Review: John Lee Hooker - The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker (1959)

Tracks: 1) Black Snake; 2) How Long Blues; 3) Wobblin’ Baby; 4) She’s Long, She’s Tall, She Weeps Like A Willow Tree; 5) Pea Vine Special; 6) Tupelo Blues; 7) I’m Prison Bound; 8) I Rowed A Little Boat; 9) Water Boy; 10) Church Bell Tone; 11) Bundle Up And Go; 12) Good Mornin’, Lil’ School Girl; 13) Behind The Plow.

REVIEW

It is no secret that John Lee Hooker is first and foremost associated with the electric rather than acoustic guitar — while he may have, on occasion, used the acoustic in the studio over the first decade of his recording career, most of those classic old hits we know, as well as the innumerable variations on said classic hits, were played on good old Gibsons and Les Pauls and the like. He himself was always saying that he preferred the electric sound — that all that electricity running through his fingers really made him feel empowered, or something of that sort. Throw in his «minimalistic» way of playing, not even remotely approaching the acoustic virtuosity of a Lonnie Johnson or a Big Bill Broonzy, and it won’t be difficult to understand why his acoustic recordings tend to be overlooked in favor of that awesome headbangin’ riffing on the ‘Boogie Chillun’ groove — it’s, I dunno, as natural as wanting to hear Eric Clapton play the piano or something like that. You can take a peek at that sort of entertainment out of sheer curiosity, but why waste time on stuff that does not come naturally to an artist?

Curiously, though, when Hooker signed up with the Riverside record label, the first thing they demanded from him was an acoustic-only set of recordings. The record label may be understood; Riverside, originally set up as a jazz label, was at the time riding the nostalgia kick and seeking out «authentic» Delta-style performers to provide them with enough ol’-timey performances to satisfy the growing demand for the folk-blues roots of American music. Meanwhile, Hooker, who had already had plenty of experience recording for multiple labels at the same time — usually under different pseudonyms — was probably interested in making extra cash in addition to his Vee-Jay career, and given that both his Vee-Jay album and his Riverside album from 1959 are in his own name, his contract with Vee-Jay must not have been exclusive, so at least he had nothing to fear when accepting Riverside’s offer. But why did he accept it in the first place, when acoustic Delta blues was never really his «thang»? And, more importantly, is there any reason for us to even bother?..

My own answer to the second question is a definitive «yes»; I am not the biggest John Lee Hooker fan in the world, yet even I feel that overlooking his acoustic output would be as much of a mistake as, say, only worshipping Neil Young for his crunchy electric classics while totally ignoring his softer, country-folksy side. It’s not as if John Lee Hooker with an acoustic guitar were a completely different person — on the contrary, he tends to play the acoustic much in the same way as he plays electric, but since nobody really plays the electric guitar quite the same way that Hooker plays it, this automatically means that nobody really plays the acoustic one quite like he does, either. The album title is spot on: this is, indeed, The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker, and of nobody else. Perhaps Riverside did want an «authentic» experience from this guy, but we can safely say that, regardless of whatever actually counts as «authentic» for a style that used to be practiced by hundreds of practitioners with their individual twists and quirks, nobody ever played Delta blues in the 1920s or 1930s in precisely the same way John Lee Hooker played it in 1959.

There is a solid selection of covers of old songs by other artists on this record, from Leroy Carr to Charlie Patton and the original Sonny Boy Williamson, but the one tune that will probably ring some bells for most people is Hooker’s own ‘Tupelo Blues’, his lyrical and musical reminiscence of the great Tupelo Flood that has since been covered by countless artists and even reimagined by some of them (e.g. as Nick Cave’s ‘Tupelo’). It is not the most typical representative from this record, because it is not so much an actual song as a spoken-word performance with a musical backup — Hooker keeps twirling and vibrating his way through a looped blues riff that sounds more like a potential introduction to a song than a self-sustaining melody. Amplify these sounds properly and you end up with something that a Robin Trower might play before launching into ‘Bridge Of Sighs’, or, actually, that Jimi might have played as a warm-up for ‘Voodoo Chile’ during the Electric Ladyland sessions. But don’t amplify those sounds and what you get is a distant, ever-so-mildly creepy, ominous echo of terrible devastation some time in the past, narrated by an old «quasi-survivor» as both a scary campfire tale for the kids and a subtle warning of possibly comparable troubles yet to come. This is not a John Lee Hooker invention — this sort of semi-chanted, semi-spoken rambling blues was practiced by quite a few Southern performers, e.g. Blind Willie McTell and others — but Hooker is among the first, if not the first such performer, to give the thing a properly cinematic feel, very intentionally going for an artistic effect where pre-war bluesmen would usually just tell it as it was. He might not be the greatest Sophocles reader in the world, but he wants us to believe that he is Blind Father Tiresias all the same, and I have no problem believing him when he keeps taunting me with his questions of "wasn’t that a mighty time, a mighty time that evening?" because it sure as hell was.

