BMA Music Review: John Lee Hooker - Hooker

John Lee Hooker's life is in many ways the stereotypical bluesman's life. He migrated north from Clarksdale, Mississippi with dreams of making a career playing the blues. He outlived most of the record labels he recorded for and recorded under more aliases than Prince.

Five years after his death, a Herculean effort has been undertaken to make sense of his unruly and expansive discography in the form of a 4-CD box set, Hooker. The idea that four discs could contain every vital side the man cut in his 50-year career is absurd. What Hooker tries to do is bring together as many of his highlights and present the music with a narrative flow.

Disc One opens with Hooker's solo recordings. His blues-based boogie meditations did more than create one of the building blocks of what would become rock and roll. The twelve-bar blues is a standard rock convention that nearly all popular music utilizes to this day. He played conventional blues but some of Hooker's best music makes time signature irrelevant. It is not exactly 4/4, it does not waltz to 3/4 or march to 2/4. John Lee Hooker played Hooker time. His blues were built on his own rhythms and it is a rhythm no drummer or guitar player will ever quite duplicate. The word "unique" is overused but it applies to a large chunk of Hooker's music, particularly his early work when he recorded solo performances.

The elements of his early compositions are guitar, voice, a rhythmic tapping of his guitar or stomping of his foot, and space. During the course of a song there will be times when Hooker plays, stomps, and sings. There will also be moments when the guitar drops out and all that is left is his voice and the stomp. Equally important is the space in the music. It is amazing how full a song can sound still have so much room to breathe. No one makes music like this today. I say that not so much to dismiss modern music but rather to marvel at Hooker and his contemporaries.

With Hooker, the power comes not only from what he plays and what he does not play, but also when he plays and when he does not. "Catfish Blues" is a great example of this as are other songs from the first disc of Hooker. Before you reach the end of that first disc, you begin to hear him expand that sound to incorporate other musicians. Even then, Hooker's unique sense of timing and rhythm can still be heard and felt.

Article Author: Josh Hathaway

Josh Hathaway is a Sr. Music Editor for Blogcritics. He is formerly an award-winning journalist and broadcaster.

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