Boogie Chillen

Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made.

The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty impressive for a song whose only percussion is Hooker’s foot stomping on a miked-up shipping pallet. When I was an ignorant teenager, I assumed that Hooker recorded this way because it’s how he was used to playing on his back porch in Mississippi. In fact, Hooker usually played with a band at the time, and he only recorded solo at the suggestion of his producer, the breathtakingly sleazy Bernie Besman.

In the first rap verse, Hooker says, “When I first come to town, people, I was walking down Hastings Street. I heard everybody talking about Henry’s Swing Club. I decided to drop in there the other night, and when I got there, [sings] I said yes people, they was really havin’ a ball.” Hooker had come to Detroit from Mississippi as part of the Great Migration, seeking economic opportunity. In other words, he was a refugee from Jim Crow. Hastings Street was in the Black Bottom/Paradise Valley neighborhood, the cultural center of Detroit’s Black community. It sounds like a happening place! In addition to Henry’s Swing Club and lots of other jazz venues, Hastings Street is also where Aretha Franklin’s father, Reverend CL Franklin, established his church.

Here is what’s missing from my romantic vision of Hastings Street. Within ten years of Hooker’s song being released, the city of Detroit obliterated the entire neighborhood and replaced it with highways and housing projects, under the (extremely racist) Housing Act of 1949 and the (also extremely racist) Highway Act of 1956. They did this because Black Bottom and Paradise Valley were ostensibly “slums.” I look at the archival photos at the link above, and I see a fine, thriving urban neighborhood with some older housing stock. Maybe there were rats and bugs, but there are rats and bugs in my very gentrified Brooklyn neighborhood too, and no one is ever going to bulldoze my block for a freeway. This same story has played out in Black neighborhoods across America. When people like me talk about structural racism, this is what we’re talking about.

Anyway, let’s talk more about the instrumental aspect of “Boogie Chillen.” If you are a guitarist and you’d like to learn the tune, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the left hand part is easy. You just tune your guitar in open G, put a capo on the 4th fret, and experiment. You can play most of the riffs with just your index finger. For the rest, try fingering a standard-tuning C chord. So that’s the good news. The bad news is that the right hand part is not easy at all. The groove isn’t complicated, exactly, but it is subtle, and it takes long practice and deep concentration to get it right.

The “Boogie Chillen” groove has been imitated many times by white blues and rock players. I probably first heard it in “On the Road Again” by Canned Heat.

This is weak sauce, but later on, Canned Heat did make a pretty good record with John Lee Hooker himself, and Hooker respected them as musicians.

You are more likely to have heard the Hooker boogie in “La Grange” by ZZ Top (along with some vocalizing copied from “Boom Boom.”)

“La Grange” has more drive to it than “On The Road Again”, but it practically thuds along compared to Hooker’s subtle bounce. I assume ZZ Top added all the chord and key changes to make their groove more “interesting,” but Hooker proves that a great groove is all the musical interest you need.

I said above that Bernie Besman was a sleazebag. This is because he gave himself a co-writer credit on “Boogie Chillen” and also retained all the publishing rights. This used to be a common practice, especially among white producers and managers working with Black artists. (This is why there are so many Duke Ellington songs “co-written” by Irving Mills.) I tell you this because in 1991, Besman sued ZZ Top for copyright infringement. They eventually settled with him out of court, and Hooker received… zero dollars. Remember what I said up there about structural racism? White musicians have certainly been screwed out of money too, but not so consistently or routinely as Black ones.

Anyway, here’s another example of the Hooker boogie that a Twitter commenter pointed out to me, “Know” by Nick Drake:

This doesn’t swing, but also isn’t trying to. Instead, Nick Drake is going for Hooker’s lonely, haunting quality.

I, by the way, am no position to judge any of the above artists. I appropriated the Hooker boogie myself, for an arrangement of “The Dust Blows Forward ‘N The Dust Blows Back” by Captain Beefheart that I did for Andy Friedman and the Other Failures. I played the Hooker groove on baritone guitar for extra menace. It slayed.

I would like to express my gratitude to John Lee Hooker by shining some musicological light on “Boogie Chillen” to learn why it’s so compelling. Here’s the track, annotated to show the form, and the various riffs and grooves that Hooker uses.

The form is loose, but not chaotic. Hooker moves back and forth between riffs and sections at will, and there’s an intriguing balance between predictable patterns and unpredictable outbursts.

I did my best to transcribe parts of the song into notation too:

The notation doesn’t get at the rhythmic nuances, which are, you know, the point, but at least it gives me something to point at. The basic groove is called a shuffle, a heavy swing feel in which the first eighth note in each pair (the onbeat) is twice as long as the second note in each pair (the offbeat). If you divide the extra-long onbeats in half, then you get eighth note triplets, the equivalent of 12/8 time. Hooker accentuates the 12/8 feel by playing a little ascending chromatic triplet figure at the end of each cycle through the main riff. He constantly points your attention to his offbeats by accenting them hard. In some places he doesn’t play the onbeats at all, but he keeps his foot tapping out steady quarter notes, so it’s easy to stay oriented in the groove.

If I had to sing you the groove, I’d sing “bup bap bap, bududuh bup bap bap, bududuh bup bap bap.” The “bup bap bap” is the downbeat, the accented “and” of one, and the accented “and” of two. The “bududuh” is the chromatic triplet run (C-sharp, D, D-sharp, or E, F, F-sharp). I’ve done my best to visualize this pattern with the Groove Pizza below. The kick drums represent Hooker’s foot. The hi-hats play the bup bap bap. The Groove Pizza doesn’t do triplets, so I just put some snare drums in to stand for the chord accents Hooker sometimes throws in.

