played blues guitar at local events with the likes of Charley Patton.

Murray contends that this stepfather figure gave Hooker his signature toe-tapping boogie sound, which Hooker himself admits: "He is my roots because he is the man that caused me who I am today. ... He made me what I am with his style. He give it to me, like you got a piece of bread and I ain't got none, and he said, 'Here's a piece of my bread.' "

And it was this childhood love affair with delta blues which ultimately drove the adolescent Hooker from his home to nearby towns and cities reachable on hobo trains, on to places like Knoxville, Memphis, Detroit. The book's tone suggests these early wanderings in search of making a bluesman's rep for himself fueled Hooker's imagination for "Boogie Chillen," the 1948 smash hit which would make him a legend: "I heard papa tell mama/Let that boy boogie-woogie/It in 'im/And it got to come out."

And come out it did, first in a Detroit recording studio run by Bernie Besman, then released on the Modern label (which would soon introduce B.B. King as well). Murray and Hooker sympathetically recall the bad old days when blues or "race" recording artists never saw a penny in royalties until they'd had a number-one hit. When white bands like the Rolling Stones would made the pilgrimage to Modern or Chess records to meet the musicians who'd inspired them, they'd meet Muddy Waters working as a painter or janitor around the studio, since he had no revenue from the songs he recorded.

Ever the scrappy survivor, Hooker juggled labels and played nights (wisely retaining his day jobs) until negotiating his own first contract and tour in 1952, by which time the effect of "race" music was beginning to hit the mainstream. Newcomers like Chuck Berry and even white men like Elvis Presley were taking up guitars and breaking away from popular jazz.

"Boogie Man" provides an interesting sideways glance at the way blues underlapped with jazz and rock, as well it should. Some of Murray's analysis may strike readers as a bit theoretical (particularly Chapter 3, entitled "The Real Folk Blues") which is to be expected, given that blues arose as a folk music from mostly illiterate folk who left few written records behind for explanation.

But Hooker's career, which spanned the better part of the 20th century and saw the diversification of blues into several other forms as well as itself undergoing a division between "pure" (Delta) and "city" (electrified big bands in Detroit, Chicago, and other large cities), reads like a time line in American music, both artistically and institutionally. For an elderly blues patriarch, the Boogie Man has much to be happy about, and the joy in Murray's book will rub off on readers as much as Hooker's music has on listeners.

St. Martin's Press

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