John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hookerwas an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi Hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionMusician
Date of Birth22 August 1917
CountryUnited States of America
The blues tells a story. Every line of the blues has a meaning.
I don't play a lot of fancy guitar. I don't want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.
I don't think about time. You're here when you're here. I think about today, staying in tune.
I remember back in Detroit, I used to go to the Apex Bar every night after I got off work. The bartender there used to call me Boom Boom. I don't know why, but he did.
I don't like no fancy chords. Just the boogie. The drive. The feeling. A lot of people play fancy but they don't have no style. It's a deep feeling-you just can't stop listening to that sad blues sound. My sound.
I went on to Cincinnati. I had got a taste of the big cities and them bright lights. I stayed there until I was about 18 or 19 and then I went on to Detroit.
Ron Thompson, he's my main man!
It's never hard to sing the blues. Everyone in the world has the blues . . .
My style is all to myself.
I am a happy man. I've had a good life.
I've got enough money to live me two lifetimes so I don't have to do nothing I don't want to.
The way Will Moore taught me, and the way I play it, the blues is just something different.
Since you knew they was goin' to cheat you anyway, I recorded under any name with all of 'em.
I have heartaches, I have blues. No matter what you got, the blues is there. 'Cause that's all I know - the blues. And I can sing the blues so deep until you can have this room full of money and I can give you the blues.