Shuffle is only one possible variety of swing. You can describe swing numerically as a ratio between the length of the onbeats and the length of the offbeats. A ratio of 1:1 is perfectly straight, no swing at all. A ratio of 2:1 is the 12/8 shuffle feel. Current Black music and uptempo jazz styles usually keep the swing ratio between 1:1 and 2:1. At slower tempos, jazz musicians sometimes get to 3:1, and Tony Williams occasionally gets all the way to 4:1. Hooker mostly sticks to 2:1, but he sometimes uses a wider ratio, and sometimes a slightly narrower one. For example, in the opening few bars of “Boogie Chillen”, his swing is consistently wider than 2:1, so it feels laid-back. Under the rap about Henry’s Swing Club, the swing is a bit narrower than 2:1, so it feels more urgent.

Hooker varies the swing ratio much more dramatically in a few places. Check out the riff he plays starting in measure 29 (0:47), right before the line “I didn’t care what she didn’t allow, I would boogie-woogie anyhow” in the first verse. (He plays the same riff again in the second verse starting in measure 61 (1:38).) I would have naively guessed that this riff was played on triplets, but no. It’s the opposite of triplets–completely straight eighth notes! This section feels like triplets because the chords are in implied groups of three that create hemiola across the bar lines. I guess you could think of them as anti-triplets, binary divisions of the beat where you’re expecting ternary divisions. This is extremely hip rhythmic thinking! For an even more sophisticated bit of microrhythmic manipulation, check out the guitar solo starting in measure 71 (1:54). Each time Hooker goes through the high-pitched riff, he plays the eighth notes a little straighter, until they’re totally straight on the last pass. When I said that the groove is hard to play correctly, this is what I mean.

Fernando Benadon and Ted Gioia point out that Hooker consistently uses different sounds for his onbeats and his offbeats. The long onbeats are bass notes, often muted, played quietly with a thumb or sometimes not at all. The short offbeats are upper-register chords or melody notes, brushed harder with fingertips or fingernails so they sound brighter, louder and sharper. The onbeats and offbeats are so sonically and rhythmically distinct that they sound like two separate auditory streams, creating the illusion of two different guitarists alternating notes.

Harmonically, “Boogie Chillen” seems simple, but it’s a rich showcase for blues tonality. Most of the tune chugs along on B7. At the verses, like on the line “Well my mama didn’t ‘llow me”, it moves to E7… kind of. Hooker doesn’t finger all the notes in the chord every time, so sometimes it sounds more like B7sus4 or E7sus4. It’s all very ambiguous. Note that there are no F#7 chords anywhere in the tune, i.e., no V-I cadences. Sorry Schenkerians.

Hooker plays D natural near the bottom of both the B7 and E7 chords several times, and sometimes he bends it up a bit so it’s a neutral third. You can hear it especially clearly in the last beat of measure 28 (0:45), and in the last beat of measure 65 (1:44). In the guitar solo, the high-pitched riff alternates between two dyads: the higher one is D and B, and the lower one is B and G-sharp. Those three pitches form a B diminished triad, which call back to the “ladder of thirds” concept found in many world folk musics.

“Boogie Chillen” includes a couple of rap verses. Many John Lee Hooker songs do! Many blues singers of Hooker’s era included rap in their music. That doesn’t mean that they were making hip-hop; that didn’t come into existence until the 1970s. But rap as a musical technique long predates hip-hop. It appears in every form of music descending from the African diaspora. Here are a bunch of examples.

John Lee Hooker – “I’m Bad Like Jesse James” (1967)

Muddy Waters – “Long Distance Call” (1968) – listen at the end

Country

Hank Williams – “Men With Broken Hearts” (1957)

Charley Ryan – “Hot Rod Lincoln” (1957)

Lorne Greene – “Ringo” (1964)

Lester Flatt – “Drink That Mash And Talk That Trash” (1970)

Gospel

The Jubilaires – “Noah” (1946)

Bill Landford and The Landfordaires – “Run On For A Long Time” (1949)

Rock

Bo Diddley – “Say Man” (1959)

Lou Reed – “Walk on the Wild Side” (1972)

R&B/funk/soul

Pigmeat Markham – “Here Comes the Judge” (1968)

Gary Byrd – “Every Brother Ain’t A Brother” (1970)

Gil Scott-Heron – “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” (1970)

Lightnin’ Rod – “Sport” 1973

Jazz

Whiteys Lindy Hoppers – “Hellzapoppin'” (1941)

Louis Jordan – “You Gotta Have a Beat” (1940s)

Babs Gonzales – “House Rent Party” (1956)

Cannonball Adderley – “Mercy, Mercy, Mercy” (1966)

Folk

Woody Guthrie – “Talkin’ Blues” (1947)

Joan Baez – “Time Rag” (1977)

Rock

Grateful Dead – “Turn On Your Love Light” (1969)

War – “Spill The Wine” (1970)

Miscellaneous

Muhammad Ali – “I Am The Greatest” (1963)

Frankie Crocker rap (1967)

Leroi Jones – “Young Spirit House Movers and Players” (1968)

There are many more examples in this amazing YouTube playlist, though many of those are songs sung on one-note melodies. I don’t consider that to be rapping, it’s still singing even if there isn’t much melodic contour. (Rap often has wide melodic contour.) But I can see their point. I also am choosing not to include spoken word that doesn’t really follow the meter, even if it has a heightened, sing-speak feel to it. But the grey area is large. If you have more good examples, please add them in the comments.

Update: Wenatchee the Hatchet wrote a customarily thoughtful response post, and it includes this amazing Hooker recording that is new to me. It’s a fascinating application of his ambiguous/partial approach to chord playing to a very different kind of song. Check it out!