John Lee Hooker
| John Lee Hooker | |
|---|---|
Hooker performing at the Long Beach Blues Festival, Long Beach, California, August 31, 1997
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| Background information | |
| Born |
c. August 22, 1912 Tutwiler, Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, U.S. |
| Died | June 21, 2001 (believed to have been 88 years old) Los Altos, California, U.S. |
| Genres | Blues |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments |
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| Years active | 1943–2001 |
| Labels | |
John Lee Hooker (c. August 22, 1912 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi Hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie.
Some of his best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "Crawling King Snake" (1949), "Dimples" (1956), "Boom Boom" (1962), and "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer" (1966). Several of his later albums, including The Healer (1989), Mr. Lucky (1991), Chill Out (1995), and Don't Look Back (1997) were album chart successes in the U.S. and U.K., and Don't Look Back won a Grammy Award in 1998.
Hooker's date of birth is the subject of debate. He is believed to have been born in Tutwiler, in Tallahatchie County, Mississippi, although some sources say his birthplace was near Clarksdale, in Coahoma County, the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker (1871–after 1923), a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (born circa 1880, date of death unknown).
The Hooker children were home-schooled. Since they were only permitted to listen to religious songs, the spirituals sung in church were their earliest exposure to music. In 1921, his parents separated. The next year, his mother married William Moore, a blues singer, who provided Hooker with his introduction to the guitar (and whom John would later credit for his distinctive playing style). Moore was his first significant blues influence. He 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. Another formative influence was Tony Hollins, who dated Hooker's sister Alice, helped teach Hooker to play, and gave him his first guitar. For the rest of his life, Hooker regarded Hollins as a formative influence on his style of playing and his career as a musician. Among the songs that Hollins reputedly taught Hooker were versions of "Crawlin' King Snake" and "Catfish Blues".
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