John Lee Hooker was born 97 years ago today. A highly influential blues singer-songwriter and guitarist, Hooker began his life as the son of a sharecropper, William Hooker, and rose to prominence performing his own unique style of what was originally a unique brand of country blues. He developed a talking blues style that was his trademark. Though similar to the early Delta blues, his music was metrically free. Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the blues, often incorporating the boogie-woogie piano style and a driving rhythm into his blues guitar playing and singing. His best known songs include Boogie Chillen (1948), Im in the Mood (1951) and Boom Boom (1962), the first two reaching R&B #1 in the Billboard charts. There is some debate as to the year of Hookers birth in Coahoma County, Mississippi. But according to his official website, he was born on August 22, 1917. Hooker and his siblings were home-schooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs, with his earliest exposure being the spirituals sung in church. In 1921, his parents separated. The next year, his mother married William Moore, a blues singer who provided Hooker with his first introduction to the guitar (and whom John would later credit for his distinctive playing style). Johns stepfather was his first outstanding blues influence. William Moore was 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. Around 1923 his natural father died. At the age of 15, John Lee Hooker ran away from home, reportedly never seeing his mother or stepfather again. Throughout the 1930s, Hooker lived in Memphis where he worked on Beale Street at The New Daisy Theatre and occasionally performed at house parties. He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, drifting 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 Detroits east side. In a city noted for its pianists, guitar players were scarce. Performing in Detroit clubs, his popularity grew quickly and, seeking a louder instrument than his crude acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar. Hookers recording career began in 1948 when his agent placed a demo, made by Hooker, with the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern Records label. The company initially released an up-tempo number, Boogie Chillen’,” which became Hookers first hit single. Though they were not songwriters, the Biharis often purchased or claimed co-authorship of songs that appeared on their labels, thus securing songwriting royalties for themselves, in addition to their own streams of income. Despite being illiterate, Hooker 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 1950s 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. Because of his recording contract, he would record these songs under obvious pseudonyms such as John Lee Booker, notably for Chess Records and Chance Records in 1951/52, as Johnny Lee for De Luxe Records in 1953/54 as John Lee, and even John Lee Cooker, or as Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams or The Boogie Man. In 1989, he joined with a number of musicians, including Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt, to record The Healer. 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. The same year he appeared as the title character on Pete Townshends The Iron Man: A Musical. Hooker recorded over 100 albums. He lived the last years of his life in Long Beach, California. In 1997, he opened a nightclub in San Franciscos Fillmore District called John Lee Hookers Boom Boom Room,” after one of his hits. He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died on June 21 at the age of 83, two months before his 84th birthday. He was survived by eight children, nineteen grandchildren, eighteen great-grandchildren, a nephew and fiance Sidora Dazi. Here, Hooker performs “Boom, Boom, Boom” in the early 1960s.
Posted on: Fri, 22 Aug 2014 09:33:53 +0000