Boogie Til You Drop

John Lee Hooker and Roots Music

William Sundwick

Nobody knows for sure when or where he was born. We know it was somewhere near Clarksdale, Mississippi, probably in 1917, but it could have been 1912, or even 1920. Poor, illiterate, black sharecropper births often didn’t get recorded with birth certificates. But, we do know when and where John Lee Hooker died: peacefully in his sleep, in his 80s, on June 21, 2001 in Los Altos, California. By then, he had spent nearly sixty years performing and recording countless original blues songs based on a primitive, minimalist boogie beat, varying only in tempo and minor rearrangement of chords and lyrics. He also impressed audiences with traditional 12-bar blues renditions, featuring simple, skillful guitar riffs and a deep, rugged Mississippi hill country voice.

He apparently learned guitar from his stepfather, Will Moore, a Mississippi blues performer in the twenties. And, perhaps more significantly, he learned from his sister’s boyfriend, also a blues musician, who gave him his first guitar. All this occurred in childhood – he left his rural Mississippi home at 14.

He journeyed first to Memphis, working as an usher at the Daisy Theater on Beale Street. It’s likely that here he got the idea performing blues might just be a living. He hadn’t launched his career yet, however, when he migrated to Cincinnati, then Detroit, in the 1930s. In Detroit, he began working at Ford, doing janitorial service during WWII.

By now in his mid-twenties, he had not recorded a single song. But he did perform in local Detroit clubs as an amateur. He was “discovered” in Detroit by a record store owner who introduced him to music producer Bernard Besman, who recorded him, then leased the recordings to an LA-based record label, Modern Records. His first song, “Boogie Chillen,” was released on the Modern label in 1948. It was not a complicated song, and featured the same primitive, repetitive beat that would become Hooker’s trademark. It was perhaps the first commercial success for something calling itself “boogie” played on a guitar – previous “boogie woogie” music was always associated with piano.

The audience for his kind of music was still limited in the late ‘40s. Very little radio promotion was available. Few stations (primarily in cities with large African American populations) ever played it. Hooker used a device in this first song, and many that followed, known as “talking blues.” The form had been in existence since the 1920s in folk, or “roots,” music from the South. It may not have been black, originally, but was certainly country. The vocals would be spoken, not sung, with attention given to the beat and the sound of the lyrics, not the notes. A mixture of spoken word and singing characterized much of “the Hook’s” work. Always, he relied on the force of the repetitive beat, his choice of words, and inflection as he spoke, sang, or chanted them. Overall, they create a feeling of dynamic, primitive energy.

Two hits in the 1950s began to establish Hooker’s reputation nationally, at least in the Rhythm and Blues community. They were “I’m in the Mood” (1951) and “Dimples” (1956). There was still a wall between R&B music (primarily a black audience) and emerging Rock-and-Roll. Hooker was clearly on the R&B side of the wall. Yet, these two songs have contributed single lines to many rock, especially “roots rock” lyrics – from I’m in the Mood, we’ve gotten “the night time is the right time” and from Dimples has come “I’ve got my eyes on you”  -- e.g., Robert Plant’s 1990 “Hurting Kind (I’ve Got My Eyes on You).”

In the early sixties, Hooker travelled to Great Britain, where he seems to have influenced  some rising British blues artists, soon to emerge as worldwide sensations – like Keith Richards. This seemed to build confidence in the now middle-aged Hooker, as he saw his appeal spread to a much wider audience. More hits were forthcoming, “Boom Boom” in 1962 and “One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer” in 1966. With the star power of the British invasion on his side (not just the Rolling Stones, but the Animals and Yardbirds), many “roots rock” bands were suddenly eager to claim inspiration from Hooker. George Thorogood made considerable alterations to One Bourbon, One Scotch, and One Beer in the ‘70s, mashing it up with another Hooker song, “House Rent Blues” – while still giving John Lee Hooker full credit, because that sold records for Thorogood and his band, The Destroyers.

When the big budget Hollywood film The Blues Brothers was released in 1980, Hooker played himself, performing “Boom Boom.” Indeed, he was just reaching the peak of his career – which lasted throughout his seventies! And, he was now immersed in California, and Hollywood culture. 

Bonnie Raitt recorded a duet with him in 1989’s version of “I’m in the Mood” on his The Healer album, winning a Grammy for them both.  He “changed the way I thought” about men in their 70s and 80s, she said. By the mid-1990s, Hooker announced he was scaling back his live performances, yet on the last Saturday night before he died, he performed at a sold-out concert in the Luther Burbank Center, Santa Rosa, CA.

