Boogie Man by Charles Shaar Murray

Author:Charles Shaar Murray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780857862044
Publisher: Canongate Books
Published: 2014-01-01T18:31:18.700000+00:00

My love.

‘Me and Brownie and Sonny and all the folk-singers,’ Hooker tells the audience at one point, ‘we are here paying our dues to the natural facts. We have come a long way – the entertainers – trying to reach you, to bring you the message of the blues. Sometimes we are travelling late at night, trying to make it to you . . . sometimes you tired when you reach your destination, but you payin’ your dues to the facts. We are tryin’ to please you the best that we know, and we hope you accept it.’

Making his Newport debut that year was young John Hammond. ‘I first met and played with John Lee in 1963, at the Newport Folk Festival,’ he says, though – as we’ve seen – he’s placed their first meeting elsewhere and elsewhen in other interviews. ‘It was one of my first big shows ever, and that was just about at the height of the blues revival of the early ’60s. I was on the same stage with John Lee and [Reverend] Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and Dave Van Ronk, and I was trembling, to say the least. John Lee played acoustic guitar, solo, and mesmerised the whole audience. It was just staggering. He was unbelievable. He did “Texas Flood”’ – Hammond presumably refers to ‘Tupelo’: right natural disaster, wrong song – ‘and it was just unforgettable. I had been a fan of his since I was about fourteen, and had just about everything that he’d recorded up to that point, so it was beyond my imagination to actually be on the bandstand with him four years later.’

The Festival was taped, as were its predecessors in 1959 and 1960, by Vanguard Records. Extracts from Hooker’s performance were included on one of the resulting albums, Blues At Newport ’63, which provided a life-changing experience for at least one listener: a fourteen-year-old girl named Bonnie Raitt, who cited it, some thirty-odd years later, as ‘the record that turned me around’.63

‘It still keeps my taste anchored to the more modal and raw Delta blues as opposed to the slicker, urban sound,’ she continued. ‘Mississippi John Hurt was singing ‘Candy Man’, John Lee Hooker was on there, and Dave Van Ronk and John Hammond, who were young white blues guys. I’d never imagined that white guys could sing the blues authentically – let alone white women. At fourteen, I sat there trying to figure out all those songs, till my fingers literally bled. There was a mournful quality, a dark night of the soul, an aching loneliness that, as a teenager, you feel intensely personally – whether you’re not getting on with your parents, or feel nobody understands you. There was all that, plus humour and bite and everything else I love about the Delta blues, on that one record.’

In a canny example of music-biz horse-trading, Vee Jay licensed two of Hooker’s Newport performances to Vanguard Records for inclusion on their album in exchange for the

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