Earl Hooker, Blues Master

Chapter 2 On the Road (1946–1953)

u x < CL huj a csi Oftth& ¿3W (1946-1953) The immediate postwar years saw Earl Hooker setting off on his own more and more often, his erratic peregrinations bringing him back to Chicago and his mother's apartment at 3139 South Park at regular intervals. As restless as he was, Hooker was not very particular about the route he took, but the road almost inevitably led him to the southern states, more especially to his native Delta, which he reached after playing his way down through southern Illinois and Missouri.Earlwasalwaysat home in the Delta, where he was familiar with the members of the local blues community. He was particularly keen on playing with Robert Nighthawk, the man who had taught him much of his technique. Nighthawk was staying at 3081 /2 Franklin Street in the MississippiRiver town of Helena, Arkansas, when Earl joined him in the mid-forties. After the war, Helena was as good for blues performers as any town in the Delta. Seventy percent of its ten thousand inhabitants were Blacks, originally from the rural areas of the Delta, who knew 24 there wasmore money to be made on the levees unloading barges, in Helena's cotton industrial complex and railroad yards, or nearby in the West Helena Chrysler plant than in the fields. While Helena wassituated at a strategic point on the Mississippi River some sixty miles south of Memphis—unchallenged capital of the Deep South—the town of Clarksdale, another thriving Delta center, was almost directly across the river less than thirty miles away in Mississippi . Helena's and West Helena's throbbing nightlife took place in black juke joints scattered all over town, where locals could gamble and drink at will to the sound of small Delta blues combos after a hard week's work. "The town was loaded with musicians," rambling bluesman Johnny Shines says, describing Helena's rough nightlife at the time. "And lots ofplaces to play there, too. Juke joints, I guess you'd call them.... Now, a juke joint is a place where people go to play cards, gamble, drink, and so on. So far as servingdrinks like you would in a bar or tavern, no, it wasn't like that. Beer was served in cups; whiskeyyou had to drink out of the bottle. Youdidn't have no glasses to drink the whiskey out of, so you drank it from the bottle or you used your beer cup, and they were tin cans usually. See, they couldn't use mugs in there because the people would commit mayhem, tear people's head up with those mugs. Rough places they were. When you were playing in a place like that, you just sit there on the floor in a cane-bottomed chair, just rear back and cut loose. There were no microphones or PA setups there; you just sing out loud as you can."1 Besides its pulsating joints, Helena's main claim to fame from a musical standpoint was the exceedingly popular King Biscuit Time show, broadcast daily on KFFA radio from 1941. This program, sponsored by the Interstate Grocer Company, maker of King Biscuit Flour, featured the harmonica acrobatics of Rice Miller, an enigmatic singer also known as "Sonny BoyWilliamson #2"— the number 2 being added later by blues historians in order distinguish him from John Lee Williamson, the other "Sonny Boy," whom Hooker knew in Chicago. KFFA was white owned, and most of its programs were intended for Delta "hillbillies," but a restricted share of its airplaywasaimed at the black audience , accounting for its popularity with local Blacks. After the war, as radio station owners realized that the colored population largely outnumbered its white counterpart in most Delta towns, a larger portion of broadcasting time was progressively devoted to this widely unexplored commercial market. The 25 On the Road (1946-1953) trend was initiated by a handful of pioneers like the Interstate Grocer Company when they appointed Rice "Sonny BoyWilliamson" Miller host and star attraction on King Biscuit Time in November 1941, only days before Pearl Harbor , inspired by the example of W. Lee "Pappy" O'Daniel, maker of Light Crust Flour and sponsor of a popular western swing program, whose broadcast eventually propelled him to the Texas state governorship. Sonny Payne, original KFFA staff announcer on King Biscuit Time, relates the program's genesis. "Actually, Sonny Boy came in looking for a job. He wanted to play on the radio, and he talked to myboss, Sam Anderson. Myboss called Max Moore over at Interstate and says, 'We got a couple of boys over here, they're wanting to play on the radio, will you sponsor 'em?' and Sam and Max got together, decided, 'Hey! Here's an opportunity to sell flour for you, Max, and an opportunity for KFFAto have blues, since this is the Delta.' This was a chance for us to have a blues band, which no one else had. Back then, for the most part it wasthe Artie Shaw, Glenn Miller type music, and then once a day we would have the blues." King Biscuit Time's tremendous popularity was not merely due to its pioneer position. Rice Miller's charisma, weirdpersonality, and powerfully inventive harmonica playingaswell ashis choice ofaccompanists contributed to the program's fame. Sonny Boyinitially started the show in the company of guitarist Robert Jr. Lockwood before he was led to increase his backing unit, spurred on by the enthusiastic reaction of black listeners. Over the years, the KingBiscuit Boys comprised at one time or another James "Peck" Curtis on drums, Earl's friend Joe Willie "Pinetop" Perkins and Robert "Dudlow" Taylor on piano, as well as a string of guitar players who followed the example originally set by Lockwood: Robert Nighthawk, his mentor Houston Stackhouse, Joe Willie Wilkins,Sammy Lawhorn, and Earl Hooker, among others. The showwasbroadcast live everyday in the week from 12:15 to 12:30 out of KFFA's precarious studios at 123 York Street in crumbling downtown Helena premises. "The buildin' was rotten," KFFA announcer Sonny Payne reminisces with a smile. "The floors were so squeaky that you can almost fall through them. Especially when Dudlow,the piano man, got on 'em. Yougot about 280 pounds or maybe 300 pounds of solid blubber, and—well, in fact he did fall through one of the floors!" In between improvised blues offerings, Sonny Boy's King Biscuit Boys advertised King Biscuit Flour exclusively until 1947, when the Interstate Grocer On the Road (1946-1953) 26 Company, in the light of the tremendous success encountered by its program, launched its new Sonny Boycornmeal packaged in bagsboasting a naive drawing of a smiling Rice "Sonny Boy" Miller, sitting on a giant corn ear and cupping a harmonica in one of his huge hands. In addition to the live bluesmusic featured on his program five times a week, Interstate Grocer president Max Moore rapidly set up a sophisticated promotional policy. On a simple request, fans received a special King Biscuit envelope with detailed King Biscuit Time schedules and current pictures of Sonny Boy and band taken by Helena photographer Ivey Gladin. Moore went one step further when he had the King Biscuit Boys travel and perform around the Delta on their days off,advertising Interstate products, Sonny Payne remembers: "They made personal appearances over in Mississippi, these towns around, for Interstate Grocer, promotioning Sonny BoyMeal and King Biscuit Flour. In the wintertime they would go by bus, and in the summertime on a flatbed truck. That was their stage. They wouldpull up in front of a grocery store; there wasnothin' to plug in, but they would draw good crowds, you better believe it!" Forming a direct contrast with Max Moore's elaborate advertising policy, King Biscuit Time radiated a sense of informality that gave it a very special appeal . "A typical Monday," Sonny Payne adds, "to start the day off right after a drunken weekend by these guys, would be to come up the steps about two minutes before time to go on. And then sometimes we had to delay it five minutes to get 'em on, because they would still have cobwebs in their minds. A lot of the times, they weren't even prepared, they didn't have their schedule of songs to go on, and we wouldhave to coax 'em like children. Dudlow might show up one day, and if he didn't they'd find somebody else, but for the most part we didn't care as long as they played their tunes and went on the air; people loved 'em." The immediate success met by King Biscuit Time incited other local flour companies to sponsor similar programs in an attempt to challenge their lucky competitor. By the time the war was over, KFFA in Helena and WROX in Clarksdale were putting on the air several flour shows, all of which featured blues music, by far the favorite of cornmeal-buying black households. And while Robert Jr. Lockwood moved on from King Biscuit to Mother's BestFlour, Robert Nighthawk plugged Star Bright Flour, sometimes backed by guitarist Joe Willie Wilkins or pianist Pinetop Perkins. 