People, Locations, Episodes

John Lee Hooker, Boogie Blues Musician born

*On this date in 1917, John Lee Hooker was born. He was a Black blues singer and pioneer of the art form.

The Hook (as he is sometimes called) was a Clarkdale, Mississippi native.  He was the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker, a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey.  His stepfather, Will Moore, planted the beginnings for his eerily mournful guitar sound while John Lee was in his teens.  Hooker had sung spirituals before that, but the blues took hold and never let go.  Traditional symbols left their mark on the style in youth; legends like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and Blind Blake all knew Moore.

Hooker tried out Memphis while still in his teens but couldn't gain much of a foothold there.  So he relocated to Cincinnati for seven years before moving to Detroit in 1943.  There he became one of the best on the Detroit blues circuit following World War II. Work was plentiful, but Hooker drifted away from day gigs to play his unique free-form brand of blues.  A mushrooming club scene along Hastings Street played in favor of his talents.  In 1948, an aspiring Hooker with entrepreneur Bernie Besman helped him produce his solo debut releases, Sally Mae and Boogie Chillen.

This was blues as primitive as anything then on the market; only his ringing, heavily amplified guitar and insistently pounding foot backed Hooker’s dark, ruminative vocals. The rest was history in the making, with recordings with Canned Heat, Bonnie Raitt, and classic solo albums ongoing Hooker keeps boogieing on.  He was beloved worldwide as the king of the endless boogie, a genuine blues superstar whose droning, hypnotic one-chord grooves are ultra-primitive and timeless. John Lee Hooker has recorded in many more styles than that over a career that stretched back more than half a century.

In his later years, he did some advertising for television and played in club settings mainly, usually dropping in unannounced.  John Lee Hooker lived in Long Beach, California, and died on June 21, 2001.

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