Of all the blues singers, John Lee Hooker may have been the most productive. A glance at singles and LPs released under his name from 1948 to the posthumous 2003 release Face to Face, reveals one hulking discography of music. This includes studio recordings and live albums, along with all the packaged and repackaged compilations of past recordings that reappear like perennials each year. A prolific songwriter, Hooker filled most of his records with self-penned songs. “I’ve written more songs than any other blues singer—I think so,” he bragged to his biographer Charles Shaar Murray for the book Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century. It’s a claim that’s hard to dispute even though many of his songs are reworked versions of previous tunes. Putting that aside, combing through all the bluesman’s music can be confusing and exhausting. It’s also rewarding. There is no other blues singer like John Lee Hooker. “[He] evolved a style which is unlike any other,” Murray wrote. “It is, simultaneously, utterly unique and personal to him.”
Hearing Hooker perform a song, there’s a sense he’s making it up as he goes along. He feels the blues in his music instead of sticking to a traditional structure. And no songs were played or sung the same way twice. Even his most popular tunes—ones he’s recorded and performed multiple times—are each given their own individual treatment. When he covered songs written by others, Hooker owned these too, recasting them in his own style and inserting himself into the storyline by adding “Johnny” to the lyrics. There are two sides to John Lee Hooker’s music: the boogie and the slow, emotional blues. Many of Hooker’s early hits, “Dimples,” and “Boom Boom” represent the former: vigorous and driving, with a pounding beat that’s thick as tomato sauce. Just try to not bob your head to the groove. The other John Lee style is the strolling blues that burn up your soul. These songs speak of hard luck, hopelessness, doomed love, and pleas for his “baby” to return. Blues that hurt. When Hooker performed on stage, he often wore sunglasses, but they were more than a fashion statement. “To keep me from crying, yeah. Blues goes so deep,” Hooker explained to Murray. “The soul sounds so sad, and the words, the lyrics that I’m saying, just hits me. Sad, loving lyrics. I feel teardrops on my eyes, and I put on my sunglasses to keep people from seeing me crying, with tears running down my face. I never know when it’s going to hit me.” These heavy, aching songs are some of his most appealing. “The slow groove—so, so sad and so deep—I have to cry, and I’m the one singing it.”
John Lee Hooker’s roots are in the Mississippi Delta, but that’s not where he got started. It began in the Motor City, where he finally settled in the 1940s after leaving Clarksdale, Mississippi, when he was a teenager. In Detroit, he played house parties, and later, in the clubs. Like many other blues guitarists, Hooker switched to electric guitar in the mid-‘40s and he began making records in 1947, scoring his first #1 R&B hit a year later. “Boogie Chillen” has the boogie, a style of playing he learned from his stepfather, a sharecropper and a bluesman. Over the next eleven years, Hooker would make records for Sensation, Modern, Specialty, Chess, Deluxe and Vee-Jay, scoring a second #1 R&B hit with “I’m in the Mood” in 1951. He also moonlighted under different aliases to earn extra cash when a label wasn’t forthcoming with payments. His records can be found under the names: Texas Slim, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Boogie Man, Delta John, Johnny Williams, Little Pork Chops, and John Lee Booker. In 1949, Hooker released thirteen singles under various recording names. Using a pseudonym to hide their true identity wasn’t uncommon for blues singers from this period. Lonnie Johnson, Blind Willie McTell and Brownie McGhee all did so as well.
In the 1960s, Hooker began recording and releasing full albums of music. This is when he got more adventurous. His first two 12” LPs in 1959 were collections of previously released singles, but his third, for the Riverside label, came from a session specifically for Hooker’s first album. The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker is an album of acoustic blues, mostly covering songs he learned in his youth. He made the album at the request of label owner Bill Grauer, who approached Hooker about recording an LP of Leadbelly songs. Hooker said he didn’t know any Leadbelly songs, but, not signed to any label, he agreed to record an album of country blues instead. The record found an audience with the folk crowd, who were discovering acoustic blues recordings from the twenties and thirties, and Hooker got invited to the 1960 Newport Folk Festival. He would release two more acoustic records for Riverside and begin performing in folk clubs for a fan base that helped resurrect blues in the early sixties. In-between these acoustic albums, he also made electric albums which appealed more to blues enthusiasts in England, who mostly knew Hooker through his recording from the ‘40s and ‘50s. In 1963, Hooker played his final acoustic set at Newport and then made several tours of Europe in the second half of the sixties, where the fans there treated him like royalty.
