John Lee Hooker - Boom Boom CD

"I don‘t play a lot of fancy guitar, because I don‘t want to play it", John Lee Hooker once said in an interview. "The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks". The man they eventually nicknamed "The Hook" was born near Clarksdale, Mississippi, on August 22nd 1917. He sang Gospel as a kid, as his father was not only a sharecropper but also a Baptist preacher. When his
parents separated in the early Twenties, he eventually learned to play the guitar and sing the
Blues from his stepfather, the blues-player William Moore who often had friends over to play.
And what friends they were: well-traveled, experienced and supremely talented musicians like
Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, or Blind Blake. When he was fifteen years old John Lee left Clarksdale for Memphis, and later tried his luck on the Blues-scene in Cincinnati for a while, before settling in the motor-city of Detroit in the late Forties. At this point, he had been playing
his mean, gritty guitar licks, singing with that deep, thunderous rumble of a voice and stomping
his foot in rhythm a good while already. But he was thirty-one years old when finally somebody
brought him to a recording studio to record originals like "Sally Mae" and "Boogie Chillen". Hooker instantly became known as the "Boogie Man" from coast to coast, scoring in 1949 with "Crawlin’ King Snake", for instance, and in 1951 with the multi-tracked "I’m In The Mood". It was songs like these, with their simple, yet contagious Boogie-grooves and their talking blues vocals, which influenced British-Blues-Rockers like The Animals or the Yardbirds in the Sixties. As soon as John Lee Hooker became known, his legacy just kept on growing – through a cameo-role in "The Blues Brothers" and his comeback-album "The Healer" in 1989, which featured guest appearances by Carlos Santana, Robert Cray and Bonnie Raitt. But even when playing in front of a Pop-audience (or with some of his more popular admirers), John Lee Hooker stayed true to his mumblin’ vocals and his eerie guitar-sounds. "The Hook" was as real as can be, all the way up to his death in June 2001.

Customer Reviews