27 On the Road (1946-1953) The King Biscuit Boys were only getting paid a dollar a day for their fifteen' minute slot, but the programhelped spread Rice Miller's reputation farbeyond the Delta. On the strength of his name, Sonny Boydecided to leave Arkansas after the war and moved north to Chicago and Detroit, where he stayed until 1948, when he abruptlyreturned to the KFFA studios one morning, confident that he would always be welcome on his show. When he did not work with Robert Nighthawk's band, Earl Hooker performed on various occasions with Miller over the air on King Biscuit Time, although the young guitar playerwas more often hired by the King Biscuit Boys when they played at night in the small Delta juke joints. It was on one such trip that Hooker met drummer Arthur Lee Stevenson. Stevenson, like Earl in this respect, acquired his initial musical experience in the band of Robert Nighthawk, who soon started calling him "Kansas City Red" because when on stage Stevenson never failed to sing "Kansas City," a popular ditty. Hooker and Red would later become close associates, and they ran into each other one night in a country juke house a few miles east of Clarksdale in Quitman County. "I met Hooker in a place called Horace BroomfiekTs out from Marks, Mississippi,"Red remembers. "It was just a juke house. Horace Broomfield waskind of a well-off guy. He wasa farmer, the share croppin' deal. Cotton be picked and everythin', and he made his money out of the juke house on Friday, Saturdaynights. Pinetop [Perkins]playedfor him too, and that's where I met Hooker at. In fact, he waswith this band called the King Biscuit Boys. James Peck Curtis, I believe Dudlow [Taylor] was on the piano, and Sonny BoyWilliamson wason the harmonica." Between gigs with Miller's KingBiscuitBoys Hooker resumedhis position as guitarist with Robert Nighthawk. Together they roamed the southern states, making frequent incursions south into Louisiana or north into Missouri and southern Illinois. One of their favorite stopovers in the Delta was the country town of Tutwiler, situated sixteen miles southeast of Clarksdale and only six miles from Earl's birthplace, where they usually teamed up with local pianist Lee Kizart. Earl had known Kizart since the early forties, when they played weekend dances around the area together with Pinetop Perkins. In Tutwiler Nighthawk and Hooker ran into KansasCity Red, whose drummingand vocal qualities got him hired on the spot. This marked the start of a long association between Earl and Red, who stuck together through thick and thin until the On the Road (1946-1953) 28 mid-fifties. Due to Nighthawk's unpredictable nature, Earl and Red soon learned how to work by themselves. Many times they woke up in the morning only to find that their bandleader had vanished. On such occasions, an additional guitarplayerwaswelcome,and they usually called upon the talent ofLee Kizart's son Willie, who inherited a largepart of his guitar technique from Earl. By 1947 Hooker and Red followed Nighthawk to Clarksdale, where they started doing radio broadcasts for various sponsors on WROX, a radio station that broadcast locally since 1939. Nighthawk and his men, including ayoung pianist named Ernest Lane, were paid close to nothing when they broadcast over WROX, but their show was the best way to advertise the band, and they never failed to announce on the air the location of their next few engagements. Several nights a week, and more especially on weekends, Nighthawk would take his outfit to the tiny country juke houses and larger dance halls to be found in large number around Clarksdale. The crowds that they drewbecause of their radio appearances allowed them to ask for more money. Or if they played "for the door," the night's pay wasdirectly related to the number ofpeople who left a small fee at the door to get in. At the time, Clarksdale wasseething with excitement; ifthe Depression had taken its toll before the war, it enjoyed an unprecedented economic boom in the late forties, leading to a population increase for the decade that reached 35 percent in 1950, or 16,539. Life in Clarksdale wascentered on a tight network of business streets boasting local bank buildings, a post office, and a library in addition to a rich variety of stores and restaurants. As always in the Delta, Blacks lived apart from the Whites, across the railroad tracks. Clarksdale's black section numbered variousjoints and cafés, including the Green Spot and the ones owned by the parents of saxophonist Raymond Hill: "We had what they used to call juke houses here. A big house and you just set it up, take everything out of this large house and set it up just like a club—call them juke houses. Well, by my father and my mother running one, I was small, but they used to bring in these little blues bands. Sonny Boy,Robert Nighthawk, used to have Pinetop [Perkins] all the time, used to have him at the place The entertainment was mostly blues all the time. Most times when Robert [Nighthawk] would come, he wouldcome with just the drumsand guitar,that's all he would have."2 When they were not playing the Clarksdale joints, Nighthawk and band 29 On the Road (1946-1953) traveled extensively through the Delta, picking out a different place every night. Marks, Lambert, Vance, Tutwiler, Drew,Ruleville, Parchman, Lula,Leland , Greenville, and Greenwood wereplaying spots, whereas Arkansas on the other side of the river provided them with additional opportunities to gain a faithful following. Until July 1961, when a bridge finally opened just a few miles south of Helena, the only way across the river wasto take one of two ferryboats , the City of Helena or the smaller Bette of Chester, and it wasoften a time race coming back from an engagement and catching the last night ferry. One of the ferry pilots then wasFloyd Jenkins, whose son Harold obviously benefitted from the presence around the Delta ofbluesmusicians,ashe later reached fame in the field of country music under the name Conway Twitty. The scope of Earl's ambition equaled his talent. Bythe time he turned twenty in early 1949, he realized that he didn't have much of a future performingfor local crowds in small Delta towns, and he decided to try his luck in the Delta's main musical center, Memphis, Tennessee, seventy-five miles up Highway 61 north of Clarksdale. Since the 1850s and the cotton and timber boom, Memphis had grown into the commercial capital of the Delta. Until the Second World War, the city wasbetter known for its jug bands and medicine shows or the more sophisticated pre-jazz blues ofW.C. (William Christopher) Handy, who was held in high favor by Memphians early in the century. Even though rambling Delta blues musicians and barrelhouse pianists regularlypassed through town during the twenties and thirties, African Americans from the Delta, attracted by the numerous jobs they were offered in the city, started moving to Memphis in large numbers after Pearl Harbor. Thanks to these newly urbanized Blacks, a new brand of blues developed that sounded more modern and polished than its overamplified country counterpart. The new Memphis sound, as it smoothly incorporated the brassysophistication of big bands, fit in wellwith Earl'smusical ambitions. Another factor of importance was the presence in Memphis of WDIA, the first black-oriented station in the South. Because it gave exposure to youngupcoming talents, WDIA contributed to a large extent to the development of a more urbane Memphis blues. By 1949 the WDIA offices at 2074 Union Avenue were somewhat of a meeting place for blues artists whose home grounds had so far been restricted to the lively Beale Street clubs and theaters that hosted the likes of Riley B. King (later known as B. B. King),Johnny Ace, RuOn theRoad (1946-1953) 30 fiis Thomas, and EarlForrest, to cite a few. The black theater tradition on Beale Street went back to the Lincoln, the first to be founded with black capital, and this precursor had been followed by a string of others, including the Grand Theater, later renamed the New Daisy. In the early postwar period, the best known of Beale Street theaters wasthe Palace, duly considered the finest black entertainment venue in the South. The Palace had originally been built by Antonio Barrasso, son of a rich Neapolitan immigrant and brother of Fred Barrasso , the man who planted the seed for the main southern vaudeville organization of the 1920s, The Theater Owners Booking Association, when he launched his Tri-State Circuit in 1910. In segregated times, the white public was not admitted to the Palace except on special occasions, and the theater was famous during the thirties for its weekly talent shows emceed by radio announcer Nat D. Williams, usually referred to as "Professor" due to his position as a high school teacher. When Earl Hooker arrived in Memphis in 1949 in hopes of winning some recognition, things did not look as bright and easy as they had seemed from Clarksdale. The Memphis music scene wasconcentrated in the hands of local artists who shared between them radio appearances, talent shows, and club gigs. Memphis wasswarmingat that time with musicians whose ambitions were similar to EarPs, partly accounting for the limited amount of space left for obscure Delta musicians like him. His sojourn in Memphis was not totally fruitless , however; on the strength ofhis dynamic stage act, Earl hustled a few dates in the blues taverns of West Memphis, a musically active town located in Arkansas across the Mississippi River from Memphis. But in the end, the search for properly paid engagements inevitably brought starving talents back to Beale Street and its various clubs and theaters. "When I first came to Memphis, Beale Street was very active then," B. B. King reports. "Many little clubs on Beale Street. So with music gohV on all up and down the street on the weekend, like Friday night, Saturdays, Saturday nights, you could find some of the best players, even guys with names would come, and out to the park, and listen to people play. At that time, there was three theaters, movie picture theaters, and two of them used to have amateur shows. The one where it had amateur shows everyTuesdayor Wednesday night was the Palace Theater. So all of the amateur musicians used to come in there, whatever they played, because ifyou're able to go on the stage, you would get a 31 On the Road (1946-1953) dollar, and if you won, you got five dollars, and everybodytried to go. Including myself, many times. Well, you found a lot of folk guitar players like [Frank] Stokes; BukkaWhite, my cousin; Robert Nighthawk, many of the guitar players . Earl Hooker and all of us would go through there, even after I made records, I still would go there sometimes." Like Earl Hooker, B. B. Kingwasrebuffed by the fact that he wasnot aswell accepted in Memphis ashe wasin the Delta. But when Kingpersevered, eventually getting a daily show on WDIA, Hooker resumed his chaotic trips throughout the southern states, opting for the immediate success encountered with rural audiences. The most positive aspect of this initial trip to Memphis was that Hooker made several good friends there, some of whom became celebrated blues artists in their own right, including Herman "Little Junior"Parker, a gifted young harmonica player and singer who owed part of his instrumental proficiency to Rice Miller; Bobby "Blue" Bland, a gospel-influenced vocalist from Rosemark, Tennessee; and Rosco Gordon, a teenage piano wonder. Earl Hooker enjoyed nothing better than the independence of being on the road with his own ensemble. The two musicianshe used most often were drummer Kansas City Red and pianist Ernest