Earl Hooker, Blues Master

Chapter 1 The Early Years (1929–1946)

TTw 2^^ í^¿¿w U X < o. llu û£ rThe life of Earl Hooker—like that of many mythical figures— is filled with the historical inconsistencies that both plague the historian and help build up true legends. In Hooker's case, problems start early with the very date and location of his birth. Hooker himself claimed to various inquirers (including Arhoolie Records producer Chris Strachwitz, blues historian Paul Oliver, and nurse Wilma Hart at Chicago's Municipal Sanitarium, where he died) that he was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi, on January 15, 1930, a statement that has never been challenged since. The guitarist's grave marker,however, cites his year of birth as 1929, a date supported by his obituary,which gave the location as Quitman County, a rural area neighboring the eastern border of Clarksdale's Coahoma County. Confronted with a difficulty of that sort, a biographer's most reliable source of information would no doubt be a birth certificate; unfortunately, it wasimpossible to trace one for Hooker in Mississippi, confirmingChris Albertson's opinion when he wrote in his fine biography of Bessie Smith, (1929-J946) 3 "Southern bureaucracy made little distinction between its black population and its dogs; such official records as a birth certificate were not always considered necessary."1 This cannot be simply viewed as a romantic exaggeration; in the very year Earl was born, sociologist Charles S. Johnson was making a survey of 612 African American families in a ruralAlabama county, and he wrote in his subsequent study, Shadow of the Plantation, "The county health officer [does not] know what proportion of the total [number of births] was registered. There is some evidence that the number of Negro births registered is less than the actual number of births."2 In the absence of official documents, EarFs own mother, Mary Blair Hooker, was the most likely informant, and she vividly recalled giving birth to her eldest son on January 15, 1929. In order to test her memory, she was asked similar questions (including the birth date of her daughter Christine, for whom a birth certificate wasfound in Chicago) and she systematically provided the right answers,tending to indicate that hermemory could be trusted. Whereas EarPs mother certainly remembered the circumstances of his coming into the world better than he did, the fact that Hooker chose to give 1930 as his date of birth is indeed surprising. In the blues community, musicians sometimes try to pass themselves off asyoungerthan they actually are as a kind of ostentatious mannerism, but had this been so in Hooker's case, it wouldhave made more sense to opt for a later date. Considering his rather eccentric and carefree nature, a likely explanation would be that a round figure like thirty simply appealed to him for purely arithmetic reasons when it came to figuring his own age. In much the same way,citing Clarksdale (the main cotton center in the northern part of the Delta) as his place of birth might have been away for Earl to place himself on the map when he reconstructed his life story for interviewers . At any rate, official records did exist at this time, but the Clarksdale city directories list no Hooker until 1936, and the 1920 U.S. census cites only one black Hooker family (George, wife Gussie, and daughter Carrie) living in Coahoma County; on the contrary, the same census listing for Quitman County shows that Earl Hooker (EarPs father), age twelve, was the fourth of eight children born to Mary and Jefferson Hooker, a tenant farmer. By the end of the decade, Earl Sr. was old enough to start his own family, and he married a sixteen-year-old neighbor named Mary Blair, who soon gave The Early Years (1929-1946) 4 him a son, asshe recalls: "In my family, it waseighteen of us. We got preachers, all of 'em ispreachers. I was livin' on a farm then where my parents were raisin* cotton, outside of Clarksdale; it wasa great big place in Quitman County, Mississippi , a few miles away from Clarksdale in the country. Earl wasborn exactly the fifteenth of January, 1929.1 called him Earl Zebedee Hooker." Earl shared his date of birth with civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr., born on the very same TuesdayofJanuary 1929 in Atlanta, Georgia, less than four hundred miles east of Quitman County. Unlike King, whose family belonged to the urban black bourgeoisie— W. E. B. Du Bois's celebrated "talented tenth"—Earl belonged to the South's rural lumpenproletariat. His very early dayswere spent on the farm tended by the Blair family in the vicinity of Vance, in the heart of the Delta. This area had— and still boasts—a large black population, most of which was scattered around small rural towns that hardly numbered more than a hundred souls. Only three centers in the Delta held larger populations—Greenville, Greenwood, and Clarksdale, the latter being the smallest of the three with some 10,000 citizens, but also the closest to the Blairs' farm. Earl's maternal grandfather was a sharecropper on one of the cotton plantations to be found all around the Mississippi Delta, working under what the Georgia Baptist Convention labeled "debt-slavery " shortly after World War I.3 Sharecroppers then lived with their families in rough wooden shacks along dustyroads under a harsh, paternalistic systemthat had undergone few changes since the Civil War and the emancipation of black field hands. Against the loan of a shotgun house and several acres of land, the sharecropper wascontracted to a landowner for whom he grew and picked cotton . At the end of the growingseason, the crop wasdivided between them, and deductions were made for cash advances and "furnishings"; when the accounts were settled, many cotton-raising families ended up in debt, thus becoming chained to "the man" and having to start over again the following year. "There was nothing unusual about 1929; it was an ordinary year," writes Lerone Bennett Jr. in Before the Mayflower. "Babies were born and old men died. Funeral services for John Lisle, a Civil War veteran, were held at Charles Jackson's funeral home on the South Side ofChicago In October there was a new Louis Armstrong record, 'When You're Smiling.' The Gay Crowd let their hair down at a series of parties celebrating the October 26 footballgame between Tuskegee and Wilberforce. That same weekend the Harlem night club 5 The Early Years (1929-1946) season went into high gear with the opening of the new revue at Smalls Paradise . Sunday