SAN FRANCISCO, California (from CNN)
John Lee Hooker, whose growling voice and guitar helped
define the American blues, died on Thursday, 21st
June 2001, at age 83. The Rosebud Agency, which represented
Hooker, said he died in his sleep Thursday morning
at his home in San Francisco. "I love to sit down
and do my thing, you know, because I love the blues,"
Hooker told CNN in September 2000. "I was born with
the blues, and I just dig it. Nothing else I want
to do, and I wouldn't do anything else in the world
but this."
Hooker was born in 1917 in Clarksdale, Mississippi,
the son of a Baptist minister and sharecropper. He
began performing as a teen-ager, and like many of
his contemporaries he moved north to find work. Hooker
began recording in 1948 in Detroit, Michigan, where
the song "Boogie Chillen" made him a star. Together
with fellow Mississippian Muddy Waters and Texas native
Lightnin' Hopkins, Hooker shaped a large part of the
what fans today recognize as the blues.
He cemented his reputation with songs like "Boom Boom,"
"Crawlin' King Snake" and "I'm in the Mood," which
melded the country blues of his native Mississippi
Delta with the sound of the electric guitar. "He is
one of a kind," guitarist B.B. King told CNN last
year. "One note of John Lee Hooker and I know that's
who it is." Hooker's music influenced a rising generation
of rock and roll players from Van Morrison and the
Rolling Stones to Bruce Springsteen and ZZ Top. "Do
I think I'm cool? I don't know," Hooker told CNN last
year. "I know I'm for real." He made a comeback of
sorts with the 1990 album "The Healer," which featured
duets with guitarists Robert Cray, Carlos Santana
and Bonnie Raitt. His duet with Raitt on "I'm in the
Mood" won Hooker his first Grammy Award, and in 1991
he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Hooker won two more Grammys in 1997, one for traditional
blues and another pop duet with Morrison; he received
a a lifetime achievement award in 2000. He lent his
name to a San Francisco blues club, John Lee Hooker's
Boom Boom Room, which opened in 1997. An exact discography
is difficult to come by because he recorded under
several different names, as did many musicians of
early blues era. Hooker once estimated he had recorded
more than 100 albums.
