John Lee Hooker Biography

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. Musically, Hooker was influenced by the guitar style of his stepfather, a local blues guitarist, who learned to play in Shreveport, Louisiana and played a droning, one-chord type of blues very different from the delta blues of the time. From a musical family, he is a cousin of Earl Hooker. He performed in a half-spoken style that became his trademark. Rhythmically, his music was free, a property common with early acoustic Delta blues musicians. His best known songs include "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom".

John Lee Hooker was born on 22 August 1917 in Coahoma County near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the youngest of the eleven children of William Hooker (1871–1923), a sharecropper and a Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (1875-?). He and his numerous siblings were only permitted to listen to religious songs, and so young John's earliest musical exposure was to the spirituals sung in church. In 1921 John's parents separated and the next year his mother married William Moore, a blues singer who provided his first introduction to the guitar (and whom he would later credit for his distinctive playing style). The next year John's father died and at age 15 he ran away from home; he would never see his mother and step-father again. Throughout the 1930s Hooker lived in Memphis where he worked on Beale Street and occasionally performed at house parties. He worked in factories in various cities during WWII as he drifted around until he found himself in Detroit in 1948 working at Ford Motor Company. He felt right at home near the blues venues and saloons on Hastings Street, the heart of black entertainment on Detroit's east side. Here guitar players were scarce in a city noted for its piano players. His quickly growing popularily as a performer in Detroit's clubs made necessary a louder instrument than his crude guitar, so he bought his first electric guitar.

Hooker's recording career began in 1948 when a demo tape made by Hooker was placed by his agent with the Bihari brothers on their Modern Records label. The company put out an up-tempo number, "Boogie Chillen", as the first release, resulting in Hooker's first hit single.

Despite being illiterate, he was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting the occasionally traditional blues lyric (such as "if I was chief of police, I would run her right out of town"), he freely invented many of his songs from scratch. Recording studios in the 50s rarely paid black musicians more than a pittance, so Hooker would spend the night wandering from studio to studio, coming up with new songs or variations on his songs for each studio. Due to his recording contract, he would record these songs under obvious pseudonyms such as "John Lee Booker," "Johnny Hooker," or "John Cooker."

His early solo songs were recorded under Bernie Besman. John Lee Hooker rarely played on a standard beat, changing tempo to fit the needs of the song. This made it nearly impossible to add backing tracks. As a result, Besman would record Hooker, in addition to playing guitar and singing, stomping along with the music on a wooden palette.

He appeared and sang in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. Due to Hooker's improvisatory style, his performance was filmed and sound-recorded live at Chicago's Maxwell Street Market, in contrast to the usual "playback" technique used in most film musicals. Hooker was also a direct influence in the look of John Belushi's character Jake Blues, borrowing his trademark sunglasses and soul patch.

In 1989 he joined with a number of musicians, including Keith Richards and Carlos Santana to record The Healer, which won a Grammy award — one of many awards. Hooker recorded several songs with Van Morrison, including "Never Get Out of These Blues Alive", "The Healing Game" and "I Cover the Waterfront". He also appeared on stage with Van Morrison several times, some of which was released on the live album "A Night in San Francisco".

Hooker recorded over 100 albums. He lived the last years of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area, where, in 1997, he opened a nightclub called "John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom Room", after one of his hits.

He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died soon afterwards at the age of 83. He was survived by eight children, nineteen grandchildren, numerous great-grandchildren and a nephew.

Among his many awards, John Lee Hooker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1991 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom" were named to the list of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. "Boogie Chillen" was included as one of the Songs of the Century. He was also inducted in 1980 into the Blues Hall of Fame.

John Lee Hooker's guitar playing is closely aligned with piano Boogie Woogie. He would play the walking bass pattern with his thumb, stopping to emphasize the end of a line with a series of trills, done by rapid hammer-ons and pull-offs. The songs that most epitomize his early sound are "Boogie Chillen," about being 17 and wanting to go out to dance at the Boogie clubs, "Baby Please Don't Go," a more typical blues song, summed up by its title, and "Tupelo," a stunningly sad song about the flooding of Tupelo, Mississippi.

He maintained a solo career, popular with blues and folk music fans of the early 1960s and crossed over to white audiences, giving an early opportunity to the young Bob Dylan. As he got older, he added more and more people to his band, changing his live show from simply Hooker with his guitar to a large band, with Hooker singing.

His vocal phrasing was less closely tied to specific bars than most blues singers'. This casual, rambling style had been gradually diminishing with the onset of electric blues bands from Chicago but, even when not playing solo, Hooker retained it in his sound.

Though Hooker lived in Detroit during most his career, he is not associated with the Chicago-style blues prevelant in large northern cities, as much as he is with the southern rural blues styles, known as delta blues, country blues, folk blues, or "front porch blues". His use of an electric guitar tied together the Delta blues with the emerging post-war electric blues.

His songs have been covered by Led Zeppelin, The Yardbirds, The Animals, R.L. Burnside, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.