Today is the birthday of the great John Lee Hooker (1917-2001), one of the most distinctive blues stylists of all time. It’s impossible to name his most famous songs without hearing them in your head: “Boogie Chillen” (1948), “I’m in the Mood” (1951) and “Boom Boom” (1962). He also did memorable covers of blues standards such as “Baby, Please Don’t Go”.
Hooker also had a very distinctive look, which provided the inspiration for the costumes for John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd when they played the Blues Brothers. They honored his contribution by putting him in their 1980 film The Blues Brothers.
Especially in his early years, Hooker had a very unique style of writing and playing all his own, quite different from the more customary, twelve bar, three-chord structure. Some of his tunes just noodle along on a single chord. I have always been a huge fan of “Tupelo” his eerie, spooky commemoration of a famous flood, for example. It’s just a mood, it’s relentless repetition accentuating the storytelling much more than any kind of elaborate, ornate arrangement would ever do. That’s the essence of the art, right there.
To find out more about the history of show business, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous
(Travalanche) 