![]() ![]() “ Hobo Blues” followed, another R&B chart hit, and Hooker seemed determined to follow a nomadic path himself, drifting from record label to record label, depending on where the next cheque was most likely to come from. A demo made its way to Modern Records in LA, which released “Boogie Chillen.” It was an R&B chart No.1 and Hooker’s career was underway. He was now loud enough to compete with city life, and became a regular performer in clubs on Detroit’s East Side. ![]() He joined the exodus of southern folk moving north in search of work, finding it at Ford in Detroit during the Second World War, his factory job bringing in enough bread to replace his acoustic guitar with an electric one. He turned up in Memphis, where he scuffled for a living and played at house parties by night. In fact he never came back, and never saw his ma and stepdad again. Hooker left home when he was 14, and never looked back. The same goes for the times he recorded it himself, of which there were many. Hence when rock came along and the likes of The Doors covered it on LA Woman in 1971, John Lee Hooker done got paid. Among them was an essential track for every John Lee Hooker playlist, ” Crawlin’ King Snake,” which Hooker first recorded in 1949 – and copyrighted. While John Lee was a juvenile, his sister took up with another bluesman, Tony Hollins, who gave him a guitar and taught him songs that would serve the kid all his days. His mother married again, to William Moore, a blues guitarist who handled his instrument in a droning, insistent style, which his stepson would adapt into a method he later half-parodied in his 1971 song “ Endless Boogie, Parts 27 & 28” – though Hooker was anything but a musical stereotype, as we shall see. He was raised to be God-fearing, but this changed when his parents split up in 1921, when he was nine (though accounts of Hooker’s birth date differ). Hooker, born on August 22, 1917, the youngest of 11 children to a sharecropping (a smallholding farmer) Baptist preacher in Mississippi, didn’t need lessons in being poor. ![]()
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