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 …

John Hurt spent nearly all of his life in the whistle-stop farming community of Avalon, Mississippi. With his gentle, soothing voice and a beautifully syncopated fingerpicking guitar style, he created one of the most compelling country blues styles ever recorded. After making a handful of 78s, he faded from public view during the Depression and then arose phoenix-like during the 1960s, his considerable skills intact. Still fresh today, his inspiring recordings provide an aural passport to a bygone era of cakewalks and rags, ballads, and storytelling blues.
Hurt was 35 years old …

 In the years before World War II, Son House created some of the purest, most powerful Mississippi Delta blues on record. Playing with partners Charley Patton and Willie Brown, he exerted a profound influence on Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, both of whom copied his music and carried it to new generations. House’s influence still echoes through the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, and many other musicians, and in many respects, he is the true father of what’s known today as “deep blues.”
Watching Son House perform bottleneck guitar was akin to …

When Sam Chatmon first began playing the blues, Teddy Roosevelt was president of the United States. Most of his neighbors in rural Mississippi were still listening to rags and reels that dated back to slavery days.
Chatmon launched his recording career in the 1930s, playing alongside his brothers Bo Carter and Lonnie Chatmon in the era’s most celebrated string band, the Mississippi Sheiks, and performed as one-half of the Bluebird duo “Chatman Brothers (Lonnie and Sam).” Outliving his brothers, Sam was “rediscovered” in 1960 by Chris Strachwitz, who recorded him anew …

Sometimes the most memorable interviews happen unexpectedly. Researching Blind Willie Johnson, the sublime prewar gospel-blues slide guitarist from Texas, I was struck by how magnificently Ry Cooder had used Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night – Cold Was the Ground” in his Paris, Texas soundtrack. I sent Cooder a note asking if he’d give me a quote. A few days later, on February 25, 1990, the phone rang and it was the man himself. After talking about Blind Willie Johnson, Ry suddenly moved on to another Johnson – Robert – …

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 …