John Lee Hooker - Long Beach Music Festival, August 31, 1997
John Lee Hooker born on August 22, 1917 was a highly influential American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist.
The youngest of eleven children He began his life as the son of a sharecropper, and Baptist preacher 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. John Lee 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.
Hooker’s recording career began in 1948 with the release an up-tempo number, “Boogie Chillen'”, which became his first hit single followed by “I’m in the Mood” (1951) and later “Boom Boom” (1962), the first two reaching R&B #1 in the Billboard charts.
Despite being illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting the occasionally traditional blues lyric , he freely invented many of his songs from scratch.
John Lee rarely played on a standard beat, changing tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians who were not accustomed to Hooker’s musical vagaries.
He appeared and sang in the 1980 movie The Blues Brothers. Hooker was also a direct influence in the look of John Belushi’s character Jake Blues.
In 1989, he joined with a number of musicians, including Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt to record The Healer, for which he and Santana won a Grammy Award. Hooker also recorded several songs with Van Morrison,
John Lee Hooker recorded over 100 albums.
Among his many awards, Hooker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He was inducted in 1980 into the Blues Hall 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 included in 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.
In 2000, Hooker was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.
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.
Source: Wikipedia