came and Monday and Tuesday—and the bubble burst with the collapse of the stock market."4 In the perspective of time, 1929 stands out in the eventful period that bridged the two world wars mainly because of the financial crash that rocked Wall Street on that black October Thursday. But the economy of the rural mid-South had not waited for that final blow to collapse; ever since the end of the Great War, prices had consistently slumped, reaching an all-time low in the last year of the decade. Due to the increasing competition of artificial fibers, the value of King Cotton dwindled, and farmers saw their incomes slump by over 30 percent between 1919 and 1929. As a consequence , the migratorymovements that developed during the teens weregrowing more important each year. Between 1916 and 1940, it is estimated that more than two million African Americans left Dixie to settle in large northern industrial cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh or Chicago. In the latter, the black population more than doubled during the decade, from 109,458 in 1920 to 233,903 ten years later. For the year 1930 only, 80,000 black migrants decided to leave the southern states in the hope of finding more lucrative jobs in the north. Among the black families that deserted Mississippi and rolled up the Illinois Central railroad line into Chicago's imposing Central Station that year were the Hookers. Probably because the prospect of becoming another dirt-poor tenant farmer didn't appeal to Earl Sr., EarPs parents decided not to stay on the plantation, possibly coaxed by the engaging descriptions of the life in the North that could be found in Robert Abbott's Chicago Defender. Earl J. and Mary Hooker first arrived in Chicago by themselves, temporarily leaving one-year-old Earl with the Blairs in Mississippi because they realized that it would be more difficult for them to settle there with a baby. Within a few weeks, they had found a place to stay on the West Side, quickly learning about bustling city life, high rents, and Chicago's terribly cold winters. "When we started out we lived on the West Side, 1037 West 14th Street!" Mary Hooker says. "I wasso upset about this house, you see. It wassomethin' I didn't like. I don't think it wasright. You'd be surprised But I stayed at 1037 West 14th Street for quite a long time." Those who are familiar with Chicago's layout know that the city's black districts are mostly concentrated today on the West and South Sides, two clearly distinct areas offering their own particular features, and both ofwhich have enThe Early Years (1929-1946) 6 hanced their own specific brand of blues music. Although Earl Hooker was later to become somewhat more of a South Side man, his first few years in Chicago were spent in Jewtown, a part of the near West Side extending from Halsted in the east to Sangamon and Morgan in the west, along Maxwelland 14th Streets. Throughout the Depression, a constant stream ofblack families filtered into the old West Side ghetto to escape the high rents of the tiny "kitchenette" apartments found in the South Side black belt. Recent migrants from the southern states often made it their first stop when they came to town. Moresophisticated black Chicagoans generally looked down on the West Side, where Italians, Mexicans, and poorer Jews dwelled along with Blacks in dilapidated buildings. There the educational level of the black population was the lowest. In the West Side of the Depression years, most African American families either found their income through WPA programs or received direct relief from the city. At the intersection of 12th and Halsted Streets, close to the Hookers' home, one could find the West Side "slave market," an infamous street corner where a large number of black women congregated every morning, hiring themselves out as domestics by the day to the highest bidder, waiting for affluent white housewives to drive by in their limousines. Jewtown was a harsh neighborhood, yet an animated one. This was especially true during the weekend. Whereas the ground-floor stores of most of the brick-and-frame buildings bordering Maxwell Street—a busy east-west thoroughfare —operated in a normal way during the week, on Sundays the sidewalks ofJewtown wouldgradually fill up with stands and pushcarts as the street suddenly turned into something like an oriental bazaar. The Maxwell Street Market—as it wasknown to all until it wasthe victim of urban renewal in the 1990s—was launched by Jewishimmigrants at the end of the nineteenth century . On Sundays, everything could be peddled and bought at the market,from southern spices and country goods noisily advertised by strong-voiced criers to stolen watches, firearms, and narcotics pushed by furtive dealers. Blues music brought a colored touch to MaxwellStreet Market's loud atmosphere.Jewtown sidewalks were the main source of musical activity for newly arrived southerners , and a rather lucrative one indeed, according to the statement of slideguitarist Hound Dog Taylor, who started performingthere on a regular basis upon his arrival in the Windy City in 1940: "Youused to get out on Maxwell Street 7 The Early Years (1929-1946) on a Sunday morning and pick you out a good spot, babe. Dammit, we'd make more money than I ever looked at. Sometimes a hundred dollars, a hundred twenty dollars. Put you out a tub, you know, and put a pasteboard in there, like a newspaper. When somebody throw a quarter or a nickel in there, can't nobody hear it. Otherwise, somebody come by, take the tub and cut out. I'm telling you, Jewtown was jumpin' like a champ, jumpin' like mad on Sunday morning."5 The neighborhood around Maxwell Street also stood out as the roughest area in town, according to police statistics. As such, "Bloody Maxwell" certainly was not to the liking of Mrs. Hooker. After a few months, her mother had come up from Mississippiwith youngEarl, and Mary Hooker had imagined living with her family in a more appropriate setting. Yet the housing shortage was such that Earl'sparents couldn't afford to move to more comfortablepremises , and the Hookers' grimfinancial reality did not improve for the better with the arrival during the Depression of Christine Hooker, nicknamed Earline, who wasborn at the Cook County Hospital on Friday March 23,1934, at 4:25 in the afternoon: "See, I had four children with myhusband, two boysand two girls, and Earlwasthe oldest one. Earline wasthe next one. Then I had another girl, but of course she is dead. Yousee, two of my children's dead."6 The promisingprospects that led