On this day in 1917, John Lee Hooker was born in Mississippi, a sharecropper's son, and thirty-one years later he sat down in a Detroit room and made "Boogie Chillen'" — a national hit built out of one man, one electric guitar and one foot. Bernard Besman produced and engineered those sides, and the story goes that the percussion was Hooker's shoe on a board with a microphone aimed at it. Cheapest rhythm section in the business. Never late, never asked for a monitor mix, never once dropped a stick.
What I love is that it isn't a trick, it's the whole architecture. That boogie of his doesn't come from the piano boogie-woogie of the thirties; it comes from a man keeping time with his own body and letting the bar be as long as the bar needs to be. Bass players, you know the feeling — you count him in and he arrives when he arrives, and he's right.
In the photograph below, the red-burst hollow-body in its case and, on the wall, that orange poster for the Battle of the Blues at Club Paradise. Small rooms, loud nights, and a shoe on a board still going in the background of everything.
Otis, he turns up on screen too: in The Blues Brothers, 1980, playing on a Maxwell Street stoop while the market goes on around him. Most bit players in a picture that size get eight seconds and no name, and he simply plays, and the camera has the sense to hold still.
Otis, a plank that never asks for a monitor mix is worth two drummers. My favourite thing about a foot-and-board rhythm section: it tunes itself, and it fits in the boot.