John Lee Hooker Boogie Man - Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American 20th Century

(2000/PENGUIN) Paperback, English, 536 pages. last copies!

`A towering monument to a remarkable 60-year career ... John Lee Hooker is our last surviving link with the birth of the blues. Now in his 80s, he has waited some time for a biographer to tell his long and, unusually for an old Mississippi bluesman, happy story. Murray performs that task, and many more besides, with gusto' Robert Sandall, Sunday Times Books of the Year
`The story of a major American cultural icon - a link to an unimaginably distant past, and a completely unique figure in popular music history - brilliantly told' Ed Ward, Mojo
`A pure delight ... Long conversational exchanges with Hooker and his associates are hilarious, touching and enlightening' Neil McCormick, Daily Telegraph Books of the Year
`The living legend gets the book he deserves ... Murray brilliantly paints a portrait of someone who may have his foibles, but comes across as being 4 Real in pretty much every way imaginable.' Clark Collis, Q

John Lee Hooker

After nomadically label-hopping for the first seven years of his astonishingly prolific recording career, Mississippi Delta émigré John Lee Hooker settled into a relatively exclusive relationship with Chicago’s Vee-Jay Records in 1955. Things had changed dramatically on the R&B front since 1949; no longer would a haunting solo blues piece like the Hook’s Boogie Chillen (it’s on BCD 16921, Disc One) find its way to the top of the charts now that rock 'n' roll had captured the teenage demographic.

Still, there remained a solid southern market for blues, and John Lee was happy to help fill it on Vee-Jay through 1964 (granted, there were dalliances with a number of other labels during that span). His first Vee-Jay date, conducted in Chicago in October of ’55, found him in the company of labelmate Jimmy Reed, guitarist Eddie Taylor (a steadying presence for both Reed and Hooker whenever they entered the studio), bassist George Washington, and drummer Tom Whitehead, who had been playing sessions with the Boogie Man since 1953 and clearly knew the territory.

Reed was absent for Hooker’s Vee-Jay encore session, held March 27, 1956, but the rhythm section remained constant. Among the enduring gems laid down that day was the rollicking Dimples, a standard in John Lee’s repertoire from then on. He’s listed as writing it with Jimmy Bracken, the co-owner of Vee-Jay. Hooker was fretting an electric guitar instead of the acoustic he used on his first Detroit sessions (ironically, he’d have to retrieve it when the folk-blues trend hit).

Hooker’s Vee-Jay stint produced some of the most polished recordings he ever made, thanks to stellar musicianship by Taylor and his comrades, who seemed to cope with Hooker’s erratic timing better than just about anyone else he’d recorded with. At the end of 1958, John Lee would find his way back onto the R&B charts for the first time in more than seven years with I Love You Honey. He scored nationally again in 1960 with No Shoes. But as it turned out, the John Lee Hooker story was just getting underway.

Bill Dahl
Chicago, Illinois

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