the Hookers to settle in Chicago four years earlier had finally given place to disillusion; unemployment wassoaring, and it was common knowledge in the ghetto that Blacks were the last hired and the first fired. For want of a paying job, Mary Hooker tended to domestic chores, and the city records show that her husband—like one out of every four black males in the nation at the time—was on relief when Earl's sister was born. Things brightened up when the Hookers left their dilapidated 14th Street apartment toward the mid-thirties to move to a more acceptable building located in the heart of the South Side, in the basement of 3139 South Park Boulevard, a busy thoroughfare later renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. According to an often verified cliché, the musical sensitivity of black children is usually aroused in church, but it wasn't the case with Earl. His mother was more interested in the Saturday nightclub scene than in the Sunday morning worship service, and it seems that he was exposed to secular music quite early, since both his parents were capable dancers. His father also displayed some proficiency on several musical instruments, and Earl listened extensively The Early Years (1929-1946) 8 to musicat home from a very earlyage. Another influentialfactor might be the presence in the family ofJohn Lee Hooker, who went on to become a world-famous bluesman and the living symbol of guitar boogie music. "Johnny Lee Hooker, that's our cousin, so Earl had known him since he wasvery young. He met him in Chicago," Mrs. Hooker says. "He's some relation to us on myhusband 's side." Mary and John Lee Hooker could not be more specific as to the nature of the latter's kinship with Earl Sr., and the Mississippi census data were of no help in this respect. In any case, John Lee wasabout ten yearsolder than Earl,7 and he was raised on a farm between Clarksdale and Vance before making the move up north in the late thirties. Established in Cincinnati at first, he probably met his young cousin around that time when he visited his relatives in Chicago. By the time Earl turned ten in 1939, his father realizedthat Chicago was not the northern paradise he had dreamed of,and he left a wife and two youngchildren in the Windy City before eventuallywindingup in KansasCity, where the Hookers had relatives. "After that I never married no more, although I could have remarried, you know, a couple times. My husband is dead now. He's been dead about five years. I didn't know that he was dead myself, and I just got the news in Arkansas," Mrs. Hooker said in 1978. Approximately around the time his parents separated, Earl decided to take up an instrument and fixed his choice upon the guitar, a popular instrument he had seen both his father and his cousin John Lee use. The purchase of a guitar was no small investment for a humble home like the Hookers', and Earl ordered his first instrument from the Sears and Roebuck Company, with a one-dollar down payment and fiftycent weekly installments. Earl was going to school then, attending successively DouglassElementary School, at 3200 South Calumet—one short block west of his mother's South Park apartment—and Doolittle School, located at 535 East 35th Street, just east of Park. Both were overcrowded institutions mainly staffed by white teachers, most of whom resented being assigned to black schools. At the time, the limited number of schools in Chicago's South Side compelled principals to set up two shifts in order to satisfy local needs—one from eight until noon, and a second until four. Compared to the educational facilities available to black children in the South, Douglassand Doolittle wereheavens, but teachers were too busy taking care of studiouspupils to giveproper attention to someone like 9 The Early Years (1929-1946) Earl, who proved refractory to all forms of training; his capacities for reading and writing actually were the only learning he derived from his school days. His interest for music was growing as fast as his strong distaste for education, and most of his time was spent with other boys who could play the guitar like him: his best childhood friend Vincent Duling aswell asyoung Ellas McDaniel, another guitarist and singer who later became known as Bo Diddley, a nickname earned as a child. Another Doolittle Elementary student that Earl probably ran into at one time or another wasfuture gospel, soul, and pop star Sam Cooke. With Vincent and Bo in tow, Earl would often skip school to hang out with street gangs in the vicinity of 35th Street, to the despair of Mrs. Hooker, who tried her best at providing her son with a decent education: "Douglass School, it wasa school for bad boys, 'cause Ihad a pretty rough time with him in school. He just didn't want to goto stay in that school; it wasjust that music! I went to see the teachers there, and they said, 'Mother, there's some good in that boy, that boy's got all kinds of talents.' But he just wouldn't learn, wouldn't do nothin' but that music, it kept me so worried." Singer and harmonica player Billy Boy Arnold, who later became friends with Earl and Bo Diddley, makes a good description of those days: "I know Hooker used to play around 31st on the streets and Bo Diddley played around the streets so they knew each other. Hooker told me once how he used to skip school. His mother'd think that he'd be going to school, but he'd be hiding in the closet with his guitar, and when she came home in the evening, he'd still be in the closet playing his guitar." "He spent a lot of time doing that," Dick Shurman, a friend of Hooker's in the latter years, confirms. "They say his mother had to pass his food into the closet 'cause he'd stay there all day. Iguess he'd do that justforprivacy,just a place to goto and keep others out of,justyou and the guitar against the world, I can see that." Hooker playing the guitar in a closet, filling it up with sound, possibly for acoustic reasons. Hooker and his guitar against the world, a pattern that would more or less remain the same until the end. Earl's best friend, Vincent Duling, was slightly younger than he was, being born in Chicago on September 2, 1931. By 1942 Earl and Vincent were proficient enough on their instruments to play for tips on the streets, and they rode the public transportation across town every weekend to perform at the The Early Years (1929-1946) 10 Maxwell Street Market in Jewtown. BoDiddley sometimes joined them on the sidewalks of 31st or 35th Streets—two busy east-west South Side thorough' fares—unless they met at 4746 