Johnny Lee Hooker
| John Lee Hooker | |
|---|---|
Hooker performing at the Long Beach Blues Festival, Long Beach, California, August 31, 1997
|
|
| 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 |
| Genres | Blues |
| Occupation(s) | Musician |
| Instruments |
|
| 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 a subject of debate. It is believed that he was born in Tutwiler, Mississippi, in Tallahatchie County, although some sources say his birthplace was near Clarksdale, in Coahoma County. He was the youngest of the 11 children of William Hooker (born 1871, died after 1923), a sharecropper and Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (born c. 1880, date of death unknown). In the 1920 federal census, William and Minnie were recorded as being 48 and 39 years old, respectively, which implies that Minnie was born about 1880, not 1875. She was said to have been a "decade or so younger" than her husband (Boogie Man, p. 23), which gives additional credibility to this census record as evidence of Hooker's origins.</ref>
...
Wikipedia