John Lee Hooker Plays and Sings the Blues

John Lee Hooker

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The Growl of the Blues

John Lee Hooker (1917–2001) didn't have the most polished pipes in the blues business, nor the most graceful delivery. He had something more important: a voice that caught all the struggle and trouble, late-night treachery, and double-crossed dealings commonly loaded into blues narratives.

Hooker made music as though lives, including his own, were on the line. He could sound as smooth as aged bourbon, or as roughed-up as gravel under the wheels of a getaway car. He put years of hurt behind the most clichéd blues declaration. The early singles collected on Plays and Sings the Blues, most from 1951 and '52, show that well before he was a blues legend, Hooker was an uncommon method actor—a master of inflection whose tools were a weary, fed-up tone and sandpapery timbre. Several of these songs, including "Mad Man Blues," are examples of his perpetually moving boogie style, in which a shuffling rhythm underpins spirited call-and-response between voice and guitar. The sound, which Hooker developed playing Detroit clubs in the 1940s (while working at Ford Motor Company during the day), galvanized British rock musicians in the 1960s, including the Rolling Stones and John Mayall and the Bluesbreakers. It made Hooker one of the darlings of the U.K. "blues revival" and helped introduce authentic blues to subsequent generations.

Hooker's catalog includes over one hundred titles, cut for every consequential blues label, often under such pseudonyms as Birmingham Sam and Delta John. Only a few, like Plays and Sings, are consistently rewarding. Most were recorded quickly, in keeping with one of his core beliefs about the music: "Once you start thinking too much about the blues," he told an interviewer in 1997, "you can wear yourself down and lose it."

Genre: Blues
Released: 1961, Chess
Key Tracks: "Baby Please Don't Go," "Worried Life Blues"
Catalog Choice: Hooker 'n' Heat; The Real Folk Blues; Alone
Next Stop: Howlin' Wolf: Moanin' in the Moonlight
Book Pages: 365–366

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