Adair 1

Chelsea Adair
Professor Henrie
U.S. Music & Culture
11/4/14
John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker was born near Clarksdale, Mississippi on August 22, 1917 as one of
eleven children in a sharecropping family. Initially only allowed by his father to listen to
religious music, this changed in 1921 when Hookers parents separated and his mother remarried
local blues musician William Moore the following year. Hookers stepfather served as his
introduction to both guitar playing and blues, with Moore playing in a unique style he had
learned previously in Louisiana. This consisted of a droning, one-chord blues different from the
Delta blues style being played in Mississippi at the time. Throughout his career, this early
exposure to Moores style of playing would influence Hookers own personal style of blues.
Running away at the age of 14, Hooker spent the 1930s taking work in different cities,
before finally ending up in Detroit in 1943. Here, he worked as a janitor for Ford Motor
Company, while playing in Detroits nightclubs and bars. Hookers big break came in 1948 when
he was noticed by local record shop owner Elmer Barbee, who brought him to the owner of
Sensation Records, Bernard Besman. Hooker recorded and released the song Boogie Chillen
that year, which unexpectedly became a huge hit, reaching number one on the R&B charts that
next year in 1949. The success of Boogie Chillen enabled Hooker to quit his factory job and
focus on a music career. John Lee Hooker went on to have a prolific and successful career,

Adair 2
recording over 100 albums and being inducted into both the Blues and the Rock and Roll Halls
of Fame.
Though much is not known about the origins of blues, the musical genre seems to have
started out as a form of black folk song in the South during the late nineteenth century. It is
conjectured that the intense, personal musical expressions sung by black field workers and
known as field hollers may have been a precursor to blues music. Whatever the origins, by the
early twentieth century, blues had reached a form still recognizable to us today. This included
characteristics such as twelve-bar blues form, lyrics often focused on personal troubles and
dissatisfaction, call-and-response patterns, use of guitar, as well as numerous other signature
aspects.
Growing up in Coahoma County (in which Clarksdale is located), John Lee Hookers
youth was spent in an area still known today as the Mississippi Delta. Here, blues musicians had
developed a style called the Delta blues, characterized by uneven rhyming patterns, minimal
melody, spoken rather than sung lyrics, and moaning vocalizations (Mississippi Delta: History
and Highlights), as well as the use of bottleneck style guitar and harmonica. Though Hooker
grew up in the Delta area and the Delta blues were absorbed into his style, the influence of his
stepfather as well as other forms of blues music (such as the driving, rhythmic elements of Hill
Country blues and its use of few chord changes) created for Hooker a unique way of playing the
blues that made him stand out and not easily be categorized in one blues genre.
Being one of the blues musicians that moved from the rural South to urban cities such as
Chicago and Detroit in the 1950s and 1960s, John Lee Hooker is also associated with a blues
style called the urban blues. The urban blues are associated with a number of characteristics,

Adair 3
including the addition of piano, a strong beat, and the use of electric guitar, as well as bass,
drums, and sometimes electric organ (Candelaria 117). Though Hooker often simply played solo
with his guitar at the beginning of his career, the influence and style of urban blues can perhaps
be seen to have gradually leaked into his music as he tended more to use the addition of
instruments such as piano and drums in his later songs.
Occasionally referred to as the King of Boogie, John Lee Hooker is noted for, most of
all, the boogie style of guitar in his music. Similar in some ways to the piano-based blues form
known as Boogie-Woogie, Hookers boogie style on guitar shared some similarities to this but
was ultimately distinct from it. Taught the rhythmic style he referred to as a country boogie by
his stepfather (Pareles), Hookers guitar playing had a driving, repetitive, rhythm-focused quality
that came to be a signature element of his style. This hallmark of his music is especially notable
because of its eventual bearing on rock n roll in the sixties and seventies, when this stylistic
feature was adapted and amplified [. . .] by a great number of rock and roll artists (John Lee
Hooker Biography)
One song that especially exemplifies Hookers boogie style is his 1948 hit Boogie
Chillen, which also happens to be the first song he ever released. In the song, defining elements
of this boogie style can be heard, such as the driving, rhythmic quality of the guitar, as well as
the use of ostinato, or a musical figure that is repeated over and over in music (Candelaria 114).
Other elements of the song showcase Hookers style in other ways; for example, the casual,
rambling style of vocals and his alternation between speaking and singing throughout the song
which was often in his songs. Two more stylistic features of the song to note are the songs use
of one chord, as well as the song not being in twelve-bar blues form. Hooker would commonly
use just one or two chords per song, and did not always use the twelve-bar form in his music.

Adair 4
A second song Hooker is well known for is the 1961 hit, Boom Boom. More traditional
in form, the song is structured in twelve-bar blues form. A later song than Boogie Chillen, this
song matches more closely the style of urban blues, with its addition of a backing band
containing both drums and piano. Another feature in the song is its use of a stop-time hook,
which can be heard in how Hooker and the band repeatedly play short phrases followed by a halt,
after which Hooker then delivers his lyrical line. This also forms a type of call-and-response
between the instruments and the musicians voice, a common stylistic feature found in the blues.
In closing, John Lee Hooker was a blues musician with his own unique style of the blues,
whose style even ended up influencing rock and roll. With a career spanning five decades, he
created memorable songs such as Boogie Chillen, Boom Boom, and Dimples, and earned
a place in both the Blues and Rock and Roll Halls of Fame. In writing this report, I learned not
only about his life, but also about how he and his music relate to American music and blues in
particular. This also led to me listening to his music more closely and noticing and appreciating
things I never had before. Overall, it was an interesting and enriching experience doing the
research and writing this report.

Adair 5
Works Cited:
Pareles, Jon. John Lee Hooker, Bluesman, Is Dead at 83. The New York Times. The New York
Times Company. 22 June 2001. Web. 23 Nov. 2014
Adams, Michael. "John Lee Hooker." Salem Press Biographical Encyclopedia (2013): Research
Starters. Web. 23 Nov. 2014.
"John Lee Hooker." Encyclopedia of World Biography. 2004. Encyclopedia.com. 2 Dec. 2014.
John Lee Hooker. Rolling Stone Online. Rolling Stone. 2001. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
The History. John Lee Hooker. John Lee Hooker Foundation. 2013. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
Drozdowski, Ted. How John Lee Hooker Got his Big Bad Boogie Style. Gibson. Gibson
Guitar Corp. 7 Aug. 2008. Web. 24 Nov. 2014.
John Lee Hooker. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 29 Nov.
2014. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.
Boogie Chillen. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 9 Aug.
2014. Web. 6 Dec. 2014.
Boom Boom. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 31 Oct. 2014.
Web. 6 Dec. 2014.
Stop-Time. Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., 19 Nov. 2014.
Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
Mississippi Delta: History and Highlights. PBS. Vulcan Productions. 2003. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

Adair 6
Candelaria, Lorenzo, and Daniel Kingman. American Music: A Panorama. 5th ed. Cengage
Learning. 2012, 2015. Print.
John Lee Hooker Biography. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
and Museum, Inc. 2014. Web. 9 Dec. 2014.
Dahl, Bill. John Lee Hooker: Artist Biography. All Music. All Media Network, LLC. 2014.
Web. 9 Dec. 2014.