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.
His stepfather, a musician, spent time with other musicians. Young John Lee was rubbing shoulders with people like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and Son House as he was learning the Blues. Like so many other Black people of that time, John headed North in search of employment when he was a young adult. Instead of Chicago, which lays claim to being the home of urban blues in post war America, Hooker ended up living and working in Detroit.
He established himself as a solid solo act playing and singing his own distinct style of Delta Blues. His way of singing hearkens back to the old "holler" songs the field workers would sing while working for the masters of a plantation. Instead of words strung together as a tune, they would chant out their litany of woes or joys while keeping a steady beat with whatever was available for accompaniment. (For more about holler songs see Broadcasting The Blues: Black Music During The Segregation Era and the book of the same name.)
Hooker chanted his lyrics in chunks of prose, as opposed to poetry, over an improvised rhythm he would pluck out on his guitar using his thumb for the basic notes and his finger to pluck out the higher strings. After he put out a string of successful songs in the late forties and early fifties as a solo act, Hooker finally made the trip across the border to Chicago where he began to work with a backing band.
Article comments
1 - Jim mcAllister
I agreee with the writer about John Lee Hooker. As much as he was fussed over in later life he should have been studied even more intently because he was a "living Fossil" so to speak. Like the alligator that has existed unchanged for millions of years, John Lee Hooker was a classic example of how Blues was played when it was first developed as a new form of music. He stubbornly refused to become contemporary, despite the industry pairing him up with all and sundry. No matter who he played with his style never changed. I've no doubt that his step-father was an actual Blues originator who was there when it was being conceived at the turn of the 20th Century. He taught the young John Lee what he himself had learned and for whatever reason John didn't feel he needed anything else. So we had in our midst a living example of the way it was done, as authentic as any lost Robert Johnson recording. John Lee was boogie-ing before it was even called that.