While that simple, minimalist boogie style of blues is “The Hook’s” trademark, and is easily identifiable in all his hits, he did write many softer, sadder blues tunes during his career. Two of my favorites are 1960’s “I Hate the Day I Was Born” and “Feel So Bad” from 1969. These two songs are traditional delta blues, and leave an impression of a man not only down on his luck, but clearly morose. They both feature an almost funereal cadence. “I Hate the Day I Was Born” seems to have a biblical source (Jeremiah 20:14), and alludes to a classic blues symbol of being “born under a bad sign” (see: song of same name recorded for Albert King in 1967, then redone by Cream in 1968). “Feel So Bad” explores childhood trauma, possibly autobiographical -- John Lee, the youngest of 11 children, was reputed never to have seen his mother after leaving home at age 14. These songs express real emotional depth, it seems to me.

Another favorite of mine is “Shake It Baby” (1962).  Though it falls into the standard John Lee Hooker boogie genre, it still displays an unusually energetic libido! It reminds me of my own youth, and songs like the Rolling Stones’ “Going Home” (1966) -- or, as recently as 2010, Jack White and Dead Weather doing “Blue Blood Blues.”

Jack White has recently become interested in roots music, and participated in the American Epic documentary series on PBS. He and filmmakers, determined to recapture delta blues and hillbilly music, fabricated their own wax-grinding lathe to record without electricity, the same methods used in the rural South in the 1920s and 1930s. John Lee Hooker, on the other hand, became an icon of roots music a generation ago at the cost of leaving his own roots and adopting “Hollywood” as home. Fortunately, he kept his music genuine by forcing his producers to work on his terms, and inspiring an audience, both via recordings and live performance, who were hungry for those lost roots.

It seems to have been a strategy that paid off. Even contemporary pop rock bands like Queens of the Stone Age have recently released clearly identifiable boogie beats in their hit songs – check out the bass line in QOTSA’s “The Way You Used to Do” (2017).

Who Do You Love? Bo Diddley’s Masterpiece

William Sundwick

On Chicago’s South Side, in the 1940s, a rich culture of recently arrived African-Americans from the rural South made for an enduring musical legacy. While not the sole birthplace of what we came to know as “Rock-and-Roll,” the neighborhood contributed a disproportionately large share of the artists who would ultimately spawn that new musical form. One of them was Ellas McDaniel. He was only six years old when his family moved from Mississippi to the South Side, and his early musical talent was fostered by playing in his school orchestra (violin and trombone). 

Sometime in his teens, he heard a performance by great bluesman John Lee Hooker. He was impressed and inspired. So, he formed a band of his own with school friends. After playing on street corners, they soon found gigs in neighborhood venues, before Ellas was even out of high school. He had taught himself guitar, and was heavily influenced by the rhythmic cadence of music heard in his Pentecostal church. 

His band kept playing. By 1955, at age 26, Chess Records finally discovered him. In one account, Leonard Chess decided that, since McDaniel’s first recording for them was a song entitled “Bo Diddley,” he would give the unknown artist the same name. Other accounts of the origins of the stage name credit it to McDaniel, his fellow band members, or unknown origin, but referencing the crude handmade single-string instrument from Mississippi called the “Diddly Bow.”

Chess was taking a risk releasing recordings from such non-entities, but some of them achieved great success. Bo Diddley would, too, but it was slow coming, by record industry standards. In 1956, when he first recorded “Who Do You Love?”, Chess was already skeptical. This may have partly been because McDaniel was banned from the Ed Sullivan show the previous year, after misunderstanding his cue card, reading “Bo Diddley,” to mean he should play his song by that name – rather than “Sixteen Tons,” as the script had directed! 

In the late fifties, McDaniel (by then well known in Rhythm and Blues circles as Bo Diddley), moved to Washington, D.C. He was prosperous enough to have his own basement recording studio on Rhode Island Avenue, N.E. Here he recorded his album “Bo Diddley Is a Gunslinger” and discovered some local artists -- including Marvin Gaye, his valet, who sang in a Doo Wop group called The Marquees.

Part of the early Chess Records promotional campaign for McDaniel was to christen his unique syncopated R & B style the “Bo Diddley Beat.” This can be loosely described as a certain five accent clave. That first single, “Bo Diddley,” is a good example. But, in fact, McDaniel did not invent it – it was a previously recorded Afro-Cuban rhythm heard, among other places, in the Andrews Sisters’ “Rum and Coca Cola” (1944). Leonard Chess did encourage McDaniel to claim credit, however, as part of the general promotion of his name. 

