#377 - John Lee Hooker - The Ultimate Collection 1948-1990 (1991)

MUSIC HISTORY WRITTEN BY HEAD WRITER DJ MORTY COYLE:

Released in 1991 on Rhino Records this is a comprehensive compilation of songs recorded between 1948 and 1990 by the American Blues artist and songwriter.

John Lee Hooker was born the youngest of eleven children in Tutwiler, Tallahatchie County near Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1917.

His father was a sharecropper and a Baptist minister and the homeschooled children were forbidden to listen to any secular music outside of the church.

However when he was young he’d watch and listen to a Blues musician boyfriend of his sister’s who eventually gave him his guitar and taught him some songs.

A few years later his parents separated and then his mother married William Moore, a popular, local, Delta Blues entertainer who was friends and played with Blues pioneers like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, and Charlie Patton.

Now I’m gonna get into the weeds for just a minute for musical context:

At that point Mississippi Blues was based on the 12-bar structure with specific chord progressions and common rhythms and routinely played with a glass bottleneck on the third finger of the fretboard hand to produce an exciting slide sound (which I will absolutely not emulate after my Toots and the Maytals debacle).

Will Moore avoided this conventional Delta style and instead played more of a barebones, churning drone on one chord, using the dynamics of volume as his changes.

As he was originally from Shreveport the Louisiana Blues he brought with him had more in common with the hypnotic, ancestral, African rhythms of the slaves.

This was due to less containment and suppression of their traditional music by the white slaveowners in Louisiana compared to Mississippi. While they both had it terrible, in Mississippi the slaveowners were also paranoid that the rhythms might contain some kind of code that would incite a rebellion so they did their best to shut them down.

This was that distinctive style of playing that Moore taught John Lee.

By his early teens Hooker ran away from home and his folks and was soon in Memphis where he hung out and played house parties and on the streets with the next generation of Blues greats like Robert Nighthawk, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters.

Although John Lee was illiterate he was a prolific lyricist and adapted an extemporaneous, singing, narrative style with spoken ad-libs.

He kept the timing loose too by singing wherever it felt right and he mastered a primitive playing style where he would often center on one chord, playing the bass strings with his thumb while picking out the melodies with his fingers.

This inconsistent style made it difficult for other musicians to accompany him.

By 1943 after a few years in Cincinnati he moved to Detroit, Michigan, got his first electric guitar, and worked as a janitor at Ford while becoming popular on the Blues scene.

A small time manager named Elmer Barbara discovered him and for the next few years had him record demos of everything he wrote and knew.

In 1948 Hooker went to the office of record label/record store owner, the Russian Jewish Bernard Besman and played him some of those demos. Impressed, Besman set up Hooker’s first session.

That session’s recording was leased to a Los Angeles label for distribution and it sold a million copies.

They continued their working relationship and success despite Hooker’s objections that Besman would add his name as co-writer to Hooker’s solo compositions and therefore part of the publishing rights, a common practice for non-creative record company executives of that and future eras.

He continued to record for various labels and tour while evolving his style into his more familiar Chicago-style South Side Shuffle and later added guitarist Eddie Kirkland.

…Obviously there’s more but we’ll get into that in a bit.

For over 50 years he released dozens of studio albums and so many compilations and reissues.

A testament to his legend were all the artists that wanted to play and record with him including Van Morrison, The Doors, Keith Richards, Steve Miller, Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, B.B. King, Ben Harper, and Charlie Musselwhite.

He won multiple Grammys including the Lifetime Achievement Award, was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1991, and the Michigan Rock and Roll Legends Hall of Fame in 2007, and he has a star on Hollywood Boulevard.

In June of 2001 John Lee Hooker passed away in his sleep.