Hooker averaged one or two studio records yearly in the sixties, and with live albums and compilation discs of his older material, he sometimes had up to four new releases on the market each year. Like the previous decade, Hooker moved around to different labels, but these results were more varied. Burnin’ (1962) featured a full band complete with piano, sax and guitarist Larry Veeder from Motown’s Funk Brothers. Hooker used backup singers for On Campus (1963) and he loaded up on brass and organ on The Big Soul of John Lee Hooker (1963). In 1966, he joined Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson for a series of individual album releases for the Chess label, all with the title The Real Folk Blues. Some of this music had been previously released, but Hooker recorded a new set of electric blues, using his own penned songs. These “folk” recordings, though, had no connection to the country blues records he made earlier for Riverside. Several of his records, like the Chess release, were one-off projects for a label. It Serves You Right to Suffer (1966) offered a polished recording for the jazz imprint Impulse! and That’s Where It’s At (1969) is his single entry for Stax, a strip-down affair with just voice, guitar and Hooker’s prominent stomping foot. He finished the decade with Simply the Truth (1969), a loose album with topical songs about Vietnam and mini skirts. Groovy stuff!
Reviewing these ten years of recordings, I’m partial to the raw, acoustic records he made for Riverside. From the first two days of sessions came The Country Blues of John Lee Hooker and Burning Hell, the latter originally only available in England until the early nineties. That’s My Story, recorded in early 1960, is the best of the three, an acoustic set with bass and drums and some of his most gripping tunes. But it’s the 1963 album Don’t Turn Me From Your Door that includes the bluesman’s most downhearted songs. One look at the cover photo of a down and dejected Hooker, with his left hand pressed tight against his forehead, and you know you’re in for a woeful program. The songs nose along, as Hooker noodles on the guitar and stomps his foot, singing stories of love loss and loneliness from a man that’s clearly down on his luck. “Wobbling Baby” and “Stuttering Blues” radiate some confidence, the latter putting front and center the real-life speech disorder Hooker dealt with for much of his life. From there, it all crashes down and song after song, his love life takes a turn for the worst. Even on the two instrumental tracks, you hope things may soon get better. Don’t Turn Me From Your Door has been reissued several times, adding bonus tracks Hooker recorded in the 1950s. The older songs are easy to spot, because of the lower quality of the recordings, but they are no less harrowing. Of all his sixties releases, this one cuts the deepest.
Like the welcoming reception he received from the folkies in the early sixties, Hooker found another eager audience with rock fans in the seventies. Hooker ‘n’ Heat, recorded with the band Canned Heat, hit # 73 on the pop charts in November 1971. Recorded before but released after the passing of Canned Heat singer/harpist Alan Wilson, it became one of Hooker’s best-selling releases. But the success of Hooker ‘n’ Heat also generated a need to create imitations, and Hooker’s albums from 1971 to 1974 feature an array of rock musicians. Van Morrison, Steve Miller and Joe Cocker all make appearances, but the overwhelming barrage of musicians overshadowed the bluesman, and he seemed less in the spotlight and more the participant. By 1974, the format wore thin and after the album Free Beer and Chicken, Hooker took a break from making new records.
He returned in 1986 with Jealous, an album recorded four years earlier but delayed due to lack of interest by most record labels. Hooker had made a splash with his appearance in The Blues Brothers movie, but a new blues album in the New Wave ‘80s just wasn’t in the cards. By 1989, things had changed, and The Healer became his biggest selling album ever, earning Hooker a Grammy award and getting the bluesman on MTV. The tour that followed brought in pop star-like revenue and Hooker, in his later years, acquired a comfortable level of wealth through records and live shows that most blues artists never achieved.
Hooker’s albums in the ‘90s: Mr. Lucky, Boom Boom, Chill Out, Don’t Look Back, included many guest stars, but this time the musicians were playing tribute to the blues legend. There are duets and reworked version of the hits, and Hooker, ever the songwriter, included new original songs for the last recordings before his death in 2001. These records capped off an eccentric catalog of thrilling music: the electric sides in the ‘40s & ‘50s, the fascinating ‘60s albums, rock in the ‘70s, and the celebrity filled ‘80s and ‘90s. Charles Shaar Murray summed it up perfectly. “Transparency, purity, authenticity — are precisely those we find in Hooker’s music.”