The 500 - #377 - The Ultimate Collection - John Lee Hooker

I was inspired by a podcast called The 500 hosted by Los Angeles-based comedian Josh Adam Meyers. His goal, and mine, is to explore Rolling Stone Magazine's 2012 edition of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. 

Album # 377

Album Title: The Ultimate Collection (1948 - 1990)
Artist: John Lee Hooker
Genre: Blues
Recorded: Various
Released: 1991
My age at release: 25
How familiar was I with it before this week: Somewhat
Song I am putting on my Spotify: I'm In The Mood

As has been mentioned in past posts, I am not a fan of compilation records being put on this list, making me a purist, I suppose. Compilation records are, often, just a collection of an artist's most popular songs. However, The Ultimate Collection by blues icon John Lee Hooker is different, and it belongs on The 500 List. 

The album is more than a retrospective of Hooker's career. It represents a literal and figurative journey through a rapidly changing America in the 20th Century. It is also a veritable Rosetta Stone of sounds which would go on to influence almost every other record on The 500 List.

John Lee Hooker was born in 1912, the youngest of 11 children, to sharecropper and Baptist minister William Hooker in Tutwiler,  Tallahatchie County, Mississippi. Thus, John Lee was raised in a strict Christian household where he was home-schooled and prevented from hearing secular music. Consequently, African-American spirituals, a hybrid of gospel and plantation "work-songs" from the antebellum south, were the foundation of his early music exposure.  This influence can be heard on some of his earliest recordings, including It Serves Me Right To Suffer from this compilation. Another track, Boogie Chillen' has its roots in North Mississippi Country Blues style which, despite his parents' best efforts, the young Hooker would have certainly heard.

In 1921, Hooker's parents separated and his mother married William Moore, a blues musician from Shreveport, Louisiana. Moore performed a droning, single chord style of blues that varied from the Delta Blues sound popular in the region. Moore was the first to introduce nine-year-old Hooker to the guitar and his influence can be heard on Let Your Daddy Ride. 

Hooker's sister, Alice, began dating guitarist Tony Hollins at about the same time. In 1922, Hollins gave John Lee his first guitar and taught him blues standards, such as Crawlin' King Snake which also appears in the anthology. 

Guitarist Tony Hollins - mentor to a young John Lee Hooker

At the age of 14, John Lee Hooker ran away from home and made his way to Memphis, Tennessee, where he busked on Beale Street and played at The New Daisy Theatre and at house parties where he met contemporary blues legends Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson.

The New Daisy Theatre - Beale Street - Memphis, Tennessee

It was during this time that Hooker developed his distinctive playing style, focused on a single chord, playing the bass notes with his thumb and picking out the melody with his fingers. His timing was loose and inconsistent. As a result, it was difficult for other musicians to play with him. This finger-picking style can be heard in the song Hobo Blues, released in 1948. 

John Lee Hooker (mid-1940s)

After a brief time in Cincinnati, Hooker moved to Detroit, Michigan, in 1943 where he worked at the Ford Motor Company during the day while playing blues clubs on Hasting Street, in the heart of the black entertainment district, at night. It was at this time that he acquired his first electric guitar and his sound changed again because of amplification and an improvement in his techniques. His biggest hits, Dimples, Boom Boom, and One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer, are recorded during this period.

Hooker continued to write and perform for more than 50 years and became a mainstay in the blues music scene. His influence can be heard in the music of The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt, Bruce Springsteen and dozens of other artists with records on The 500 List. 

Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones with Hooker (1991)

My first exposure to John Lee Hooker was the film The Blues Brothers, featuring Dan Akyroyd and John Belushi in the titular roles. It played for about six weeks at the theatre located across the street from my high school, Saunders Secondary. I went to see it three times.

Movie Poster for The Blues Brothers (1980)

Hooker's cameo appearance shows him performing the song Boom Boom on Maxwell Street in Chicago.

Hooker in The Blues Brothers Movie

On Wednesday, June 20, 2001, I was teaching music to my grade seven and eight students at Lorne Avenue Public School. It was the end of the year and I was screening selected scenes from the movie The Blues Brothers and showed them John Lee Hooker's performance. I can remember this date because the next afternoon, Hooker's journey came to an end. He died in Los Altos, California, at the age of 88.

John Lee Hooker Gravestone
(Notice the birth date of 1917. After his death, it was determined
that he was born in 1912)

He was inducted into multiple Halls of Fame; received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award; and the National Heritage Fellowship Award -- the United States government's highest honour in the arts. He also has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. 

The Ultimate Collection, is the perfect way to document his incredible literal and figurative journey during the dynamically changing United States in the 20th Century.