John Lee Hooker on before there were recordings! Charles Shaar Murray : Boogie Man

John Lee Hooker: "At that time there wasn’t no songwriters, there wasn’t no publishers, nothin’. They just made songs up in the cotton fields and stuff like this.’ Needless to say, there wasn’t no recording studios, neither, so information about what the blues sounded like before it was first recorded is, by definition, anecdotal. We know who first copyrighted the basic blues themes, but that doesn’t tell us an awful lot of about who might have originally created them. Staples like ‘Catfish Blues’, ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’, ‘Walkin’ Blues’ or ‘Rollin’ and Tumblin” certainly long predate their earliest recorded manifestations, and each exist in numerous variations, none of which could with any certainty be described as ‘earlier’ or ‘more authentic’ than the others. Virtually every Delta singer had his (only very rarely ‘her’) distinctive personal version of the standard fistful of guitar or piano riffs and lyrical motifs. Generally, blues tyros learned from an older singer in their neighbourhood, who may well have learned it either from one of the many itinerant bluesmen who would pass through the saloons, levee camps or plantations, or from a city-based performer taking a swing through the South with a tent show.

Hooker’s earliest musical experiences came through the oral tradition: from direct contact with Tony Hollins, who taught him his first chords and songs, and from Will Moore, who gave him the boogie. Hollins was a professional bluesman, though not a particularly successful one, who travelled the highways and by-ways of the South and eventually wound up in Chicago; Will Moore was a popular and respected player among his local community, but was never recorded. Hollins’s only direct legacy is a fistful of songs cut in Chicago between 1941 and 1951which, at the time of writing, mostly remain unreissued – including some which, like ‘Crawlin’ King Snake’ and ‘Crosscut Saw’, became ‘standards’ only through other artists’ recorded versions. Moore, as previously noted, never recorded at all. Hooker was their only direct inheritor. He eagerly imbibed songs and ideas from whatever early blues recordings came his way, but his most profoundly formative influences came from direct, face-to-face encounters with musicians who had themselves learned their stuff the hard way, the old way, the traditional way: from their elders, the elders who were themselves the first generation of bluesmen. 

Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century by Charles Shaar Murray 

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