John Lee Hooker

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Coahoma County, Mississippi (1917 – 2001)

John Lee Hooker (Coahoma County, Mississippi, August 22, 1917 – Los Altos, California, June 21, 2001) was an influential American post-war singer, guitarist, and .

John Lee Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the , often incorporating the piano style and a driving rhythm into his masterful and idiosyncratic blues guitar and singing. His best known songs include “Boogie Chillen” (1948) and “Boom Boom” (1962).

Hooker was the youngest of the eleven children of William Hooker (1871–1923), a sharecropper and a Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (1875–?).

Hooker and his siblings were home-schooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs, with his earliest musical 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 John’s first introduction to the guitar (and whom John would later credit for his distinctive playing style). The year after that (1923), John’s natural father died; and at age 15, John ran away from home, never to see his mother and stepfather again.

He was a cousin of Earl Hooker,

Throughout the 1930s, Hooker lived in Memphis where he worked on Beale Street 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 Detroit’s east side. In a city noted for its piano players, guitar players were scarce.
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