Lane. In addition to Helena and Clarksdale, the Hooker trio discovered early another bluesheaven in the town of Cairo, Illinois, which became their home base from 1949. For rural Blacks who left the South heading north, Cairo, situated midway between the Delta and Chicago, was where the North began; as such it was a symbolof freedom. "They had a black curtain on the bus—white folks in front, us in back. They took it down in Cairo,"3 a former plantation worker once recalled to National Geographic writer Charles E. Cobb Jr. Located at the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at the southern tongue of the state of Illinois, Cairo lies in the same floodplain as the Delta, in an area that has long been known as "Egypt." The levee around Cairo completely encircles it, and during great floods the city is temporarily isolated. During the first half of the nineteenth century, speculators rushed to acquire title to this rich land, convinced that the nation's greatest metropolis wouldsoon arise on this site. This wasa time when much of the enthusiasm for western settlement was based on expectations about foundinggreat cities. While St. Louis grew to enjoy a future foreseenfor similar reasons, Cairo failed to develop into a major urban center—much to the despair of the many English investors who were the victims of the Cairo On the Road (1946-1953) 32 City and Canal Company in the late 1830s, and whose plight Charles Dickens described in Martin Chuœkwit. In the late 1940s, with a mere five thousand souls, Cairo remained half the size of comparable centers like Helena in Arkansas, but it had an important African American community for a number of reasons. Before the Civil War, Cairo had given fugitive slaves fleeing the South through the Underground Railroad their first taste of freedom, and since the beginning of the Great Mi' gration it had been a natural stop on the wayto Chicago, Indianapolis, or De^ troit. The city Charles Dickens had most unkindlydepicted a century earlier in his American Notes4 as"a dismalswamp... teeming... with rank unwholesome vegetation, in whose baleful shade the wretched wanderers who are tempted hither, droop, and die, and lay their bones; . . . a hot bed of disease, an ugly sepulchre, a grave uncheered by any gleam of promise: a place without one sin^ gle quality, in earth or air or water, to commend it," now boasted an intense musical activity; it stood within reach of Paducah, a larger town in Kentucky that traditionally welcomed blues musicians from the Delta, while southern Missouri and its thriving nightlife were found directly across the Mississippi River toward the west. Cairo's strategic position made it a meeting point for several of EarPs Delta musician friends, including Houston Stackhouse—who remembered seeing Rice Miller there for the first time—or Pinetop Perkins, who settled in Cairo around 1949, shortly before Hooker's arrival,and who shared his time between his day job at a local radiator shop and weekend dates with his own ensemble. "It's a small town, it ain't too big, but it was a lot of music in there," Pinetop Perkins confirms. "A whole lot of black people. See, it's where the two rivers come together; there was barges comin' there, and they kept workin' on the barges and stuff, and people'd come and spend their money in town." Cairo's blues past was nothing recent in fact, as Cannon's Jug Stompers's "Cairo Rag" and Henry Spaulding's "Cairo Blues," respectively waxed in 1928 and 1929, clearly show. Hooker and Red were already familiar with the Cairo club scene, to which they had been introduced by Robert Nighthawk. With pianist Ernest Lane in tow, they moved there in 1949 and used it as their regular base for two years. Very few bluesmen actually lived in Cairo. Keyboard specialist Jimmy Smith sometimes visited his aunt, who ran an undertaking business there, and legend 33 On the Road (1946-1953) goes that he eventually adopted the organ after playing at her request for funerals ; but other than Pinetop Perkins and until pianist Eddie Snow's In The Groove Boys moved to Cairo in 1951, Hooker and band were the sole permanent representatives of the blues tradition locally, explaining the tremendous success they obtained from the start. "Peoples would come there from out of Missouri, Kentucky, anywhere else," Kansas City Red reports. "They kept us workin' seven nights and seven days practically. Cairo was a good-time place, that was one of the best. Helena, Arkansas, used to be a good swingin' place, and Cairo was just about like that. Well, then practically every corner was a club, and everythin' waslively." "It was some more [bands] there," Pinetop Perkins adds, "but it was a jazz band; they called the boy Horace, he played piano, and another boy played drums with him, George Morris. He's a good jazz drummer,he here in Chicago now. So Hooker came to Cairo around that time and told ushe waswell, which he wasn't. 'Well, I'm well, now,' he said." The tuberculosis that plagued Hooker's health from the very beginning seemed to have abated. Apart from older acquaintances like Perkins who wereawareof the youngman's condition, more recent associates never suspected a thing until years later, as Earl took care not to display any symptom of a highly contagious sickness which might have killed the enthusiasm of his entourage. "Well, he didn't show signs of bein' sick down there," Kansas City Red categorically states. Outside music, Earl and his band did not really care about anything. When they weren't on stage, they flirted with local females and swallowedlarge quantities of alcohol during their long workinghours. Earl regarded personal health problems with deliberate coolness, ashis intrinsic laxityurgedhim never to acknowledge any symptom likely to hinder the course of his career. Yet, he needed all of his energy to provide thrilling entertainment to Cairo tavern crowds all through the week, first at the Palms Hotel. "We played at the Palms Hotel, 34th and Commercial. That hotel is all demolished now. I go through there every so often, take a ride and look around and everything is different now," Kansas City Red recounted thirty years later with a touch ofnostalgia. "But the PalmsHotel wasreal nice; it had a bar in the front, a lounge in the back. It wasowned by Earl Palms, that washis name. So he got in bad health and he lost one of his legs, so he sold it to a guy by the name of Memphis. He had a big nightclub up in Mound City, they called it the On the Road (1946-1953) 34 Silver Slipper or somethin' like that. He wasa nice guy,Memphis. He was one of them big-time gamblers; I don't know how, he couldn't see good. He was pretty wealthy,you know, so me and Earl Hooker and Ernest Lane and this boy Homer, he liked us." Hooker and band also performed in the rougher bars of the omnipotent Wade Brothers, who reigned supreme over the local black club world. "Sam Wade, George Wade, Ed Wade, it was a lot of 'em there," guitarist Son Seals, who played in Cairo on variousoccasions in the sixties,remembers."They wasn 't white, but they wasmixed all up. They looked Spanish, they had real curly hair and shit. They had two or three joints, man." "They had several clubs, one on 13th Street and one on 29th Street," Kansas City Red confirms. "The one on 13th and Poplar wassomethin' like a hangout joint for guys. They didn't do no gamblin' in there. All they did wasdance and drink and have a good time, when they wasn't fightin'. It wasa rough place, yeah.Just one of 'em old honkytonk places, you know. Open twenty-four hours, cheap booze, and some of the guys mostly slept there. Places never did close, especially this one on 13th, 'cause wewould start before the sun godown, and the sun'd be up when we out. "The man even built a hotel for usright behind the place. It wasn't no great big place, but we didn't have to pay no rent, nothin' like that. Food, we didn't have to buy no food. All we had to do was keep our clothes clean and work. And a little money on the side. We'd make a hundred and some dollars aweek, nothin' big, but then we wouldgo out of town somewhere we can pick up afew hundred dollars apiece " Hooker, Red, and Lane got on well together. The mere fact that Earldid not get rid of his sidemen during their long stay in Cairo gives ample proof of the feeling ofmutual understanding that prevailed in the band. When the presence of another guitarist wasrequested, Hooker used Homer Wilson, a musician he had picked up on the sidewalks of Chicago's Maxwell Street. Wilson usually played in the band of Earl's friend John Brim in the Windy City, but Hooker used him when Homer stopped over in Cairo on his way to his hometown located near Hopkinsville, Kentucky. More than another guitarist, Hooker needed a talented vocalist to roundoff his blues crew. In addition to Red, whose singing repertoire wasample enough to grant the requests of most patrons, Earl would use his old friend Pinetop Perkins, who spent his spare time on stage on the weekend unless Hooker came 35 On the Road (1946-1953) back from one of his regular out-of-town trips with a good singer. Soul star Bobby "Blue" Bland for one has kept fond memories of his singing stints under Hooker's auspices in Cairo. Regardless of the quality of his singers, Hooker was an outstanding showman, and he had no trouble getting the attention of the public, according to Kansas City Red: "Youheard of Les Paul, he was a madman ? Earl Hooker waslike that. He wasa monster. Earl Hooker wasputtin' the guitar behind his back, pickin' it with his teeth, with his feet! That's where all these guys got that stuff from, Earl Hooker. At that time, I could walk the bar and play my drums, and Ernest Lane'd be on top of one of them big pianos, playin' it backward, and all that kinda stuff. But we all got it 'cause Earl Hooker started us all to clownin'. We really didn't need but three pieces. And when I got with Hooker, then I had the freedom to do all of that stuff, you know. He wanted everyone to go for hisself." His capacity at getting the very best out of his musicians wasone of Earl's most precious qualities. Although he would not use sidemen unless they were up to par, even average players would go beyond their limits under his direction. Actually, there were two separate sides