The Country Blues Of John Lee Hooker

We Say...

Review by Michael Azerrad

Only during the late '50s folk revival could you sell out by picking up an acoustic guitar. For at least a decade before 1959's The Country Blues, John Lee Hooker played electric blues aimed primarily at the African-American market, a minimalist electric boogie that sold hundreds of thousands, maybe millions (no one knows for sure), of singles and made Hooker a jukebox hero. But Hooker's market was drying up — the new generation disdained the blues — so, now in his 40s, he turned to acoustic folk music, which was what earnest white kids listened to before there was indie rock. Ironically, the folk crowd deemed acoustic guitar more "authentic" — authenticity apparently being limited, as critic Ed Ward once japed, to "aged black men playing an acoustic instrument" — even though the truly authentic African-American folk music had been played on electric guitars for many years.

So Hooker's regular label Vee-Jay loaned him out to the venerable New York jazz imprint Riverside for his first proper acoustic recordings, not to mention his first proper albums. (The excellent Burning Hell, released years later, comes from the same sessions.) The gambit worked: Country Blues was a success and Hooker, now calling himself a folk singer, soon played the Newport Folk Festival, leading to a good long run on the coffeehouse circuit.

The funny thing is, Hooker made a hell of a record. Sure, he was the all-time champion of electric trance-boogie, his rhythms as mesmerizingly monotonous as the auto plants of his adopted hometown of Detroit, but he'd gotten to his spectral metal machine music from other places, deep below the Mason-Dixon. Hooker certainly knew folk blues — he grew up in the near-mythical jazz mecca of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and Delta blues legends Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton (whose "Pea Vine Special" Hooker covers here), and Blind Blake all hung out with his stepfather, William Moore. In fact, it was Moore, an obscure but revered country bluesman, who imparted Hooker's "boogie lightnin'" style, having picked it up in his home state of Louisiana.

For the chin-stroking folk revival crowd, this is a sampler of southern folk styles: Delta blues (the galloping "Pea Vine," which interpolates Son House's "Pony Blues"), hokum ("Wobblin' Baby"), prison work songs ("Water Boy"), etc., but Hooker gives them his own inimitable spin. Like Japanese Zen painting, it's the spaces in between the lines that bear much of the tunes' weight and meaning; Hooker always knows just the right place to build hypnotic suspense, mercilessly interrupting a narrative line with guitar vamps that gallop like a ragged spectre, or haphazard, bad-ass squiggles of notes that somehow signify blues licks. That elliptical approach accounts for much of the quiet menace in "King Snake," a murderous monologue by an enraged cuckold, told with unsettling sangfroid; Hooker's spare guitar speaks volumes of implied sound and rhythm.

Instead of the leering, miniature tales of urban misadventure he limned in his electric singles, Hooker here details the rural life he'd left behind in his youth. But rather than a vision of bucolic splendor, the country is a sun-scorched crucible of sex, violence, toil and death, like something out of Flannery O'Connor. "Church Bell Tone" opens with four peals of a low E string, a buzzing, moaning and ominous introduction to a profoundly dark — and fascinatingly ambiguous — song. A depressed woman friend has died but it's unclear whether she took her own life. "Bye, bye, baby, I know we'll never meet again," he says in a high, eerie wail, clearly implying that one of them is going to heaven and the other isn't. "We'll never meet no more," he adds firmly, and that's when the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

"Water Boy" resounds with the breathy "ha!" of men breaking rocks in the hot sun, an epiphany of regret and anger in each swing of the heavy hammer, while the sharecropper's lament "Behind the Plow" makes clear that only beasts of burden had it worse then the folks who worked on the plantation. The album's centerpiece, "Tupelo," evokes an apocalyptic flood scene with bare-bones, one-chord, single-string riffing and an almost conversational vocal delivery. Never mind that there never was a major flood in Tupelo; Hooker calmly evokes the calamity in powerfully Biblical terms. Covered by Captain Beefheart and homaged by Nick Cave, the tune sucks you in like a ghost story told around a crackling campfire.

In his liner notes for the record, Riverside co-chief Orrin Keepnews called Hooker "the most down-home of the major post-war blues figures… a most authentic singer of the way-back, close-to-the-soil kind of blues,” which completely ignores Hooker's citified art, but sure explains where this recording was coming from. Purists of the day might have rejoiced in the authenticity of the material and the approach, but whatever John Lee Hooker did was de facto authentic, and the calculated commercial motivations behind this recording simply don't stand a chance in the face of the man's profound artistry.