Most of the performances here are somewhat tighter structured, yet somehow even they rarely feel like «songs». Hooker gives himself as much freedom as possible, both with his vocals and his guitar playing — which very rarely has any sort of smooth flow to it, it’s more like a crudely constructed, ugly-fitted agglomeration of choppy licks, constantly changing tempo and time signature; again, this used to be a trademark of some pre-war performers as well, most notably Blind Lemon Jefferson (not coincidentally, Hooker begins the album with a BLJ cover), but it never sounded quite as sinister as on this album. Blind Lemon’s ‘Black Snake Moan’ was a semi-realistic morning grumble about not being able to get any — a senti­ment quite close to the heart of many a listener; in Hooker’s interpretation, ‘Black Snake’ basically becomes a song about the Devil himself stealing the protagonist’s woman from him, and you could probably guess it even without understanding a word from cryptic lines like "he’s a mean black snake sucking my rider’s tongue", just through the threatening plucking of the bottom string with the man’s thumb and through the way he draws out and shakes up all of his resonant m’s and r’s at the end of each vocal line.

He even manages to insert a bit of a threat and a warning into ‘How Long Blues’, a song that is almost literally impossible to reimagine as anything but a whiny, broken-hearted, sentimental plead — that’s the way it was originally performed by Leroy Carr and pretty much every black or white bluesman covering it ever since, but Hooker’s choppy «time-marches-on» playing and the thoroughly unsentimental insistence in his wording of the "how long, oh baby how long?" chorus gives it a completely different interpretation. Not a very appropriate one for the song, perhaps, and I think this was actually one of the poorer choices, but it is still interesting to watch the man take something so remote from his usual style and give it the appropriate John Lee Hooker treatment.

Out of the «originals», the one obvious standout other than ‘Tupelo Blues’ is ‘Church Bell Tone’ which, under the right conditions, can sound scarier than any Black Sabbath song out there — well, at least those opening church bell-imitating string pulls certainly sound scarier than the actual church bell that opens ‘Black Sabbath’ (the song); for what it’s worth, some of those wobbly trills you hear throughout this track would later become a standard part of Tony Iommi’s guitar lick arsenal. Just give a little push to your imagination, and those trills will naturally transform into rolls of thunder and lightning, accompanying the protagonist as he follows his loving baby’s hearse with its "two great white horses" to the burial ground. This is some pretty sick country blues if I know anything about anything...

Certainly not all the tunes on this record are about Death or the Devil — there are even occasional humorous turnarounds like ‘Bundle Up And Go’, an indecent variation on the ‘Step It Up And Go’ oldie — but since Hooker’s playing style and voice themselves do not vary all that much, most of the songs still end up meshing together, which is OK by me: fourty minutes of such an atmosphere are quite tolerable, enjoyable and evocative. Contrary to popular belief, country blues of the Delta variety in pre-war times was never really all that «dark», not even when performed by the likes of Blind Willie Johnson or Charlie Patton; to make it conventionally «dark», one needed a modernist artistic touch, and John Lee Hooker was among the first guys to understand this and make it work — which is precisely why it was John Lee Hooker, and not Blind Willie or Charlie Patton, who would later serve as such a major inspiration for all the darkness-lovin’ modernist artistic white boys from Jim Morrison to Nick Cave. Which sort of makes The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker one of those «seminal» albums, if my understanding of the term is really correct.

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