About John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1917 – June 21, 2001)
was an influential American post-war blues singer, guitarist,
and songwriter born in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi.
From a musical family, he was a cousin of Earl Hooker. John
was also influenced by his stepfather, a local blues guitarist,
who learned in Shreveport, Louisiana to play a droning,
one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta
blues of the time. John developed a half-spoken style that
was his trademark. Though, similar to the early Delta blues,
his music was rhythmically free. His best known songs include
"Boogie Chillen" (1948) and "Boom Boom"
(1962).
John Lee Hooker Quotes
* "It don't take me no three days to record no album."
(during the recording of the double album Hooker 'N
Heat with Canned Heat.)
* "I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want
to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean
licks."
John Lee Hooker
Blues musician whose career spanned six decades -
Blues giant whose raw voice and singular guitar bridged
generations
by Tony Russell, June 22 & 23, 2001
In the long history of the blues there has been no figure
more singular than John Lee Hooker, who has died aged 83.
Where other singers rhymed, he sang in blank verse; where
other guitarists might skip through the changes, he would
play entire songs on one or two chords; and where other
blues veterans were fortunate to be rediscovered once, he
bounced repeatedly from obscurity back into the limelight.
For most African-American musicians of Hooker's generation,
to title an album Mr Lucky would be to exercise at least
a little irony, but he did enjoy more strokes of good fortune
than usually come a bluesman's way. That he could draw about
him, even in old age, a crowd of admiring fellow musicians
and would-be collaborators was largely due to the hypnotic
effect of his music, to the mantra-like chanting over the
relentlessly repetitive beat of guitar and foot, which absorbs
listeners into a huge heartbeat. Those qualities were evident
in his first hit, Boogie Chillen (1948), an apparently impromptu
synthesis of spoken narrative and sung verses with abrupt
gear-changes on the guitar. Such structural wilfulness was
not uncommon among the blues musicians of the 1920s and
30s, but for much of his life Hooker was exceptional, "the
last," as Ry Cooder called him, "of
those unstructured, free players."
So popular did he become after the success of Boogie
Chillen that Hooker briefly turned into a multiple
personality, recording for half a dozen labels under as
many pseudonyms: Texas Slim, Delta John, Johnny Williams,
Birmingham Sam & His Magic Guitar. He was based in Detroit,
where he had moved in 1943, working during the day as a
janitor at Dodge Motors or Comco Steel, and at night playing
in nightclubs. He managed to preserve a good deal of vagueness
about his early life, whether in Clarksdale, Mississippi,
where he was born into a family of 11 children, or in Memphis
and Cincinnati, where he spent his teens. In Clarksdale
his stepfather taught him guitar, including the open G tuning
he would employ to such resonant effect. He also listened
attentively to the obscure Mississippi bluesman Tony Hollins,
from whom he derived one of his early successes, Crawling
King Snake, but most of his highly personal conception of
blues-singing and playing appears to have come from within
him. I'm In The Mood, a characteristically skewed reconstruction
of the pop song I'm In The Mood For Love, gave him another
hit in 1951, but the day of the solo bluesman was passing.
In 1955 he signed with a new label, the Chicago-based Vee
Jay Records, and began to work with small backing
groups. The other musicians flattened his more baroque rhythmic
contours and some of the hectic excitement was lost, but
the success of Dimples (1956) proved the
change of setting was commercially astute. While maintaining
his name in the ghetto record-stores he also, exceptionally,
developed a parallel career as a "folk blues"
artist, playing without amplification and recalling songs
from an earlier, more rural era of the blues. "I have
created about three fields," he would say proudly.
"A folk field, a blues field, and a jump field for
the kids. If it was necessary I could do hillbilly stuff".
Such dexterity enabled him, in the early 60s, both to perform
at the Newport Folk Festival and to have a hit in the rhythm
'n' blues chart with Boom Boom, which entered the British
top 20 in 1964 and made possible a succession of UK tours.
By the late 60s the folk-blues bubble had burst and Hooker's
audiences were now almost entirely white. In the 70s he
collaborated with Canned Heat and Van Morrison, and in 1980
he made a celebrated cameo appearance as a street musician
in the film The Blues Brothers. But by then he seemed to
have wearied of touring and recording, and when the near-silence
prolonged itself through the 80s it was assumed he had retired.
It was the guitarist Roy Rogers and Hooker's manager Mike
Kappus who reactivated his career, pairing him with a variety
of artists including Robert
Cray, Los
Lobos and Bonnie Raitt. The result, The Healer (1989),
became the best-selling blues album ever, and Mr Lucky (1991)
repeated the twinning format with Cooder, Morrison and Keith
Richards. The years seemed to have added potency to his
other resource, the dark, sombre instrument of his voice.
"That deep, well-like sound," Cooder called it,
while for Raitt it was "one of the saddest things I've
ever heard."
By now as nearly a household name as a blues artist is ever
permitted to be, Hooker was sought by film-makers to add
an indigo shade to their soundtracks and by advertisers
to fix his stamp upon brands. He even exploited himself,
opening a music club in San Francisco, the Boom Boom Room.
Enjoying his prosperity, he now worked only when he chose,
but when he did sit down on a stage with his guitar he wove
much of his old spell. Though he had been lauded in the
70s as a matchless exponent of the boogie beat, he cared
more about telling a story. "Every song I sing,"
he said, "is something that happened to my life or
somebody else's life in this world. You might lose your
money or your car, or can't pay the rent - every person
has had these heartaches and tribulations. That's why everybody
digs the blues. When I sing these songs I feel them down
deep and reach you down deep". Hooker is survived by
his fourth wife, Millie, and by six children from his previous
marriages, including musicians Zakiya and Robert.
• John Lee Hooker, blues musician, born August 22
1917; died June 21 2001.
