Joe Von Battle, the store’s owner, also ran JVB Records at the same site with a hole-in-the-wall recording studio in the back room. Sonny showed me some vintage shots from his collection of himself with Hooker on Hastings Street and inside Joe’s Record Shop, a Black Bottom fixture Sonny describes as “the headquarters for Detroit blues.” I made extra money by going to the blues clubs and taking Polaroid pictures of the people and musicians there and selling them.” “When I moved to Detroit in 1953, I worked at a used car lot. “I first heard Hooker’s music at the juke joints in Alabama when I was about 14 or 15,” Sonny says. During the late 1960s, Sonny recorded three albums with Stax Records, including his most famous release, New King of the Blues Harmonica. He once covered a show for Little Walter, who was too drunk to get onstage. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Howlin’ Wolf. Sonny led his own blues band and performed with Hooker and visiting artists like B.B. Sonny’s basement is a virtual blues museum, filled with photos, colorful posters, record contracts and other memorabilia spanning his 56-year career. I met Little Sonny at his home in the Conant Gardens area of Detroit, about three miles north of the section where Hooker once performed. “He was a nice guy – just a regular country boy.” “John Lee and I were pretty good friends,” says harmonica player Aaron “Little Sonny” Willis, one of the few remaining locals who performed with Hooker. To begin my journey, I sought out Detroit-area blues musicians who knew Hooker personally. If you search hard enough, you can still find places echoing with the treasured chords and foot stomps from the bluesman’s past. An array of musicians – from Eric Clapton and Bonnie Raitt to the Cowboy Junkies and Laughing Hyenas – have covered his songs, yet, for all the artists who have walked in Hooker’s footsteps musically, it’s not easy to retrace his path physically in present-day Detroit. Hooker left Detroit for San Francisco in 1970, and he continued “doin’ the boogie” until he died in 2001 at age 83. Most of the musicians who were on the scene in Hooker’s heyday have died. Sensation, Fortune and the other record companies that issued some of Hooker’s earliest 78s have long been out of business. The spot where Hooker’s home once stood is now an empty, weed-choked lot. Henry’s Swing Club was razed around 1960 – as were most of the bars, restaurants, shoeshine parlors and other businesses that made up the neighborhood – to make way for the Chrysler Freeway. I set out to visit as many of Hooker’s Detroit haunts as possible, but discovered that, at least in Black Bottom, the party ended years ago. Its message – a constant theme throughout Hooker’s long career – was to cut loose, shake and shimmy like the party would never end. It shot to the top of the national Rhythm and Blues chart in early 1949 and resounded in bars across Black Bottom and in urban centers across the country. With notes rolling like thick syrup, barking rhythmic chords and a heavy foot stomp, Boogie Chillen and its hypnotic drone resonated with the masses. ‘Yes, people, yes’, they was really having a ball, I heard everybody talking about Henry’s Swing Club, One of them, an electrifying, infectious performance, contained references to various Black Bottom landmarks: Hooker was entering Detroit’s United Sound Systems to lay down his first professionally recorded tracks. After recording a handful of crude demos, he finally got his break. Word had gotten out about Hooker’s performances – a distinct form of primitive Delta blues mixed with a driving electric rhythm. In the evenings, he would exchange his mop and broom for an Epiphone Zephyr to play rent parties and clubs throughout Black Bottom, Detroit’s thriving black community on the near east side. For five years he had been toiling as a janitor in Detroit auto and steel plants. Like many Delta blues musicians of that time, Hooker had moved north to pursue his music, and he was paying the bills through factory work. In September 1948, John Lee Hooker strummed the chord that ignited the endless boogie. © Jacques Demêtre / Soul Bag ArchivesĬhasing the Echoes: In Search of John Lee Hooker’s Detroit John Lee Hooker on Hastings Street, Detroit, 1959.
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