I can remember first hearing Blues music during the minor revival of interest in the mid-seventies, just before the Punk Rock explosion. However, there weren’t many clubs playing it, except for coffee houses playing some folk blues, and the occasional house band that played Chicago-style electric blues.

The only other time you got to hear the Blues was the occasional concert by someone like B. B. King, or at folk festivals where they'd bring out some acoustic Blues player who had authenticity and not much else going for him. Worst of all were the times the rich rock stars would feel guilty about not giving back to where it all started.

They'd haul out someone like Lighting Hopkins on stage to sing a couple of songs and that would be it. Everybody would clap and cheer and the rock star would go off in his big limo to whatever fancy hotel he was staying in, and the blues musician would go off to whatever cheap hotel he was living in. Okay, so that's probably a little bit of an exaggeration, but I would get the feeling that something really important was being allowed to fall by the wayside.

Since that time, there has obviously been another resurgence of interest in the blues. Perhaps it was the emergence into prominence of players like Bonnie Raitt followed by the success of movies like Oh Brother Where Art Thou? that brought about the increased popularity of traditional music. When that was combined with the inevitable backlash against the ever-increasing reliance on technology by so many contemporary performers the 1980s and 90s, times were ripe for a renaissance of what we now call roots music.

Fortunately, there were still some of the original players around who could finally cash in on their talents and newfound popularity. For the Black musician in the 1950s, making money from the music you wrote was fraught with difficulties (like discovering the record deal you signed also sold your ownership of all the material recorded – meaning you never received a penny in royalties) and so many of them fell by the wayside, victims of poverty and despair.

One of those who made it and managed to have a successful second career was John Lee Hooker. John Lee was born anywhere between 1912 and 1917, which is a huge difference but also reflects the carelessness with which records were kept for Black people in the South. At best, births would be registered at baptism, but with illiteracy being commonplace, it was rare for written records to be kept of anything.

His early years sound like the songs he sings; he was the son of a sharecropper and part time preacher with ten brothers and sisters. When his parents split up in 1926, he stayed on with his mother and it was his stepfather taught him guitar, especially the blues.