Langley Avenue, where Bo lived at the time. Soon Bo had his own street corner outfit that he called the Hipsters before changing to the even hipper Langley Avenue Jive Cats: "Earl Hooker was the one that got me interested in playin' on the street corners with a band, because he had one an* I saw they were makhV all these nice coins, so I said: 'Hey!' Earl and me, we was in the same classroom at school. I used to hang around Earl a lot. We ditched school together, we'd get caught by the truant officer."8 Earl Hooker and his friends practically lived on the streets, playingmusic, busting windows,and drinking cheap wine. On the streets, Earlmet most ofhis childhood chums, some of whom later became musical associates or partners on a professional level, like guitar player LouisMyerswho wasto remain one of his closest friends until the end: "Now how I met Earl Hooker it was like in a little gang fight. . . . And I know Hooker he wasrunning around with a little street gang then, and I never did know he played guitar, they jumped us one time on 35th Street and the next time I sawHooker, he wason the street playing guitar. And now he could play, he wasaround my age bracket.... When I saw him that kinda made me wanna come on out and playon the street too, but I never did 'cause see I was always shut in by my peoples or the religion on my auntie's side. . . . Wasn't no use, myauntie didn't allow me to play ... in the house so I quit and picked it back up especially when I sawHooker.... Hooker was a terrible young guitar player."9 For street-smart ghetto boys like Earl Hooker, Vincent Duling, BoDiddley, or Louis Myers, music was an essential component of their lives. It was present on the sidewalks; in the neighborhood bars and taverns in front of which they sometimes hung around for hours, trying to sneak in; and, of course, in church, a source of inspiration that proved widelyinfluential in the case of BoDiddley. By the time they reached their teens, they had all resolved to become professional musicians, a decision they stuck to. While Bo Diddley later grew into a member of a black rock 'n' roll triumvirate alongside Little Richard and Chuck Berry, LouisMyersachieved international fame as leader of a widely acclaimed Chicago blues unit known as the Aces. Only Vincent Duling remained in relative obscurity, although his instrumental virtuosity earned him the respect and admiration of many of his peers; after working quite extensively on the 11 The Early Years (1929-1946) Chicago scene, Duling crisscrossed the southern states during the fifties with the outfit of multi-instrumentalist Dennis Binder—even making a handful of recordings for the Memphis-based Sun company—before he eventually settled in Oklahoma with Binder. A factor of importance wasthe tremendous influence records and radio stations had on the black community. Even the poorest homes proudly exhibited a radio and a phonograph, as Drake and Cayton show in their sociological study of black Chicago, Black Metropolis, where they give the following description of a typical West Side home in the mid-forties: "The furnishings of this home are those of very poor people, but everything is clean and in order. The only new article in the living-room is a modern portable Zenith radio. Other furnishings include a large old-fashioned stove, a day-bed, three chairs, a trunk with a clean towel spread over it, a Victrola [phonograph], and a table."10 The blues were Earl Hooker's own favorites from the very beginning. By the time he took up the guitar, country-tinged blues sounds were becoming outdated as electrically amplified instruments gradually replaced acoustic ones. One of the very first blues guitar players to start using an electric instrument was Texas-born Aaron "T-Bone" Walker, who settled in California in the midthirties , where he perfected his style at about the same time as jazz guitar pioneers Eddie Durham and Charlie Christian. For a few months in 1942, T-Bone Walker had his name up in lights at the front of Chicago's Rhumboogie Club, a Garfield Boulevard venue. Managed byCharlie Glenn with financial backing provided by heavyweight champion Joe Louis, the Rhumboogie featured Walker's show for a three-month run. Walker was an immediate hit with Chicago club-goers, who lined the sidewalksof Garfield Boulevard night after night to catch one of his flamboyant shows and see him doing splits without missing a lick, playing the guitar behind his head or picking it with his teeth. At the end of his nightly set at the Rhumboogie, T-Bone rarely failed to make the rounds of after-hours spots on the South and West Sides, sitting in with local musicians, paying special attention to his younger fans, so that he had a considerable impact on upcoming blues guitarists, as Billy Boy Arnold explains : "Hooker really liked T-Bone 'cause T-Bone wasthe top guitar player before B. B. King was on the scene. So Hooker being a guitar player and playing in that style, he listened to T-Bone." The Early Years (1929-1946) 12 The new dimension T-Bone Walker introduced into his playing, the genuinely modern aspect of his swing-influenced blues records, appealed to Hooker more than anything else. Walker's style actually helped shape EarPs guitar playing in more than one respect. Even in the latter part of his life, Hooker showed a great debt to T-Bone in the intricate chordwork he showcased in his playing and in the jazzy way he would sometimes run the blues scales, but a more obvious and direct influence can be traced in Hooker's stage dynamics; Earl, in the purest T-Bone-style, would play his guitar behind his neck or pick it with his teeth, putting on the type of show his Texasmasterwas well known for. The influence of T-Bone apparently stopped there, for Earl never tried to emulate the mellow singing style of his idol, nor did he seem to have a strong inclination for singing as a general rule. This may seem strange, since EarPs favorite musical idiom, the blues, is an essentially vocal genre, but the young boy's lack of interest for singing can easily be accounted for;Earl was afflicted by birth with a speech impediment that somehow cooled off his interest in singing. The problem itself may have had its origin in the Hooker family, as EarPs cousin, John Lee Hooker, also suffered from a pronounced tendency to stammer. Although worthy vocalists, including John Lee Hooker himself or harmonica wizard John Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson, overcame their handicap and made successful careers, EarPs stutter enhanced his need to