Boogie Man by Charles Shaar Murray Page A

John Lee, ‘to work.’ They also had to sing in church, as Hooker’s nephew Archie, son and namesake of John Lee’s immediate elder brother, explains:
‘He’d been singin’ for, like, years. If you’s ever been a minister’s son, you gonna have to participate in church. They made him go to church,and if you go to church, you gonna learn how to sing basic hymns, so it stuck. It stuck to him, and when he be workin’ he would always try to sing.’ As Hooker himself
proudly recalls, ‘I used to sing in the church when I was nine or ten. I was a great gospel singer. Macedonian, where my father was a pastor. It was in the country. I was a very
talented young man, and everybody round in the county looked up to me and said, “Oh, that kid is somethin’ else, he can sing better than anybody I ever seen.” When I come into the
church everybody look round, and when I started singin’, people start shoutin’ and hollerin’. I had such a tremendous voice. I was nine, ten years old.’
    And there was farm-work, though John Lee was neither physically nor mentally suited to the toil of agricultural labour. He just flat-out didn’t like working in the fields, and down there
working in the fields was all there was. ‘My daddy,’ says Archie Hooker, ‘was more a mechanical type. He worked with his hands, and Uncle John didn’t.’ However, there
was also play. In the rural South, you either made your own entertainment, or else you got very, very bored. ‘There was this old mule we had, an old mare mule, and she was very
stubborn , but she was a gentle old mule and she know us kids. She was a very wise old mule. She wouldn’t hurt us, and she really cared about us. We’d ride her back and she’d
let us ride ’til she get tired, and then she rub up against a barbed-wire fence. You know what a barbed-wire fence is? She’d just swing you right into the barbed-wire fence and scratch
you and you’d have to jump right off her back! You’d get so mad with her you’d start bitin’ her lip and be cussin’ her: “You bitch! You . . . !”
There’d be one behind kickin’ her, bam! Right up against the barbed-wire fence! Whoo! Whoo! Old Kate, that was her name. She’d drag you right into a barbed-wire
fence! You had to hop right off her or get stuck with the wire! Yeah! She’d see us comin’ and if she didn’t want to be bother, she just lay down, get on her knees and lay down.
Old Kate. Hell of an old mule. She knew when twelve o’clock come and we’d been workin’ in the fields, when time to eat she startedhollerin’ Whoo!
Whoo! and she wouldn’t go no further. She lay down in the middle of the field ’til she knew that you were gonna take her and get her somethin’ to eat. A lot of memories in
that old mule.’
    Chicago drummer S.P. Leary, a veteran of the Muddy Waters Band who worked with Hooker on the 1966 sessions for The Real Folk Blues , would certainly agree on that: ‘Everyone I worked
[with] taught me something but John Lee Hooker. Me and him fell out. You have to watch your p’s and q’s with John Lee; he’d tear a house up, he’d tear the top off a house.
If you make him mad, you talk about a mule . . . ha ha. I think a mule showed John Lee a hard time.’
    And then there was the usual kid stuff.
    ‘I met a midget once. Did I tell you about the midget? There was some pretty little girls around, and I was the big bully of the town. I was a bully . There was a little midget,
’bout this high. There was about four or five little girls around, and he was peekin’ on one girl, and I said “Leave him to me .” I was showin’ off for
the girls. I was nine years old, and I thought I was gonna walk all over him. They said’ – Hooker shifts his voice into a taunting, little-girl falsetto – ‘“We
gon’ make John whup your ass. John, will you hold him for us?” I said’ – roughening to a stylised ‘tough’ voice – ‘“Yeah, I’ll take care
of it.” And I slap