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John Lee Hooker
According to official data, John Lee Hooker was born in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1917. This is a contractual date, because – some think that the blues vocalist and guitarist aged himself by three years.
His father was a cleric who left the family when John was still a child. He took care of the stepfather Will Moore who taught him how to play the guitar. Will Moore was a musician from Louisiana, playing cheeky dignified blues. Many years later, John Lee Hooker – already a well-known artist – will admit that he owes his style to a large stepfather.
The boy escaped from the house and never saw his mother or Will Moore again. At the age of 14, John Lee Hooker began working as a boy to help The New Daisy Theater on the famous Beale Street, one of the most memorable streets of Memphis. Then he took a hard job in a car workshop and in 1948 he moved to the capital of the American automotive industry, Detroit, where he took a job at the Ford Motor Company. It was then that he performed in local clubs, gaining local popularity and, wanting to enrich the sound, he started playing the electric guitar.
The guitarist and vocalist gained notoriety as a musician in the late 1940s after his songs were released by the Modern Records label. One of his first recordings, the song “Boogie Chillen” became a great hit and the characteristic ballad songs, often based on fashionable boogie-woogie rhythms, became local hits.
It is thanks to such music that John Lee Hooker gained recognition of various generations and became (just like B.B.King) an artist combining the black and white world of musical America.