express himself through his instrument. "Oh yeah! He stuttered! They sayhe used to stutter real bad when he was a kid," Kansas City Red, a drummer and singer who wasa close Hooker associate in the late forties and early fifties, recounts. "But it look like to me he would stutter more when he's gettin' funny or somethin ', you know, then he always put that 'M-m-m-man,' just like that," Characteristically , Earl started playingwith his stutter quite early,calling his friends and associates according to a recurrent pattern. In addition to the quite common "man," Earl constantly addressed women with stammered "g-g-grandma" while his fellow men would indifferently be "g-g-grandpa," "b-b-bossman," or "c-c-cousin." Other than blues, Earl wasparticularly keen on country music, the hillbilly style of southern Whites. Chicago became a major center for country music quite early, due to its recording activity and the popularity of WLS station's National Barn Dance, broadcast regularlysince 1924. One of EarPs favorite ra13 The Early Years (1929-1946) dio shows wasthe one hosted on WLS by country music star Gene Autry, who moved to Hollywood in the mid-thirties to make a brilliant career on the screen as a popular "singing cowboy." Since radio stations were owned exclusively by white operators in the United States until the end of the forties, the tastes of white listeners alwaysprevailed, and programs aimed at the black audience were only allowed very restricted airplay, as JimmyJohnson, a Mississippi blues singer and guitarist, explains: "I guess I grew up on country & western, 'cause that's all you would hear on the radio. When I was a kid growing up, I can't remember exactly if it was every day through the week or just one day, but it was fifteen minutes, there would be a blues program come on. But now the rest of it wasC&W all over the radio."11 The fact that black people can easily relate to hillbilly music is quite natural , considering that blues and country music are two sides of the same regional cultural coin. The constant musical exchanges that took place between Blacks and poor Whites in the South illustrate the strong musical bonds that linked both communities, explaining that the very essence of black music can be traced in the playing of the white country artists Earl Hooker admired: Ernest Tubb, Red Foley, Bob Wills, Hank Williams, Merle Travis, and above all Roy Rogers and Gene Autry, whom Hooker later recalled watching as a youth. There are even stories in Chicago that EarPs first fan wasno less than Gene Autry himself. "Louis Myers told me that when Hooker was something like eight years old, that he wasalready well known, and that Gene Autry went to Hooker's mother and asked her if he could take Hooker and like sort of adopt him, teach him how to play guitar and use him on the show, but Mrs. Hooker wouldn't let him take her kid away from her, which is possible, because I do know that he was well known pretty young," says Dick Shurman. "Who knows?" Shurman adds laconically. Regardless of the fact that this anecdote is most certainly apocryphal, since Autry left Chicago around 1934, it clearly shows the legends Earl generated throughout his life. Biographical notes printed on the covers of several of Hooker's albums12 mention that Earl wasformally taught at the Lyon & Healy School of Music in Chicago. These allegations were strongly denied by all of Hooker's friends. Hooker himself gloried in his lack ofmusical education, and his associates confirmed that he couldn't read notes and picked up by ear the guitar parts he would hear on records or the radio. Earl wasa self-taught musician, but he benThe Early Years (1929-1946) 14 efitted nevertheless from the expert advice of a limited number of people who helped him when he first started out, showing him licks and teaching him basic guitar chords. Among such informal teachers were the Blevins brothers, whom Earl met as he was playing on the sidewalks and street corners around 35th Street. Leo and Kinky Blevins were slightly older than Earl, and it was Leo who seems to have taught Earl much ofthe chording technique he himself inherited from T-Bone Walker at the time of his 1942 stint at the Rhumboogie. In her fine biography of the great Texas guitarist, Helen Oakley Dance writes that "Leo Blevins was a teenage guitarist who never let T-Bone out of his sight except at night when he fronted a small group of schoolmates who carried their horns over to Maxwell Street looking for a place to stay. T-Bone never acted big-time, especially with kids, and not being secretive the way musicians are, he let Leo in on some of his tricks. At the Rhumboogie, he sneaked the boys into his dressing room so they could hear the band stretch out."13 The confidence Walker placed in Leo Blevins was not betrayed, as the young man eventually turned into a much sought-after session man whose inspired playing was featured on various recordings by tenor saxophonist Tom Archia, vocalist Andrew Tïbbs, or great bebop sax man Gene Ammons. Along with brother Kinky,Leo Blevins acquired a fine reputation in jazz-blues combos on the Chicago club scene of the forties and fifties before he eventually moved west to California toward the mid-sixties. Leo occasionally returned to the Windy City on various occasions, such as the time in the late seventies when he performed at Roberts* 500 Room with singer Jimmy Witherspoon. Mrs. Hooker clearly remembered Kinky Blevins as one of her son's friends, also recalling that the young MuddyWaters, who made the move to the Windy City from Mississippiduring the war and who would later grow into the patriarch of postwar Chicago blues, also gave Earl informal guitar lessons: "Muddy Waters learned him quite a bit when he was very young, 'cause they used to hang around a lot together." Earl apparently kept fond memoriesof those days, according to his friend Billy BoyArnold: "Hooker must have been fifteen, sixteen or something, and he wasalready playinggood, because Earl Hooker told me that Muddy Waters used to come to his house and ask his mother could he play with him in the clubs, and his mother said, 'Okay/ as long as Muddy was looking after him." 15 The Early Years (1929-1946) It was not in the clubs but on the sidewalks of Bronzeville—as the South Side ghetto was known then—that Earl Hooker met his mentor and main source of influence, Robert Nighthawk. A mythical figure and a living personification of rambling MississippiDelta musicians, Nighthawk was born Robert Lee McCollum in the town of Helena, Arkansas, in 1909, twenty