to Hooker's deep-rooted sense of showmanship, the first having to do with his uncanny way of playing his instrument . "Anythin' he could do to put on a good show, Hooker did it, no matter what it was," pianist Big Moose Walker insists. "I've seen him turn a flip with the guitar, landin' on his feet. Played with his teeth good. Behind his neck, he got that from T-Bone [Walker]. Wehad somethin' like a show, I'd pick him up, you know, I's big and stout, so I put Hooker up on my shoulders, and he'd play the guitar, and walk all around in the house with him playin' the guitar ." In addition to the action he could do with his instrument, Hooker rapidly understood there were technical ways of turning his playing to account. He realized that electrified amplification could provide any imaginative player with a whole new range of sonorities and possibilities; this awareness only bore fully ripe fruits later on in his career, but early tricks included playing with two amplifiers at the same time, thus creating a premature form of stereophony; using the tone control knob on his instrument to obtain voice-like wah-wah effects as he played; or performing with a hundred-foot-long guitar cord that allowed him to walk from one end of a club to the other while his accompanying musicians backed his playing from the stage. On the Road (1946-1953) 36 The unusual flamboyance of Hooker's performances, fully enlivened by the incredible number of tricks he pulled from his bag, could only enhance the reputation and popularity of his band not only in the immediate vicinity of Cairo but in neighboring towns and villages aswell. To that extent, the geographical position of Cairo was strategic, with a large number of small clubs and roadhouses found within close reach: in addition to Paducah, a lively Kentucky river town straight east of Cairo, the southern part of the state of Missouri, which lay right across the Mississippi River, was teeming with country towns that eagerly welcomed traveling musicians. EarPs favorite hangout there was the club owned by Walter Taylor in the town of Lilbourn, just off ofHighway 61, in the heart of New Madrid County. From Charleston to Caruthersville, fromthe Illinois border to the Missouri-Arkansas state line, almost every place was a possible stop for the Hooker outfit. Earl, Red, and Ernest Lane took every available opportunity to go back on the road for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, to draw a deep breath of fresh air before they returned to their Cairo digs. "I had a car for a while, a Lincoln, in Cairo," Red says. "Then I bought a old Chevy, and Ernest Lane bought a car, that wastwo cars, then. We would travel in that wherever wewanted to go. In Future City, in another place called Monkey 's Eyebrow—that's well out in the country—Mound City, and a little old place they called Mounds. Those were the majors, and then we played all in Missouri, Sikeston, and another one, Hayti. We had all of that sewed up in there. Paducah, we played a place they called Foot's, and quite a few places in Tennessee. Then Hooker would always come to Chicago and stay with his mother, and then he'd come back. And ifhe stayed too long, we'd send for him to come on back." It wason the occasion of such a visit to his mother that Earl met one of his closest associates. Earl Hooker wasriding on a train, heading for southern Illinois on his way back from the Windy City, when a young fellow traveler saw his guitar case and decided to talk to him. The young man, a dark-skinned steelworker named Aaron Corthen, wason his wayto Mounds, a small Illinois town just north of Cairo, where most of his relatives resided at the time. Corthen, better know today under the name of A. C. Reed, was born in southern Missouri's Wardell in 1926, and he made the move to Chicago as a teenager where a war job in an iron foundry prevented him from being drafted. 37 On the Road (1946-1953) His true interest lay well beyond the army-truck assemblylines and whatever savings he had after purchasing a secondhand saxophone in a Chicago pawnshop werespent in musiclessons. Aaron Corthen wasdrawnto the sound ofbig bands like Erskine Hawkins's or Duke Ellington's, but he was flattered to be offered to sit in with Hooker's band at the time of their initial encounter. A few weeks later, Earl and A. Q ran into each other again. "When he come to Chicago, I run up on him," Corthen says. "We's all around on 31st Street, and I started to takin' myhorn around playin' with him and he started comin' back gettin' me for jobs. When I first started goin' on the road with him, we'd go down South all the time playin'. At first, I would work, but we'd go out on weekends, like Missouri,southern Illinois. And durin' a couple years, it musta been somethin' like '49 or '50,1 wasout of a job, and we traveled all the time. We played in Tupelo, Mississippi,with Hooker; I played in a lot of places with Hooker." Earl Hooker and A. C. Reed would play and travel more extensively together during the following years, but their collaboration wassuddenly brought to a stop after Earl's uncanny knack of "borrowing" the musical equipment of others without asking for prior permission sent him right into the arms of the law. Although their complicity wasnever established, Ernest Lane and Kansas City Red were forced to share Hooker's plight. Hooker's eccentric manners developed quite early, for piano man Pinetop Perkins remembers the first time he and fellow band members caught young Hooker red-handed: "When he wasthirteen, down South, he stole one ofLee Kizart's guitars, and we caught up with him and got it back, and he asked Lee did he want to charge him, police charge, sowesaid, 'No, wejust want the guitar , we'll just let it go.'" This bad habit, far from abating with time, soon took such proportions that it alienated Earl from a large number ofpeople. It took a charitable musician like Houston Stackhouse, appointed guitarist with the King Biscuit Boys then, to put up with the young man's wild personality. "Robert [Nighthawk]'d say Earl's fingers got to stickin' to stuff when he'd go into stores, you know; he had to let him slide," Stackhouse later recalled. "Robert sayhe didn't want that, 'cause it could get them all put in jail like that. So when he come over to Helena and went to stayin' with me, I found out his hands would stick by him taking my amplifier! I was gone and had the house locked up, and he broke in there and got myamplifier, and taken mypickup out On the Road (1946-1953) 38 of my guitar, and brought it off somewhere. Sold it. But he musta couldn't sell the pickup, and he went back and broke back into myhouse and put that back in the guitar. I just happened to come in the next morning, I wasjust lookin' around, I said, 'Well, my old guitar ain't got no pickup in it. I will just pick it up and sound off on it.' Then when I looked, there's the pickup. And I looked at that thing, I said, 'Now what the—that scoundrel—done been back here and put the pickup,' and I went to lookin' around for the amplifier, I didn't see it. So when he show up I got at him about the amplifier. 'Oh, I'm shipping it back, it'll be back in a day or two.' That amplifier ain't got back yet! "Yeah, that boy was terrible. I started to jump on him, but I got to thinkin' I gotta son that mighta been a year or two older than he was, and I said, 'Well, I won't do that,' I just talked to him. Told him don't do that, that waswrong. He said, 'Well, I ain't gonna do it no more.'"5 Earl obviously did not pay close attention to Stackhouse's wise advice, because his "sticky fingers" had him, Kansas City Red, and Ernest Lane arrested during the early summer of 1950, and they spent six months in the Illinois State Correctional Center at Vandalia. Johnny "Big Moose" Walker, a broad man with broad shoulders and a broad smile then known as "Cochise" because he was part Indian, tells the story the way he heard it from Hooker himself: "What happened, the owner of the place, he wastestin' the mike, 'One, two— one, two.' But he don't hear nothin'. He looked in the hook-up, the standwas still sittin' up like that, but the hook-up didn't have nothin' inside! Hooker had taken the speakers out of the box! [Hooker] wason the bus on the wayback, so the owner called the highway patrol, and they had to take him off the bus, so they sent him to Vandalia for six months, him and Ernest Lane, a beautiful piano player who used to play with Ike Turner, too." Earl Hooker wasplaying locally around Cairo at the time of the incident; in spite of the connections they had in the black community there, Hooker and his bandmates werehurriedly locked up before they could leave town. Contrary to Moose Walker's magnified version, Earl's arrest took place at the Palms Hotel . The account ofthe event given byKansasCity Red, who shared time in jail with Hooker and Lane although he was clearly innocent, speaks volumes for the haste with which African Americans were imprisoned. On Tuesday, July 18, 1950, Hooker, Lane, and Red were hurried to the Illinois State Farm at Vandalia, some 150 miles straight north of Cairo on Route 51, where they 39 On the Road (1946-1953) served a six-month sentence on a "charge of vagrancyoriginated in the cityof Cairo, Alexander County, Illinois," according to Illinois Department of Corrections files. In various states, especially in the South, local government had enacted laws in the wake of the Civil War with the clear intention of limiting the freedom of Blacks. Among such laws were so-called vagrancy acts, which allowed any representative of the law to arrest African Americans arbitrarily,a practice that lasted well into the 1950s. Regardless of such iniquitous methods, the most frustrating aspect of this grim experience for both Red and Lane was their complete ignorance of the true motive for their incarceration, as Earl Hooker was careful enough not to straighten things out in an attempt to escape their wrath. "Yeah, I really didn't know the reason of it, I found out a little later," Red chortles. "Hooker stole the speaker from this guy.It wasn't in the Wade's Club, this is another club on 23rd Street. It was a little fancy club, and me and Hooker and Ernest Lane played there. Hooker had somebody to take his stuff out to the