News & Updates — ZZ Top
John Lee Hooker / Aug 22, 1912 or 1917 - June 21, 2001
One of my favorite musicians was John Lee Hooker and his deeply entrancing boogie, a droning one-chord style that is one of the more direct links from American electric blues to an ancient African sound pool. From the Mississippi Delta, his exact birth year is disputed. His earliest musical experience was with spirituals before learning to play the blues from his step-father. He left home at 14 and by the '30s was playing on Memphis' Beale Street. In 1943, after a few years in Cincinnati, he started working at the Ford Motors plant in Detroit while playing local clubs. Around this...