years before Earl. McCollum apparently had no intention of becoming a guitarist as a youth; a competent harmonica player, he only took up the guitar in his early twenties after meeting a Mississippi player named Houston Stackhouse, who gave him friendly guitar lessons. Turning his newly acquired proficiency to account , McCollum wandered through the southern states, traveling from Arkansas to Mississippi, Tennessee, and Florida. He waseventually compelled to leave the South after running into some trouble there, and he moved north to St. Louis. It is likely that Missouriwas not safe enough, however, for he finally wound up in Chicago, where he changed identity to evade legal authorities , assuming his mother's maiden name and becoming known as Robert Lee McCoy. Under his matronymic, he recorded several sides for the RCA-Victor subsidiary label Bluebird and gained some renown with a song called "Prowling Nighthawk," waxed in 1937. As he went on with his peregrinations, Robert realized that people remembered his song better than they did his name, and he started calling himself Robert "Nighthawk," using this new surname as a visiting card from then on. After the outbreak of World War II, Robert Nighthawk decided to move back to the South and established himself in his hometown of Helena, Arkansas, where he played the bars and gambling joints, advertising his band through various radio broadcasts sponsored by Helena commercial companies. Whenever his longing for the road got the better of him, Nighthawk worked his way up to Chicago and played around the city for a while beforehe decided that the climate wasmuch warmer and nicer in Arkansas. It wasduring one of Nighthawk's trips to the Windy City that Earl Hooker met him for the first time in the early forties. "Thirty-fifth Street, that's the street where he met Robert Nighthawk," EarPs mother stated when Nighthawk's name wasmentioned. "Now Earl was already playin' somebefore, he learned by hisself, but Robert taught him. And he used to go with Robert Nighthawk to play too." Nighthawk had more bearing on the Chicago blues scene than has often been thought, notably because he wasone of the first in The Early Years (1929-1946) 16 Chicago to switch to electric guitar in the early forties, following the example set earlier by T-Bone Walker, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy,Tampa Red, and the very versatile George Barnes. Even though he originally started out in the thirties with a straight acoustic instrument, Nighthawk had perfected an electric slide guitar style that strongly bore his stamp by the time he met EarlHooker. Slide guitar, or bottleneck style, calls for the use of specific open tunings; instead of using his bare fingers, the guitarist slides a cut-off bottleneck or steel tube across the strings of his instrument , in Hawaiian fashion. Nighthawk's own slide technique, inspired to a large extent by that of a widely influential Chicago musician, Tampa Red, was rather unique because of its truly amazingclearness and smoothness; instead of sliding his bottleneck across the width of the guitar neck like most country players, Nighthawk played single-note staccato runs; combined with the novelty of his electrically amplified guitar styling, it gave him a tremendously appealing and blue sound that was widely imitated by Delta-born players, including MuddyWaters and ElmoreJames. Yet it wasEarl who became Robert Nighthawk's best imitator, no doubt because he wastaught by the master himself.Nighthawk, a rarely smiling and taciturn person, took a liking for Earl and painstakingly showed his young student runs on the fretboard of the guitar, teaching him how to play in "E Natural" (open E), "D Natural" (open D) and Spanish (open G) tunings, slowly shaping up Earl's super-light guitar touch. Nighthawk's influence didn't stop there, for he also trained the youngman vocally. Like Earl in this respect, Nighthawk did not have a great voice as such, but he used it with taste, and it suited perfectly the slow blues he sang in a deep, solemn, heavy and almost gloomy way. Nighthawk apparently ended up bequeathing Earl more than his musical ability , for Hooker also inherited some ofNighthawk's traits of character, acquiring the restlessness and carefree ways of his mentor. Earl's highly unstable nature emerged early in his life, and he frequently ran away from home, leaving his mother and sister behind worrying; it was not without a certain amount of retrospective fear and emotion that Earl's mother recalled the most spectacular escapade of her son, who broke away from home for nearly two years when he was thirteen and stayed in Arkansas with white people who had given him shelter: "One day the bad boy just ran off, he just thought that he was a man. I went to every house on Michigan [Avenue], 17 The Early Years (1929-1946) called the police and everythin'. Then after a couple of years I heard someone say that he'd seen him down in Arkansas. Then I went to Arkansas and hewas stayin' there with some hillbillies on a boat. He tried to hide 'cause he thought that I was gonna whoop him, see. And I whooped him. I don't know who slipped him out. I believe Robert Nighthawk would have asked me before. I don't know whether he went alone and I don't know how he went, he never told me yet how he got over there. "After that, I couldn't tell you how many times he went away. Like I went to this house in Florida and this woman had bought myboy amplifiers, and she had bought him guitars,and she had bought him everythin'; I never wassomad in my life! I said, 'What is this all about?!' so she said, 'You're Earl Hooker's mother?' and I said, Tes, I'm Earl Hooker's mother,' she said, 'I thought Earl didn't have no Mama!' I never wasso mad in my life. He had told the woman his mother wasdead. I couldn't blame the woman, 'cause younever know what kinda lie the boy told her. He wasjust like that." Earl's recurrent trips away from home inevitably led him to the southern states and more specificallyto the Delta, where he could feed his restless desire to play music. The Delta was familiar ground for Hooker, who still numbered quite a few relatives in the Clarksdale area, some of whom could provide him with food and shelter in case ofneed. Although her son's conduct certainly was not to Mrs. Hooker's liking, experience taught her to accept it, since nothing could contain Earl's love for the guitar. The only thing that compelled the teenager to come home wasthe illness that plagued most of his life and that was to lead to his early demise. It