car, and his guitar, but he didn't put his guitar in his case. So maybe this is how he got the speakers into the case. He's pretty slick, off of that. Next thing I know, they come to the hotel and arrested all three of us and they didn't tell us anythin'. We all had a gun apiece. They taken away all the guns, and they locked us up. We called our friend Memphis to come and get us out. Now wehadn't had no court, no kinda trial. Before Memphis could come down, they throwed us in the car and take us to Vandalia. Didn't nobody tell us until after we done got out of it, about the speakers. I had done served the time, I say,'Well, I'm out, now,' I couldn't get mad, you know." Although located in Illinois, the Vandalia correctional center wassimilar to the state farms found in the South. Sleeping and dining premises were comparable to those found in a traditional prison, but working hours were spent out in the country, where convicts performed various tasks in the fields. Located on Route 51 a few miles off of the northern limits of Vandalia—a rural town about the size of Cairo—the Illinois State Farmhoused a majority of minor offenders. As such, the overall atmosphere which reigned there was nothing as harsh as that of a penitentiary, and Hooker, Red, and Lane did not suffer beyond measure from their inglorious stay at Vandalia. "Youweren't fenced then, but you were locked up in the dormitory and all," Red says. "Vandalia wasa pretty large place, they had roughly about ten dormitories. The building was a big brick On the Road (1946-1953) 40 building, beautiful, it wasclean. It wasjust the idea you'd be locked up at night, 'cause after me and Earl Hooker got there for a while, they found out we was musicians. When they comin' in for dinner, they had a little band that was playin' mostly the sad stuff, and me and Earl Hooker and Ernest Lane, we got up there, and they had an electric guitar, and we started playin' this hard stuff, and half ofthe guys stopped eatin' and listened at this. The warden wasa pretty nice guy,and he would bring his family, and he'd sit up in the back and listen to us play, and after then, they started givin' parties, barn dances and things, it was a lot of fun. They dress us up in white, black shoes, black bow-tie, then we had it made pretty good. We ate with the guards,so we weren't eatin' the bad stuff no more, wedidn't have to workno more then." Forobscure reasons, Lane benefitted from "preferential" treatment and was released on December 6, 1950, while Hooker and Red—listed respectively as Zebdee (sic) Hooker and Arthur Lee Stevenson on State Farm records—were discharged on Thursday, January 4, 1951. Undaunted, they headed back for Cairo as spirited as ever. Neither Ernest Lane nor KansasCity Red had much to gain from this experience , but it could have proved beneficialat least to Hooker; in fact, it only incited him to be more cautious in the future. With time, Earl was to perfect a technique that enabled him to steal the latest musical equipment at Chicago's largest retail musicstore, Lyon & Healy, located on Wabash in the heart of the Loop. "All the musicians knowed how he'd get his stuff," Red confirms. "He come up once with a brand-new set of drums, and he didn't pay a quarter for 'em! The wayI heard it—now I ain't never been with him when he was stealin' that—but that boytold me this; him and Earlwent down there, and he sayhe'd be talkin' to one guy,and he switched over talkin' to another one tellin' this one guy he was interested in somethin' else, and while he got this other guy's attention, the other boyput the stuff in the car." It did not take the Hooker band much time to resume their former position as the leading blues outfit on the Cairo scene. They didn't try to hustle another engagement at the 23rd Street club where Earl had made himself unwelcome, but the town offered many more opportunities, including the set of nightspots operated by the Wade brothers. In between Cairo gigs and out-of-town performances in the immediate vicinity, Earl Hooker still found the time to make occasional forays into the Delta, unless he decided to head north for Chicago, where he visited his mother. 41 On the Road (1946-1953) At the time of a trip to the Windy City, Earl wasintroduced to a man who could wellhave transformedthe courseofhis career ifbad luck had not stepped in. With the deep changes that were taking place in the field of black music in the postwaryears,small independent record firms wereemerging in an attempt to fill in the gap left by the gradual disengagement of the majors. Among the shrewdest representatives of the new "indies" were Leonard and Phil Chess, two Jewish brothers of Polish origin whose financial interest in the black Chicago club scene led them to record some of the entertainers they hired in their venues. In the spring of 1947 they founded the Aristocrat label, essentially devoted to brassybig bands and sophisticated jazz trios. By 1951 Aristocrat had been replaced by the Chess and Checker labels that featured the heavily amplified Delta blues made famous by Muddy Waters. In addition to Muddy, the Chess brothers were showing interest in Robert Nighthawk as well as in piano players Sunnyland Slim and "Little" Johnny Jones. It is quite possible that it was Jones, a friend of EarPs approximatelyof the same age, who introduced him to Leonard Chess. Chess took an immediate notice of EarPs potential, especially as an instrumentalist; following a rapid audition , Hooker asked for enough time to round up his men, and a session was set up for a fewweekslater. Earlwasexcited at the prospect of cutting a record, and he had no difficulty convincing his associates to leave the Cairo scene and move on to bigger things in Chicago. Hooker was going to be the victim of his own success when BigJim Wade, his current employer who feared his exceedingly popular house band might never return from Chicago, decided to keep the Hooker band from deserting Cairo. According to KansasCity Red, "They locked us up a second time; they say we broke a contract. At that time, I couldn't sign my name, and I don't think Hooker could sign his, so we didn't have no contract. BigJim Wadewas the guythat wasthe cause of that 'cause he didn't want us to leave becausewe was bringin' in peoples from different states and cities, so he had us locked up. We tried to slip away, but they pulled us off the bus in Cairo. We waslocked up two weeksat the city jail, right acrossfromthe courthouse, and wehad to agree that we would play for 'em before they get us out of there." Jim Wade apparently underestimated Hooker's craving for freedom. After spending a few additional weeks confined to the Cairo night underworld, Hooker and friends pretended that they had an audition in Paducah. Insteadof On the Road (1946-1953) 42 getting on the bus to Kentucky,they grabbed their instruments and took the first Greyhound to Chicago. Forming a sharp contrast with their glorious arrival on the Cairo scene several months earlier, their escape from a town that loved them all too wellwas definitely a lackluster one for Earl and band. Kansas City Red and Ernest Lane prudently decided to avoid Cairo during the years that followed, but Hooker could not check his desire to visit his old stomping grounds. Even though he never fully reintegrated into the Cairo scene after 1951, the course of his road travels would regularlytake him to southern Illinois until wayinto the sixties, when social and cultural metamorphoses gradually dimmedthe flame that once animated the town's musical life. By 1963 the blues had given way to Black pride in Cairo, and local African Americans staged sit-ins in local restaurants and recreational facilities in an attempt at fighting de facto segregation. Never one to commit himself outside the scope of music, Hooker no longer belonged there. Earl had better incentives than Red or Lane for venturing back into Wadecontrolled territory. The presence in Cairo of Sadie, a girl he had met several months before his departure, must have been compelling enough, for after spending some time in Chicago he headed back for Cairo to join her. There is no telling what the reaction of Jim Wade was when he found himself face to face with the man who had challenged his authority shortly before; it may be assumed that Jim Wade made the best of the situation, since he immediately gave Earl a job at one of his clubs. After a while Earl finally brought his girlfriend to the Windy City, where she moved in with him at Mrs. Hooker's South Side home, much to the dislikeofMary Hooker, whose over-possessive attitude toward her son was legendary among EarPs friends. Rather than stay in an inhospitable environment, Sadie rapidly gained her independence after she found a steady occupation as barmaid at Chuck's Corner, later renamed the Globetrotter's Lounge, a West Side bar located at the intersection of Damen and Madison Avenues, where Earl often performed."That's where she worked at all the time, 'cause Hooker would come by and see her when he was in town," KansasCity Red says. "He had a kid by her or somethin', I don't know was it one or two." Upon his return to Chicago after his long spell in Cairo, Earl Hooker played around the city quite a bit. One of his main hangouts then was the city of 43 On the Road (1946-1953) Chicago Heights. This industrial urban center of forty thousand, located twenty-five miles south of the Chicago Loop, numbered a respectable amount of bars and taverns where the working-classpopulation of "the Heights" could be entertained. Among other locations, rhythm & blues players found regular jobs at the Cut Rate Lounge at the corner of 15th and Wentworth, at the Sunset Lounge on 16th Street, or at Cole's Quality Lounge situated on 14th Street, but the Black & Tan, at the corner of 17th and Hanover, across the street from the busy railyard, featured the best live music in town. Hooker often took his band there, sometimes using his sister Earline on saxophone. One of EarPs fans wasfourteen-year-old Andrew Brown, a native ofJackson, Mississippi, who lived with his mother in the Heights. It wasnot there, however , but in southern Illinois that Brown first met Hooker, on the occasion of an overnight stop in Cairo on his way back from a vacation in Mississippi. Young Andrew was underage at the time and as such was not allowed inside clubs; yet his overpowering interest in the music and his burly stature were his passport to the inside of the Wade's Club. He later remembered vividlyhis first impressions upon hearing Earl Hooker: "When I was thirteen years old, I weighed 170 pounds and had a moustache. I can remember this real good. 