Wealth & Money Quote by John Lee Hooker

There is a swagger here, but it is the hard-earned kind: freedom framed not as luxury, but as refusal. Hooker isn’t merely bragging about wealth; he’s staking a claim to autonomy after a lifetime in a music economy built to deny Black artists exactly that. “Two lifetimes” lands like a blues exaggeration - tall tale as armor - yet the punchline is quiet and blunt: “so I don’t have to do nothing I don’t want to.” Money is just the tool. The real prize is veto power.

The grammar matters. Hooker’s double negatives and plainspoken cadence aren’t accidental roughness; they’re a statement of voice. He keeps it in the vernacular, where blues lives: unvarnished, uncredentialed, unbowed. That phrasing also makes the line feel less like a financial report and more like a boundary set in real time, face-to-face, to someone asking for another tour, another compromise, another polite performance of gratitude.

Context sharpens the edge. Hooker came up through sharecropping country, Detroit factory life, and decades of record-industry extraction where publishing, royalties, and credit were routinely siphoned away. By the time later-career acclaim and steadier checks arrived, the boast becomes a corrective: a man who was underpaid for the soundtrack of American cool finally insisting that his labor no longer belongs to anyone else’s schedule.

It’s a capitalist sentence with an anti-capitalist soul: I’ve bought my way out of being bought.