isn't known precisely when Earl became afflicted with tuberculosis, but his earliest associates remember him being sick from a very young age. It is likely that he caught TB early, particularly since the ghetto slum apartments where the Hooker family spent their first fewyears in Chicago were especially unhealthy. Dampness, want of proper food and heat, and the utter lack of hygiene in Chicago's dilapidated tenements possibly took their toll then. A U.S. Public Health Report published in 1944 shows that for the period 1939^41 the tuberculosis death rate for Blacks in Chicago was more than five times that of Whites,14 a situation that lasted into the sixties. But Hooker could also have caught TB during one ofhis Delta escapades, since the problem wasjust as crucial in the South. In 1938, the National Anti-Tuberculosis Association even The Early Years (1929-1946) 18 produced a short film titled Let My People Live in which black movie star Rex Ingram sensitized African Americans to the ravagesofthe disease in rural communities . Despite the fact that EarPs condition did not become critical until the midfifties , it drove him to the hospital at regular intervals. One of his very first socalled professional engagements was brought to an abrupt end that way after young Hooker spent several months touring Mississippi joints with the Lee Kizart band. "That's a long time ago, 'round about '43 if I'm not wrong in that," pianist Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins remembers. "Yeah, Earl used to play with us, me and some other boys down in Mississippi,a little place out there called Tutwiler. He's around thirteen yearsold then. He waslivin' up here in Chicago, but he had some peoples in the South, and he'd come down to visit them. And so we got together and made a little band up, and me and him and Lee Kizart played a long while together. Where we played, they didn't know how old he was. All they wanted to do washear the music, and he really could play it. He was active. He'd jumparound like with his guitar behind his back, doing turnflips and stuff; he learned that fast, that little. He just picked it up, he's gifted, he was the baddest guitar player around Chicago. So after a while his mother came down and got him, because he had taken sick, and she had to put him in a hospital, he had TB. And then he stayed there for a while, and he'd runoff and come back, and he used to come out and tell the boys, Tm well, I'm ready to play, now!' Then after a while he'd get sick and had to go back." In between hospital stays and trips to the Delta, Earl spent most of his time playing on the streets and trying to hustle club engagements in Chicago. Itwas around that time that he met young Amos Wells Blakemore, just arrivedfrom Memphis, Tennessee, with his mother. The future Junior Wells already had a good voice, and he was blowing a cheap harmonica well enough to gather forces with Hooker, starting a long friendship that was to last over several decades. From their initial encounter, Hooker's strong charisma impressed Junior , who recalled years later the self-assurance and determination that guided Earl's career from the very start: "I met Earl Hooker way back years ago in the forties. And he had an old piano player called A. C., so Earl told A. C., he say—you know how he stuttered and things like that—he say,'I-I-I-I want you to hear Junior, 'cause Junior and me we gonna make a lot of money.' Youcould feel what he had inside of him. He didn't wanna just be a person that just 19 The Early Years (1929-1946) played in Chicago, he wanted to be like the other big artisses that wasplayin' around the country and things like this. Now this is what he waspushin'. He's always been an ambitious person, you know what I mean. He told us, he say, 'Well, we gonna make some big money/ So here we go, out on the road, followin ' him, little biddy things, runnin' away from school and everythin', doin' our thing." Since his street friends were too youngto take to the road seriouslyon a lasting basis, Hooker devised other ways ofkeeping his street band busy around the Chicago area. On week days, streetcars provided them with a lucrative wayof performing their music away from windswept sidewalks. "At that time, I was about ten years old," Junior Wells reminisces. "We'd be standin' on the corner, the police would ask us, say, 'What you all waitin' on?' and Hooker say, 'W-w-we on our w-w-w-way to school!' At that time, they had streetcars in Chicago, and we used to be standin' on the corner, cold, nose runnin' and everythin', waitin' on the streetcar to come along. We used to get on one streetcar and ride it to the end of the line, collectin' money with the hat. Ride that one to the end, get off, get on another line, ride it 'til the end, all across Chicago, and we wasmakin' pretty good money. I wasdancin', and we had another boy—I can't remember his name right now... Rob! And he used to play, not a bass but it wasa washtub with a rope and a mop handle. And then wedid some things on the West Side in Jewtown, and at that time, so many peoples was comin' over to shop and everythin' like that, and we used to knock down about $350 on Sundays. We's makin' far much more than an average musician at that time wasmakin' playin' in a club; he go to the regular gig, and the regular gig is payin' only $8. And so we was doin' real good." In addition to money, the market area made it possible for youngsters like Earl or Junior to make friends. On the teeming sidewalksof Maxwell and 14th Streets, they met musicians such as Floyd Jones, Otis "Big Smokey" Smothers and his brother Abe, Homer Wilson, or John Brim—who remained a close friend of Earl's over the year and who also sang for nickels and dimes on every market day. During the week, Hooker hustled jobs whenever he could, especially in the vicinity of 35th Street, where he knew just about everyone. One of his first jobssawhim playinghis guitar with a piano player (possibly the A. C. mentioned by Junior Wells) and Vincent Duling on a flat-bed truck, advertising a local vegetable dealer named Red. It was also during the war years that The Early Years (1929-1946) 20 Earl got to know the owners of a large hotel located on Michigan Avenue, who took a liking for him: "They were the nicest peoples I ever met in my life," Mrs. Hooker says. "This white fellow had a colored boy working in the hotel, it was right around 33rd and Michigan, and he brought Earl to the hotel and that's probably how it happened. He gave Earl that nice guitar and a violin. They didn't have