'That's All Right.' I heard [Hooker] play it in Cairo, Illinois, in 1950. It wasa little club called Wade's Club. I heard him play that tune with a slide, and that's when I knew that it wasn't nobody in the world could play a slide like that. Because he could actually make a guitar talk. I believe he influenced me more than anybody, because the things he would do with a guitar was awfiil strange, and as a kid I wanted to get the sound that he got. Because like B.B. King had a certain sound, T-Bone Walker had a certain sound, Lowell Fulson had a certain sound... but EarlHooker had everybody'ssound, and HIS sound. So he was altogether like the boss of the guitar as far as I was concerned."6 Brown, upon hearing that his idol wasplaying at the Black & Tan several months after their initial meeting, invited him over to his house. Earl gave the teenager a few tips on the guitar, teaching him useful chords and showing him how to set the knobs on his guitar amplifier, advising his young pupil to use a plain (unwound) G string when playingblues. It wasnot uncommon foryoung fans to come to Hooker for advice, asthey found it less intimidating to speak to someone who looked almost as young as they did than to approach older and more solemn musicians. On the Road (1946-1953) 44 Earl not only provided help veryreadily; he even let beginners sit in with his band when the occasion arose. Herb Turner and Ronald "Bobby Little" Bluster who also lived in the Heights, were approximately Andrew's age and they would hang outside the Black & Tan every time a Chicago band played there to grab with their eyes and ears as much as they could whenever the door opened or closed. Herb Turner remembers: "Chicago Heights was a southern town, meaning it had a great migration from the South. This town had more factories than any other town this size in the country. Inland Steel, American Brake Shoe, DeSoto, you name 'em, it's here. Lots ofworkers, and a lot of clubs, and a lot of blues, and a lot of money. The first time I sawHooker, it wasat the Black & Tan. I guess I was about thirteen, fourteen at the time. Every week it was a different band, MuddyWaters, Howlin' Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Earl Hooker. And so I listened outside the door, and you know I was just completely interested in music. But see, Bobby [Little] is about the same age I am, we grew up together, we hung out in the taverns, but he could play drums so he could get in and I couldn't. Hooker would let him sit in on drums." Earl Hooker's main source of work when he left Chicago remained the club scene of the southern states. Although he spent most of his time around Cairo from 1949, he never stopped making occasional forays into Mississippi or Arkansas, either with his own outfit or as a guest with various Delta combos. The KingBiscuit Boys in particular wouldusuallyhire him for their dailyKFFA radio show whenever he came through Helena, especially after King Biscuit Time's star, harmonicist Rice Miller, left Helena in the late forties, heading for West Memphis with guitarist Joe Willie Wilkins in tow. Following Miller's departure, the remaining King Biscuit Boys, including drummer James Peck Curtis and pianist Dudlow Taylor, made it their business to take over the program. As a replacement for Wilkins, they hired Houston Stackhouse, a fine singer and slide guitar virtuoso to whom Robert Nighthawk owed a large share ofhis technique. Earl's own participation in the Delta's most popular blues show reached a climax in the spring of 1949 when he appeared with Curtis and Taylor on the 2,000th broadcast of King Biscuit Time. A commemorative photograph taken on this glorious occasion shows a twenty-yearold Hooker proudly picking an acoustic guitar with a pickup added for amplification, whereas a short article in the Chicago Defender described the event: "Earl Zebedee Hooker, self-taught guitarist and son ofMrs. Mary Hooker 45 On the Road (1946-1953) of 3361 Giles Ave., has been going great guns on the station KFFA's KingBiscuit Time, beaming in the Helena, Arkansas area. King Biscuit Time recently completed its 2000th broadcast over station KFFA.Young Earl has been with the group about 6 months."7 During part of 1951 and most of 1952, after his progressivewithdrawalfrom the Cairo scene, Earl spent most ofhis time in the Delta, where he resumedhis spot with the KingBiscuit Boys.As a regularmember of the band, he took part with Stackhouse, Curtis, and Dudlow Taylor in the Monday-through-Friday fifteen-minute program, advertising King Biscuit Flour and Sonny Boy Corn Meal, while weekend nights were devoted to club work throughout the Delta. "Earl come over to Helena and went to playin' with us," Houston Stackhouse later recalled. "He stayed around us two years over there playin' with me and Dudlow and Peck, there wasjust four of us then. He played with us 'cause Iwas playin' guitar on the program then, and so he came and went to playin' guitar on the program. There was two guitars.That wasKing Biscuit Time."8 In addition to their daily engagements over KFFA radio, 1360 on the AM dial, the KingBiscuit Boys played every Saturday morning on the flatbed truck of the Interstate Grocer Company, singing and advertising their sponsor's prod' ucts in front of country grocery stores and gas stations. Cashing in on their tremendous following around the Delta, the King Biscuit Boys drew most of their income from the unbridled performancesthey gave on weekend nights in the large dance halls and teeming juke houses encountered in Mississippior Arkansas. "Youusuallyplayed in the little towns, like Indianola, for instance, where I grew up. They had a place there called Jones' Night Spot,"bluesstar B.B. King, whose outfit roamed the samecircuit as that of the KingBiscuit Boys, explains . "If you played Arkansas, then you had a place called Slackbritches in Birdsong, or Hick's Corner. Each one of these places wasa little nightclub. The place wouldhold maybea hundred people, a hundred and fifty at the most, and they'd usually have one little room for gamblin', and all of the swingin' people would have fun dancin' and playin' music in the big room. They'd have food, music, boys and girls,youngpeople and old people, it was a lot of fun." Although he never missed a King Biscuitbroadcast, Stackhouse had to stay in Helena during the week due to his professional obligations, and he could only work out-of-town gigs with his bandmates on Saturdays and Sundays. Hooker's association with Houston Stackhouse washighly beneficial, for it enOn the Road (1946-1953) 46 abled him to perfect his technical proficiency; the presence of accomplished guitarists likeJoe Willie Wilkins or Boyd Gilmore also proved helpful to alarge extent. By the time Earl came back from Cairo and started playing with the King Biscuit Boys on a regularbasis, he had definitelyearned the reputation of best guitar player around, quite an honor considering his age and the fact that Delta instrumentalists werenot known to be mediocre players. "Bottleneck?" says Joe Willie Wilkins, former King Biscuit Boy and a fine guitarist in his own right who taught Earl a few licks when the teenager visited the Delta in the mid-forties. "That's the reason I left mine alone, 'cause Robert Nighthawk, that Earl Hooker, and that Stackhouse—well, when you get to them fellows, it wasn't no more bottleneckin'. 'Cause they was all of it. Yeah. So when I wasaround those fellows I kept mine in my pocket."9 In the spaceof a few years, the worthy student had transcended his masters: "Joe Willie and them helped him," Stackhouse states, "but Earl Hooker was the best to my idea.... He used to could play all kinda guitar. He started to usin' the slide, I reckon, after Robert [Nighthawk] learned him how to play a guitar. So he started foolin' with the slide, around there with us. He got bad with the thing, too!"10 By the second half of 1952, Earl Hooker decided to free himself from the King Biscuit Time routine, and he left on his own, picking up sidemen in the course of his travels. This period of his life was marked by his encounter with the most influential of modern blues guitarists, B. B. (forBlues Boy) King.Although Earl and King had often played the same country juke houses and nightclubs for several years, and even though Earl had visited the Beale Street theaters in Memphiswhere Kingand friends performedwith regularity,the two men had never met. Yet B. B. King was aware of the King Biscuit Boys on account of their daily broadcast over KFFA, and Hooker had been exposed to King's work. With a national R&B hit to his credit since Christmas 1951 ("Three O'Clock Blues"), Kingwasclearly on his wayto stardom. It wasbecause they wished to see B. B.King perform that Earl and band, on their wayback from the Delta, met him at the Club 61, a country joint sitting astride the Arkansas-Missouri state line. "I met him at a place called the State Line of Arkansas and Missouri, it used to be above Blytheville, Arkansas," B. B. King remembers. "He and his group was travelin', comin' from the South, goin' back to Chicago. So he stopped bywith his group,and that night after we 47 On the Road (1946-1953) finished playin' the concert, he and I and the band, weplayed all night, wejust sit and played. That was my first time meetin' him, and from then on, wewas friends the rest of his life." It seems that both men showed mutualrespect for each other from the start. Until his death, Earlwouldnever miss an opportunity to sit in with King,much to the delight of appreciative audiences. Kingon the other hand still expresses today his boundless admiration for his friend's stunning ability, and the crisp picture he drawsof Hooker betrays the importance he attached to their friendship : "A quiet, a real nice man, a real gentleman. I never heard him swear. Most people swear,I do, a lot ofpeople, but I never heard him swear.Never. He