On assignment for Blues Revue Quarterly, I journeyed to John Lee Hooker’s home in Redwood City, California, on December 29, 1992. I’d sold the magazine on a cover story that was to be entitled “Spinning the Blues with John Lee Hooker.” I brought along some records that included the earliest 78s made by T-Bone Walker and B.B. King, two of Hooker’s initial releases, and one of the filthiest – and funniest – blues songs ever recorded, Lucille Bogan’s “Shave ’Em Dry.” Hooker liked the idea of a “listening party,” and …

For sixty years, John Lee Hooker ruled as the world’s baddest boogieman and one of the most idiosyncratic performers in blues history. While he cut more than a hundred albums with some of the finest blues musicians, his music always centered on his mesmerizing voice, propulsive guitar, and rhythmic foot taps. Like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lightnin’ Hopkins, he was a musical law unto himself and a link to early blues. “With John Lee, there’s a break in the continuity of styles,” Keith Richards once told me. “What he picked …

A few weeks into my freshman year at the all-boys Jesuit high school in Detroit, I went to my first school event: a concert in the commons. The performer was none other than John Lee Hooker. I knew nothing about him, other than one of my favorite albums, The Best of the Animals, included a line where Eric Burdon listed “meeting John Lee Hooker” as his most thrilling experience. I later learned he’d written their hits “Boom Boom” and “Dimples.”
The rowdy audience of preppy teenagers quieted down when John Lee …

In the decade following World War II, the epicenters of the urban blues boom were in Chicago, Houston, Oakland, and Los Angeles. But other cities made essential contributions as well, notably Detroit, where musicians from the Black Bottom to Paradise Valley specialized in swing, jump blues, boogie-woogie piano, and electrified country blues. Detroit’s most happening scene was along Hastings Street, with its black-owned shops, clubs, and restaurants, as well as its gambling dens, bordellos, and ongoing house parties. John Lee Hooker, Eddie Burns, Baby Boy Warren, Willie D. Warren, Calvin …

Asked to name my favorite among all the musicians I’ve interviewed, the first person who comes to mind is John Lee Hooker. John could not read or write, and could barely scrawl his own name, but he was highly intelligent, profoundly insightful, and musically true to himself.
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I first saw John Lee Hooker in 1966, playing a solo set at the Detroit-based Jesuit high school I’d just begun attending. That night he did most of the set from a fabulous album he’d just made with Muddy Waters’ band, Live At The …