Boogie chillen

John Lee Hooker: 1917–2001

By Ted Drozdowski

DEEP BLUES: You can’t go no deeper than me and my guitar,” Hooker once said, as if daring debate.

Chester Burton Atkins: 1924-2001 The roots music world took another hit this past Saturday with the death of the legendary Chet “Mr. Guitar” Atkins, at the age of 77. Atkins, who had been battling cancer for quite a while, is widely credited with bringing country music to the pop and mainstream consciousness through his work as guitarist, producer, and general ambassador for the music he loved so much. The legend goes that Atkins, who hails from the East Tennessee town of Luttrell, started out on the fiddle, but idolized his older guitar-playing half-brother Jim, and traded a pistol for his first guitar by the age of nine. His admiration of Merle Travis led to the development of Atkins’s signature “two-finger-and-thumb” style of guitar playing — a style that could often give the impression that two guitars were being played simultaneously. Thanks to support from early-country pioneers like host of the “Prince Albert Show” on Nashville’s Grand Ole Opry Red Foley, Acuff-Rose publishing’s Fred Rose, and RCA Records’ Steve Sholes, Atkins was the session guitarist for the majority of RCA’s Nashville recordings by 1949 — playing on hits by Hank Williams (“Jambalaya”), the Everly Brothers (“Bye Bye Love”), and Elvis Presley (“Heartbreak Hotel”), to name just a small few. By the late ’50s, Atkins-the-producer had managed to create a crossover sound that would become Nashville’s signature, often replacing fiddle and steel guitar with strings and vocal arrangements that would appeal to a more pop audience, making possible the fame of everyone from Presley to Waylon Jennings to Dolly Parton. In fact, there are modern-day critics who would say Atkins is the reason country music is so bad today — too much pop, not enough roots — for which Atkins would apologetically say, “we were just trying to sell records.” He, himself, sold plenty of records — mostly instrumentals, everything from covers of Beatles tunes to Hawaiian luau music — winning 14 Grammys along the way, most recently in 1997 for the instrumental “Jam Man,” off his Almost Alone album for Columbia Records. He also took turns with everyone from Les Paul to Mark Knopfler to Paul McCartney, to give you an idea of his musical range. Yet, for all his accomplishments, Atkins just wanted to be known as Chet Atkins, c.g.p. (certified guitar player). As for me, struggling to master the C-major scale, I consider the Atkins records I find today for 25 cents a steal, and an inspiration. —Sam Pfeifle

Nobody sounds like John Lee Hooker” was the great bluesman’s assessment of himself. “John Lee Hooker is all different — different stories, different worries, different sounds. That’s what makes me outstanding, I would think.”

Anyone familiar with Hooker’s 53 years of contributions to the blues will agree. His music was a spiritual tonic, whether a grease for celebration in tunes like his trademark “Boogie Chillen” or a balm for heartache and primal dread in numbers like “Dark Room” and “Tupelo.” His death of natural causes in the early-morning hours of June 21 leaves an irreplaceable hole in the soul of the music. He was the very last of the generation of musicians who pioneered electric blues, a rugged and determined individual who believed so mightily in his art and himself that he spent more than 30 years traveling from rent parties to juke joints to clubs and coffeehouses before nding economic comfort and something approaching mainstream stardom.

Hooker was 83 when he passed away. He was buried a week later, after two days of viewing and memorial services at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland, across San Francisco Bay from his Los Altos home. The Clarksdale (Mississippi) native made his exit as colorfully as he’d entered stages across the world for decades: in a white suit with matching fedora and his trademark dark sunglasses.

Those shades were more than an affectation for Hooker, who was one of 11 children born into a Baptist minister’s family. “I get so deep when I sing that teardrops come into my eyes,” he once told me. “I wear dark glasses so you won’t see the teardrops.”

But they could always be heard in his voice and in his guitar, which seemed hot-wired to every emotional nuance of his lyrics — especially in his solo performances, where his low moaning and the dark, spare notes of his Gibson hollowbodies could evoke utter desolation in just a few measures, echoing the basic throb of human need. Hooker was fully aware of how profound his blues could be. “You can’t go no deeper than me and my guitar,” he stated, as if daring debate.

Nonetheless, he was best known for his livelier material. He was the inventor and king of guitar boogie, the chugging beat driven by upstrokes that he de ned on his in uential rst hit in 1948, “Boogie Chillen,” and rede ned repeatedly on “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer,” “Boom Boom,” “House Rent Boogie,” “Crawlin’ Kingsnake,” and many other signature tunes. That rhythm, rooted in both West Africa and the Mississippi Delta, became part of the basic fabric of rock and roll, being seized upon by the Rolling Stones, Canned Heat, Jimi Hendrix, ZZ Top, George Thorogood, and almost every bar band in America and Europe.

Hooker recorded “Boogie Chillen” and 23 other sides for Modern Records in Detroit, where he worked by day as a janitor in an auto plant and played parties and jukes at night. Those Modern cuts were both primitive and cutting-edge, blending his take on raw electri ed country blues with experiments in multi-tracking, guitar textures, and reverb. But Hooker’s music always bared its roots. His slow narratives were Delta approximations of the art of the African griots — solo performers who chronicle the history of their village and its families, often accompanied by a kora or some other stringed instrument used to amplify the events in their songs. Hooker was given the basics of his one-chord guitar approach by his stepfather, Will Moore, whose primal funk re ected the typical style of 1920s bluesmen from his native Louisiana. “He taught me, ‘Do it this way or no way,’ ” Hooker once explained. “ ‘This is the blues. Don’t come to no fancy chords, don’t come to no fast playing.’ And he was right.” Hooker’s conviction in his style was unshakable. Teo Leyasmeyer, booking agent at Harvard Square’s House of Blues and a friend of his for many years, recounts: “He told me a story once about picking up his little ampli er, walking out of Chess studios, and telling them to go fuck themselves when they told him to lighten up on his foot tapping and to play the guitar differently on certain songs.”

The catalogue of Hooker’s albums reaches nearly 150 titles, including collections and reissues. These range from anthologies of his early Modern and Chess sides to the superb concert sets Alone and Live at Café Au-Go-Go and Soledad Prison and his latest studio CD, 1997’s Don’t Look Back. When he died, Hooker was working on an album with his daughter Zakiyah and several other projects. Into the 1980s he could still be seen performing alone in small clubs and coffeehouses. His popularity had at last outgrown those venues by 1989, when he won the rst of his three Grammys (including a Lifetime Achievement Award) for the 1.5-million-selling The Healer (Chameleon), on which he was joined by Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana, Keith Richards, and other students. After that, he performed mostly at outdoor sheds and festivals, and the number of his appearances decreased as he become frail with age. In 1999, he opened his own club in San Francisco, John Lee Hooker’s Boom Boom Room. He had many ties to the New England area, from his decades of playing now-gone rooms like Jonathan Swift’s in Harvard Square and Boston’s Jazz Workshop; they included close friendships with Peter Wolf, pianist David Maxwell, and Leyasmeyer, who was himself a blues pianist before turning to booking.

In February, Leyasmeyer traveled to Los Altos to spend a few days as a guest in Hooker’s home. “John himself seemed a bit more frail and slower-moving than the last time I had seen him about a year before. His sense of humor was magni cent. He could make himself as well as the whole room laugh instantly by retelling a great story from the past or describing some new hilarious event. He was a born storyteller.

“John was completely generous with his hospitality — sel ess, encouraging, and gracious. He seemed completely unencumbered by the mundane in his life. He asked about my job, about our mutual friends in the music business and in Boston. We talked about song lyrics and old girlfriends. He radiated peace and quiet wisdom.”