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component parts: Cupp is commencing a new day job the following Monday and thus will travel back to San Francisco with the band, but since Hooker has a few days’ business in New York City,
Lizz Fischer has been asked to stay on in order to keep him company. New to the organisation and unfamiliar with its ways, she is a trifle concerned. Naturally, she is thrilled, but nevertheless
she worries about exactly what such companionship will entail and what she might be expected to . . . umm . . . Just a few minutes ahead of the relentless downpour which will, the following
day, have the flood warnings out on every radio station, John LeeHooker rolls into Manhattan in a long black limousine. He will give a handful of interviews and, in a week of
hurricanes, celebrate what he will claim to be his 71st birthday.
    ‘When I die, they’ll bury the blues with me,’ he states proudly to a well-wisher at the exit. ‘But the blues will never die.’

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    BLUEBIRD, BLUEBIRD, TAKE A LETTER DOWN SOUTH FOR ME
    In my mind, music is made by those whom music saves. Jimi Hendrix could not have done anything else with himself. John Lee Hooker, what else is he going to do? Work at
     McDonalds?
    Henry Rollins, interviewed in Rolling Stone
    Alabama’s got me so upset
    Tennessee made me lose my rest
    And everybody knows about Mississippi . . .
    Goddam!
    Nina Simone, from Mississippi Goddam
    I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.
    John Lee Hooker,
interviewed in Melody Maker , October 1964
    So how you gonna keep ’em down on the farm once they’ve seen the big city? Some people just can’t wait to get out of the country, feel some pavement under
their feet, scrape the mud off their boots and morph, as smoothly as possible, into urban slickers ready to parade their new-found sophistication at the expense of the rubes fresh offthe latest bus from down home. Every big city is full of people from the sticks or the ’burbs who’ve taken on urban coloration like so many concrete chameleons, shedding
their country skins, going native on Broadway or in Hollywood, pumped and cranked all the way up, and primed to mud-wrestle the locals for that big-town pay-cheque. For others, the basic fact of
who they are changes not one iota no matter where they may find themselves.
    John Lee Hooker left the Mississippi Delta whilst still in the turbulence of adolescence. Nevertheless, Mississippi never left him. Though he’s lived in major conurbations – first
Cincinnati, then Detroit, then Oakland, California, and finally the suburbs of the San Francisco Bay Area – ever since reaching his late teens, he remains a quintessential man of the Delta.
His slow, deliberate drawl has never revved itself up to city speed. His manners are still country-courtly. His fondness for traditional Southern food remains unaffected by the temptations of any
exotic delicacies from Europe, Asia or, come to that, anywhere else you could name. He’s seen it all and he’s not terribly impressed, but he’s far too much the country gentleman
to give offence.
    The Delta formed his voice, and he in turn became the voice of the Delta: the very incarnation of the traditional culture of its African diaspora; a king in voluntary exile. However, the
suggestion that ‘Mississippi made him’ would be an outrageous oversimplification. There is only so much for which purely sociological heredity-and-environment hypotheses will account;
there is no process, no set of circumstances, which can truly be said to ‘explain’ John Lee Hooker. We can certainly state without fear of significant contradiction that the
‘environment’ of the Mississippi Delta not only produced considerably more than its fair share of blues singers, but was most probably the spawning ground of the primal blues from which
all the different varieties of blues-as-we-know-it ultimately derived. The