Since the original version of “Who Do You Love” did not even feature that “Bo Diddley Beat” (it was closer in style to Chuck Berry’s “Maybelline”), there must be something else about the song that caused it to become the best-known of all Bo Diddley works –  based on the number of covers it’s received by different musicians.

Could it be the bizarre lyrics that make it such a masterpiece?  They were, according to the songwriter himself, based on children’s schoolyard bragging in Kansas City, animated by a rhythmic body language. We don’t know why McDaniel had been in K.C., or that schoolyard! But, the lyrics clearly have some strong Voodoo overtones (or, “hoodoo,” the Mississippi/Louisiana variant) – rather dark and threatening, describing a harrowing journey through barbed wire, wearing a cobra snake for a necktie, living in a house made of rattlesnake hide with a chimney “made out of a human skull.” Fearless, he is “just 22 and I don’t mind dying” – harsh to his girlfriend, Arlene, “don’t give me no lip”” – and the scene filled with cognitive dissonance: “the night was dark, but the sky was blue” and “you should have heard just what I seen.”

The original song also is easily adaptable, not only to the classic “Bo Diddley Beat,” but also to many different styles of rock music that developed through the sixties and seventies. It was a particularly popular cover for some of the California “psychedelic” bands. Perhaps this is attributable to the vaguely Southwestern imagery of rattlesnakes and barbed wire in the lyrics.

 The California connection for Who Do You Love was contemporaneous with another by a New England coffee house folk singer, Tom Rush. Rush recorded an early cover in 1966. His Who Do You Love had some of his smoother folk attributes. But, when recorded by Elektra Records, Rush’s version was transformed into a Rock-and-Roll staple, with that “Bo Diddley Beat.” This was the first version of the song I ever heard, played on WHFS-FM radio. Rush adopted a low-pitched growl for his vocal rendition, which captured both the blues culture and the dark Voodoo lyrics perfectly. It ultimately led to my wanting to learn more about the song, and about Bo Diddley.

At about the same time, Bo Diddley was becoming a cult on the Left Coast. One of the prime examples of the San Francisco psychedelic scene in the sixties was Quicksilver Messenger Service. Their second album, “Happy Trails,” features the entire first side dedicated to an extended jam on Who Do You Love, in six parts. Most of it is inspired more by Jerry Garcia and The Grateful Dead than by Bo Diddley, but if you listen carefully, through the haze, you can just barely make out the Bo Diddley Beat in parts, and the lyrics are faithfully reproduced – in between the extended guitar riffs. The great flexibility of the song to differing interpretations is on display in Quicksilver’s performance at Fillmore East in 1968.

My two favorite Who Do You Love covers are both by iconic figures from California. The Doors picked it up for a series of live performances in 1970. By this time in their career, Jim Morrison was drunk at many concerts, and the backup band – especially John Densmore (drums) and Robby Krieger (lead guitar) – often had to rescue him. Who Do You Love made that role easy. Morrison’s slurred speech fit the surreal lyrics well, with Densmore and Krieger were masterful in multiple recordings of the band doing the song on tour. The Bo Diddley Beat is unmistakable. As is the inherent raw power of the song.

By the late seventies, the blues revival was nearing its end – Led Zeppelin was on the verge of breaking up – but one California artist was having some success keeping it going. That was George Thorogood, with his band, The Destroyers. His second album, “Move It On Over,” contained many great blues numbers, often mashups of different Chicago blues classics, with altered lyrics, and transition chords created by Thorogood. “Who Do You Love,” one of his most enduring numbers was also here – Thorogood’s version adds a line to the lyrics: “good time music with a Bo Diddley Beat,” and a couple other minor changes – they fit perfectly, and the beat itself is adapted seamlessly. Thorogood’s “Who Do You Love” is a masterpiece all by itself. He may have been the best of the California R & B revival artists – maybe the last authentic “Who Do You Love” cover?

So, where are they today? Yes, we’ve seen blues guitarists more recently – notably Jack White – but, I’m not aware of any recent R & B or rock covers of Bo Diddley. The Proto-Punk, Punk, and Metal trends in rock seem to have passed him by. Who Do You Love would be eminently adaptable to any of these later styles, I could have seen Motorhead doing a cover of it, for example. 

But, alas, though such attempts may have been made, they were never released. Is it time for another revival? Surely, George Thorogood can’t be the last in a line … maybe another musical style would work better? How about jettisoning the “Bo Diddley Beat” altogether, like Elise LeGrow is doing? Not rock-and-roll, but …