Creativity Quote by John Lee Hooker

Baked into that offhand brag is an entire survival manual for Black musicians in the mid-century recording business. Hooker’s grammar keeps the line rooted in spoken truth, not polished autobiography: “they was goin’ to cheat you anyway” lands like something everybody in the room already knows. No outrage, no pleading for fairness - just a clear-eyed diagnosis of an industry built to extract value from a sound while denying the person who made it.

The tactic he describes - recording “under any name with all of ’em” - is both hustle and protest. Blues has always traded in masks and aliases, but here the disguise isn’t romance; it’s leverage. Labels locked artists into exploitative contracts, paid pennies, skimmed publishing, and controlled distribution. Hooker flips the script by becoming uncontainable: if the deal is rigged, he’ll treat identity as fluid and loyalty as optional. The subtext is a moral inversion: the “cheating” isn’t his; it’s the system’s. He’s simply refusing to play the role of the grateful, easily managed talent.

It also hints at the way Hooker’s sound functioned like currency. His boogie groove was in demand, and demand creates room to maneuver - even if the maneuver is shadowboxing with paperwork. The line works because it refuses victimhood without denying harm. It’s pride sharpened into strategy, the artist as outlaw not for the myth, but for the paycheck.