no children; they just about adopted him. Earl wasplayin' in the streets, and this man, he went with Earl on the streets. Just to be more with Earl." This story, as well as the fact that he could run away from home and find foster parents and a shelter with extravagant ease, tend to show that, regardless of his unruliness, Earl Hooker was an engaging, attractive, and extrovert teenager whose strong charisma appealed to the people he met. These characteristics werealso noted by those who knew the man Earlgrew into; Dick Shurman and producer Ed Michel both described him as an incredibly gentle, warm, and physically harmless, though highly unpredictable, adult. Earl tried to find good-paying jobs at night in taverns and neighborhood clubs as soon as he looked old enough to be admitted there, and he eventually wound up on the North Side at one point with guitarist Lee Cooper, a man who established a reputation for himself in the forties and fifties when he played and recorded with the likes of Eddie Boyd of "Five Long Years" fame and harmonicists BigWalter Horton and John Lee "Sonny Boy"Williamson. In order to get more work, Earl Hooker used to hang around the places where older and more established bluesmen performed. In spite of his young age, his boldness and natural talent often made it possible for him to sit in with some of the local celebrities, including saxophonist J. T. Brown, pianists Sunnyland Slim and Big Maceo, or Big Bill Broonzy, a virtuosic guitarist with an impressive number of recordings to his credit. Another early acquaintance was Arbee Stidham, an upcoming singer who made it to the top in 1948 with "MyHeart Belongs to You,"a recording waxed for the RCA-Victor company. "The first time I met Hooker," Stidham reports, "it wasa place on 47th Street and Indiana. J. T Brown wasplayin' in there at that particular time, and we went in there one night. Hooker wasn't playing but he got up and played with J. T. Brown. When he came down I introduced myself to him, and we talked. And then the next time I saw him was in Evanston, Illinois, he wasplaying at a club out there—uh, I'm trying to think of the guy's name ... Pete Hiñes! From then on, we kind of would bump into 21 The Early Years (1929-1946) one another, every time we got a chance. He kind of hung around Bill [Broonzy] and Sunnyland Slim, and that's how I would get to see him." Stidham rapidly struck up a friendship with his young fellow musician, and the two men grew more intimate when Stidham decided to take up the guitar: "My wife wanted me to start playing a guitar, so I bought one. So then [Big] Maceo told me, he say,Til tell youwhat/ he said. 'You're runnin' around with Hooker all the time. Now that's somebody who could tell you something.' So between Bill [Broonzy]and Hooker, I started to learn. Hooker would teach me the single'String thing, because he wasa wizard at that. He would stop byevery once in a while and give me pointers." Another Chicago blues celebrity wasJohn Lee "Sonny Boy" Williamson. A singer and harmonica player originally from Jackson, Tennessee, Williamson made Chicago his home after the worst of the Depression, eventually growing into one of the most popular bluesmen of his day,recording some 120 sides for RCA-Victor/Bluebird between 1937 and 1947. Sonny Boywas a very moving and persuasive singer afflicted with a slight speech impediment that he used to good effect and that conferred on his singing an irresistible appeal. But more than a vocalist, Sonny Boy was a powerfully inventive instrumentalist who took the harmonica to a higher plane, making people take it seriously. In his hands, this tiny toy stopped providing an unobtrusive accompaniment to the guitar to become a soloing instrument. Sonny Boy lived on the South Side, about two short blocks west of the Hookers' South Park home, and his house at 3226 Giles Street wasconstantly crowded with neighborhood children and fellow-musicians who stopped byfor a chat and a drink. Sonny Boywas aware of Earl's musical potential, and they would sometimes get together at Sonny Boy's house. One day that he was going to Tennessee on a tour, Sonny Boyoffered to take Earl and his friend Vincent Duling with him, Earl later told Billy Boy Arnold: "See, Hooker lived right around the corner from Sonny Boy, and him and Vincent went to Jack' son, Tennessee, with Sonny Boy.They were kids, they must have been fifteen, sixteen or something, you know, young kids. Hooker said, 'Damn! that Sonny Boy, man, that cat blew, man!' See, I had a picture of Sonny Boyand I showed him the picture. I said, 'Who's that?' This wasin the sixties when he was playin' at Theresa's [Tavern]. I just wanted to see if he remembered. He said, 'That's The Early Years (1929-1946) 22 Sonny Boy!* He said, 'Yeah, man, he took us down South. We used to go to his house all the time and play with him!'" The end of the war brought deep changes in Chicago, and Earl decided to leave the city for the Delta in 1946. With the progressive mechanization of cotton culture, new waves of black migrants flocked to Bronzeville everyday, hoping to find a better life there. At the same time, the soldiers whohad served their country during the war were returning home from the Pacific and European battlefields, and this double phenomenon made it harder for everyone to find a decent job in the city, including musicians. Small independent recording companies had not emerged yet to question the supremacy of majors, and the Chicago club world wasstill almost exclusively dominated by the main record' ing artists of A&R man Lester Melrose, who exerted his pressure on the local scene for Columbia and RCA'Victor. Another immediate consequence of harsh competition and population increase was the development of criminality, as EarPs neighborhood was becoming more violent with time. "At the time," Billy Boy Arnold reports, "that neighborhood was a very rough neighborhood. Some of the roughest people lived around 31st and 26th Street and this is where all the blues people lived. You get south of 47th Street, you hear jazz on the radios and jukeboxes, but north of 47th Street on down to 29th, 26th, 22nd, this iswhere the blues peopie lived."15 Bythe time Earl started to establish his reputation throughout the southern states, his thirty-four-year-old friend Sonny Boy Williamson was dead, murdered one night in June 1948 on his wayhome from the Plantation Club at 328 East 31st Street, where he had performed that night, killed by a man who stabbed him in the head with an icepick. 23 The Early Years (1929-1946) ...