was interested in music, only. Youcould tell, because when he came on stage, playin*—I think it's kinda like me, I hear a lot of people that play so near like me today, I have to listen myself to see if it's me. But that's the same thing with Earl Hooker. When EarlHooker started playin', I KNEWthat wasEarl Hooker. I don't care who else played,whether it wasRobert Nighthawk, Bukka White, anybody, you knew it was Earl Hooker. "And he was a good organizer,"King goes on. "He had a good eyesight for people. He knew about talent, he had a good ear for it, which isonly a few people I find today that have it. In other words,he could recognize talent right off. And he did a lot of other things." Cashing in on his growingreputation, Earl conscientiously played the usual nightclub circuit. After visiting Cairo once again, where he picked up ayoung drummer named Billy Gayles, the one-nighter trail led Hooker to Clarksdale, where he became acquainted with a twenty-one-year-old disc jockey named Ike Turner. A native of Clarksdale, Turner started playingpiano at a very early age after he heard pianist Pinetop Perkins on the King Biscuit radio show. When he met saxophonist Raymond Hill in a Clarksdale high school, Turner formed his own band, the Kings of Rhythm, and they gained popularity in the vicinity of Clarksdale with their sax-led type of jump blues. The Kings of Rhythm made their recording debut in Memphis,Tennessee, for producer Sam Phillips in early March of 1951, recording four songs that were then leased to the Chicago-based Chess label. A resulting single issued on Chess (number 1458) and credited to Jackie Brenston and His Delta Cats—Brenston was the current vocalist with the Kings of Rhythm—soon became famous after its Aside titled "Rocket 88" became Chess Records' first number-one hit record, On the Road (1946-1953) 48 topping Billboard's national rhythm & blues charts in May of the same year and remaining charted for a straight seventeen-week period. On the strength of this success, Turner and his fellow Kingsof Rhythm toured until money disputes led to the breakup of the band. Ike was then recruited as a talent scout by the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern/RPM record complex in Los Angeles. This new function provided him with new openings, and he was regularlyrequested to back up the artists recorded bythe Biharis, cutting several sides himself for RPM in April of 1952. It wasaround that time that Turner and Hooker met. Turner, a very powerful and fast boogie pianist, was strongly impressed with EarPs driving guitar picking and impeccable slide style, his freshness, and his profoundly modern dynamism. When Ike decided to take up the guitar himself because his current girlfriend already occupied the piano stool, he turned to Earl, Hooker's influence in his playing being traceable to this day. That June, Earl went on the road with a new outfit that featured Ike Turner and his girlfriend Bonnie Turner aswell asJohnny O'Neal—one of the original singers with Ike's teenage bands, freshly out of the outfit of popular blues shouter Tiny Bradshaw—who also acted asthe band's drummer.They first traveled north to southern Illinois and the livelyCairo scene, where they picked up Pinetop Perkins, before they eventually ended up in Florida after workingMississippi and Louisiana joints and dance halls on the way. Guitarist-singer "Little" Milton Campbell, who was then leading his own ensemble across the country, gives an accurate description of the usual circuit blues bands currently played at the time: "Turner, Hooker, we were all doing the same thing, especially in the South; I had a little band, and I waslike traveling around through the states like Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Mississippi , even Alabama; we'd play in little places like that. Florida is a little farfetched in a sense, but it is a state that you can work in for three or four months. It's different in Mississippi, where you kinda run out of places, but Florida, especially in the wintertime, that's the time when they're harvesting the fruits. And back then times were real good, lots of money, everybodywas working, and it's many towns that there wasto work in. Ifyou just got a chance to play there three or four times in the same town it would keep you there maybe for three months, or at least for the time of the harvest season. It starts some time around November, December, what have you, until March, three, four months of it anyway." 49 On the Road (1946-1953) The local scene must have been quite appealing to Hooker and his men, for they burned up the Florida roads until the late fall, playing every little town they went through. "We stayed down there about six, eight months," piano man Pinetop Perkins recalls. "We's playin' around Sarasota, Fort Myers, Stuart, Homestead, Miami, Bradenton. We played there a while. At that particular time, we didn't have a bass player,and I wasplayin' drums behind Ike Turner's wife, and when we'd get readyto play the blues, then Johnny O'Neal wouldget on the drums, and I'd get to the piano, that's the waywe had the thing goin'. When Bonnie would get to playin' piano—see, she played nice piano, she could read it—and I'd get over and play the drums, and Johnny would sing then. She sang too, she had a good voice. We had a good band too, piano, drums and guitar, that's all it was." The band's favorite spot in Florida was the Sarasota/Bradenton/St. Petersburg triangle, south of Tampa Bay on the gulf of Mexico, an area boasting a very active musical life. In Bradenton they ran into a piano player and singer originally from Tarpon Springs, Florida, named Billy "The Kid" Emerson, who performed in local clubs at the instigation of a local promoter for whom Earl and band also played at regular intervals: "Earl Hooker, yeah, I met Earl Hooker in Bradenton. Now that was a blues player. Now you talking about a blues player! Earl Hooker was probably,was one of the most pronounced blues guitar playersthat ever lived. We wasworkin' for the same guy,Buddy May ... which is a guy who really did a whole lot for me in music, you know. He was a promoter out of Bradenton."11 Everything went smoothly until Earl and Ike had a falling out over financial issues at Dennis Simpson's Bar in Sarasota, a recurring problem with Hooker, who ended up that time with the short end of the stick: "Earl Hooker was the one that carried me to Florida the first time wewent down there with Bonnie. ... He promised me one amount ofmoney and then when I got down there he was gon' pay me another one. This was a fight between he and I, so then the club owner fired him and so Bonnie and I started to playing there."12 In spite of his trouble with the Turners, Earl found life in Florida exciting enough, and he decided to stay around with singer Johnny O'Neal while Ike, Bonnie, and Pinetop stayed in Sarasota, eventually playing their way back home. After putting together another small unit with Roosevelt Wardell on piano , Ed Wiley on saxophone, Robert Dixon on bass, and Will Cochran on On the Road (1946-1953) 50 drums, Hooker and O'Neal hustled regular engagements around the Tampa Bay at music spots such as the Palms' Club in Bradenton, the Drive In in Sarasota , the Manhattan, the Elks Club or the Roseland in St. Petersburg. If Earl and Johnny O'Neal had started to build up a reputation in Florida, Wardell and more especially Wiley could hardly be regarded as newcomers on the scene, for they had been leading their own ensemble in the state for a while. Wiley wasa talented artist in his own right; besides his workwith former Kings of Rhythm vocalist Jackie Brenston, he had already made a handful of records since the beginning of the decade. In addition to his fine work asan accompanist to Texas artists like guitarist Smokey Hogg, pianist Willie Johnson, or vocalists King Tut and Teddy Reynolds, Ed Wiley was notorious for his own Sittin' In With release "Cry, Cry Baby," later covered by Hooker's longtime sidekick Johnny Big Moose Walker, which earned Wiley a fourth position on the national R&JB charts in the spring of 1950. The Hooker/O'Neal/Wiley combination was a potentially promising one, and it drew the attention of a talent scout for the Cincinnati-based King Recording Company who attended one of their tear-it-up performances at a Bradenton club. Johnny O'Neal washardly an unknown at King Records; his stint with Tiny Bradshaw had enabled him to cut several tracks for the Ohio firm in January of 1951. This did not escape the King representative, who offered to record both Johnny and Earlon the spot. A total ofeight numberswere recorded with the help of a portable machine right in the club, after the end of the last set, on Thursday night, November 26, 1952. Following this hurried session, Kingdecided to release two of O'Neal's sides; as for Earl's own King4600, it included "Blue Guitar Blues" and "Race Track," whereas his remaining two titles mistakenly sawthe light on John Lee Hooker's Every One a Pearl (King LP 727) later on in the decade. These sides are rather disappointing efforts as a whole, and they don't do justice to Hooker's potential . While "Blue Guitar Blues" and "Happy Blues"—both of which show the influence on Earl's playing of West Coast jazz-blues specialist Pee Wee Crayton —are rather dull blues instrumentais marred by Wardell's inadequate piano accompaniment, "Race Track" and "Shake 'Em Up" are faster guitar items that showcase Hooker's elaborate chordwork and jazzy picking on a tight foundation of piano flourishes contributed by Wardell. Of the four tracks dedicated to O'Neal's singing, two have remained unis51 On the Road (1946-1953) sued to this day, including a version of "Whole Heap of Mama," a song the singer had already cut under the auspices of Ike Turner for the short-lived Blues & Rhythm enterprise ten months earlier under the pseudonym of Brother Bell. "So Many Hard Times" and "Johnny Feels the Blues," released on King 4599, give a fair idea of O'Neal's charisma as a vocalist; to a certain extent, this full-chested coupling makes up for the mediocrity of Earl's own offerings. Although the band suffers from an obvious lack of rehearsal, the degree of interplay between Hooker and O'Neal gives a much clearer picture of their talent. "So Many Hard Times," taken at a slow pace, provides Earl with ample opportunity to showcase his sensitivity as a blues instrumentalist, whereas the jazz-tinged "Johnny Feels the Blues," complete with an alert bebop tenor sax solo contributed by Ed Wiley, features Earl's imaginative guitar support, every chorus being adorned with new chords and phrases. All in all, this improvised live session, Earl Hooker's initial contact with the world of recording, gave him an overall impression of informality that may well have influenced his vision of the recording industry, accounting for the thoughtless, easy-going attitude he adopted in the studio as a general rule from then on. For Hooker, that episode wasa mere digression in his daily routine, and the next fewweeksfound him back on the road with his band. Bythe beginning of 1953, Earl and Johnny O'Neal had decided to go separate ways, and the guitarist joined forces with a harmonica player named "Little" Sammy Davis. Originally from Winona in the Mississippi hills, Davis had been living in Florida for some time, cutting logs and picking fruit in orange groves. After meeting Hooker when Ike and Bonnie Turner were still in Earl's band, he was flattered a few weeks later when the guitarist offered him a spot in his outfit, following O'Neal's departure. Hooker's inside connections with the club scene in Florida were many, and he wasworkingseven nights a week when a second recording opportunity came his way. This time, the proposal came from a Bronx-born but Miami-basedrecord distributor named Henry Stone. A shrewd business man with expert insight into the R&B market, Stone decided to diversify his trade in the early fifties by launching his own Crystal Recording Company, joining efforts with Andy Razaf, a pioneer jazz writer made famous by his collaboration with Fats Waller, and incidentally a grand-nephew of Queen Ranavalona III of Madagascar.After opening a studio in downtown MiOn the Road (1946-1953) 52 ami, Stone concentrated on local talent and started releasing his productions on the Rockin* and Glory labels, the first being devoted to blues and country music, while Glory boasted a gospel catalog. After hearing Hooker and Davis in Bradenton one night, Stone approached them and made a recording offer. "I was the first distributor around," Stone later reminisced. "Like I had to make a living. That's how I got into distribut' ing and hustling records. That meant daily bread for my family. I always recorded on the side, because I felt a big distribution down here. I needed a place to record. I've always had a studio in my hip pocket. Originally Rockin' was Ray Charles. He wasdoing a little blind-man thing. I got the word on him. He was giggin' around. Later I did Earl Hooker."13 "I liked the way he played guitar."14 Stone's record business wasquite new when Hooker walked into his studio in 1953; the first few Rockin' sessions had taken place in October 1952, when Stone recorded Ray Charles (freshly back from the West Coast, where he had achieved success at the head of the Maxin Trio), the blues sounds of W. C. Baker, and the Leroy Lang Orchestra. Another set of recordings the following January involved Leslie Louis (supposedly Memphian one-man-band Joe Hill Louis) and Manzy Harris as well as former Hooker pianist Roosevelt Wardell accompanied by Ed Wiley and his orchestra, but Stone wasready for more studio work. By the spring of that year, a relationship was established with Syd Nathan of King Records in Cincinnati, who eventually purchased the Rockin' masters during the following summer after Stone temporarily went out of business ; on the strength of this new deal, Stone worked harder than ever on the recording side ofhis business all through the month ofApril at the precise time Hooker and Davis met him. Within days of their initial encounter with Henry Stone, Earl Hooker and Sammy Davis, taking the band's drummer Tony with them, made the 220-mile trip from Bradenton and wound up at Stone's Crystal Clear Studios at 505 West Plagier in downtown Miami. This only Rockin' session was a rather productive one, as Stone recorded ten titles altogether. Sam Davis's singing was featured on the first four, while Hooker authored the next six numbers. This session wasfar more rewarding than the under-rehearsed King event of the preceding fall, as it gave a clear vision of Hooker's versatility and proficiency at a time when his idiosyncratic style was progressively shaping up. Listening to 53 On the Road (1946-1953) those sides today, you can hear Earl grow from a gifted traditional guitarist into an inventive and fully creative artist. Despite the large amount of talent displayed by Hooker during the whole session, Stone seemed more satisfied with Davis's material, and he released it in its entirety on two 78s (Rockin* 512 and Rockin' 519), credited to Little Sam Davis. Davis's output no doubt pleased Syd Nathan as well, for the harmonicist 's second coupling wassoon reissued on the King-owned DeLuxe label that Nathan decided to reactivate after he leased the Rockin' mastersfrom Stone in August 1953. Davis, if not a major instrumentalist, displays both conviction and versatility in these recordings although his music is quite derivative. Expressing himself in a wide variety of styles,Davis's recorded repertoire includes an R&B effort strongly rooted in the New Orleans tradition aptly titled "Coin' to New Orleans" alongside a slow, rustic Delta item called "Coin' Home to Mother" that showcases his pleasant singing and fine harp blowing, duly complemented by Earl's progressivepicking and chording. "She's So Good to Me" is a straight copy of Chicagoan Little Walter's "Sad Hours," which had run high in Billboard's R&B charts all through December 1952 and January 1953; it gaveHooker an occasion to re-create the guitarparts initially contributed on Walter's original by his childhood friend Louis Myers. That left "1958 Blues"as the most exciting number recorded by Davisthat day; this fast tune—showing the extent of Little Sammy's debt to the playingof John Lee "Sonny Boy"Williamson (Sonny BoyWilliamson #1), whosemumbled singing style also proved influential here—was a superb variation on the traditional "Rollin' and Tumblin"' Delta theme. Its inspired lyrics, enlightened by Hooker's razor-edged, drivingguitarlines, certainly point to SammyDavisas a promisingwriter and competent harmonicist. In contrast with Davis' offerings, only two of Hooker's own sides were considered worthy of a spring 1953 release on Rockin', probably because Hooker chose to stay on a strict diet of guitar instrumentais. In addition to a versionof Pee Wee Crayton's "After Hours" and improvisations such as "Ride Hooker Ride" or "Alley Corn" that didn't see the light of day until 1998 on a Hot Records reissue album, Hooker's set also includes a fine vocal attempt titled "Sweet Angel." Rockin' 78 number 513 coupled this single song with a guitar -drums duet of the sort Hooker seemed particularlyfond of, titled "On the Hook." Aurally, this up-tempo number is a fine rework of the "Happy Blues" On the Road (1946-1953) 54 put on wax for the King label five months earlier. Hooker had apparently turned this short period to account, for the sloppy, under-rehearsed November tune had become by then a more inspired jumper boasting heavily amplified, almost distorted chordwork interspersed with swift single-note runs; the faked fade-out effect Earl uses to bring the tune to a close also stands as a proof to Hooker's sense of dynamics. "Sweet Angel" isno less interesting, but the song already had a long history when Earl recorded it in 1953. It was penned in 1930 by one of the few nonvaudeville female blues singersof the prewarera, Lucille Bogan, who waxed her own "Black Angel Blues" for Brunswick in December of that year. Tampa Red, one of the most prolific blues recording artists of the twenties and thirties, then put on wax an influential rendition of the song for Vocalion on the very dayof March 1934 when EarPs sister Christine wasborn, before re-recording the tune for the RCA-Victor label in 1950 as "Sweet Little Angel." Tampa Red, whose crystal-clear bottleneck sound waswidely imitated by slide guitarists, had a determining influence on Earl's teacher, Robert Nighthawk, who in turn recorded the song on the Chess brothers' Aristocrat label on the occasion of a 1949 trip to Chicago. By the time B. B. King made a hit out of it with his own 1956 cover, the original "Black Angel Blues" had been revamped into a fully orchestrated "Sweet Little Angel," bereft of any color connotation, allowing it to become a classic many urban blues artists still keep in their bag of songs today. It ishard to saywhether Earl had heard Lucille Bogan's original; at any rate, his Rockin' version was patterned after Nighthawk's Aristocrat recording. As such, it isstill very much rooted in the raw tradition of the Delta blues, with its over-amplified and distorted guitar and harmonica sounds. Earl cleverly alternates smooth and eerie slide passages with vocal lines, his slide work coming as an extension to his singing. Surprisingly enough for a man who distrusted his own singing enough to consistently carry a vocalist in his band, Hooker is endowed with a very nice, distinctive voice, which he useshere quite wittily. Listeners only need to listen to the first verse of the song to realizehowpersuasive a singer Hooker could be: "I got a sweet black angel / And I love the way she spreads her wings / When she spreads her wings over me / It brings joy and everything." Hooker stretches out the end of the third line, "over me-e-e-e-ee -e," which lazily wraps itself, wing-like, around one's shoulders in a highly effective manner. Sammy Davis should also get credit for his drone-like 55 On the Road (1946-1953) harmonica accompaniment, which blends perfectly with Hooker's performance . Although the latter's debt to Nighthawk was obvious on this early recording, "Sweet Angel" isn't a mere copy but rather a tribute paid by a worthy pupiL Like any good student, Hooker had by now transcended his teacher, coming up with an exciting Delta bluesperformancethat deserves to be classified today as a true gem of the early postwarblack American tradition. On the Road (1946-1953) 56 ...