Jimi Hendrix called Earl Hooker “the master of the wah-wah pedal.” Buddy
Guy slept with one of Hooker's slides beneath his pillow hoping to tap
some of the elder bluesman's power. And B. B. King has said repeatedly
that, for his money, Hooker was the best guitar player he ever met.
Tragically, Earl Hooker died of tuberculosis in 1970 when he was on the
verge of international success just as the Blues Revival of the late
sixties and early seventies was reaching full volume.
Second
cousin to now-famous bluesman John Lee Hooker, Earl Hooker was born in
Mississippi in 1929, and reared in black South Side Chicago where his
parents settled in 1930. From the late 1940s on, he was recognized as
the most creative electric blues guitarist of his generation. He was a
“musician's musician,” defining the art of blues slide guitar and
playing in sessions and shows with blues greats Muddy Waters, Junior
Wells, and B. B. King.
A favorite of black club and neighborhood
bar audiences in the Midwest, and a seasoned entertainer in the rural
states of the Deep South, Hooker spent over twenty-five years of his
short existence burning up U.S. highways, making brilliant appearances
wherever he played.
Until the last year of his life, Hooker had
only a few singles on obscure labels to show for all the hard work. The
situation changed in his last few months when his following expanded
dramatically. Droves of young whites were seeking American blues tunes
and causing a blues album boom. When he died, his star's rise was
extinguished. Known primarily as a guitarist rather than a vocalist,
Hooker did not leave a songbook for his biographer to mine. Only his
peers remained to praise his talent and pass on his legend.
“Earl Hooker's life may tell us a lot about the blues,” biographer
Sebastian Danchin says, “but it also tells us a great deal about his
milieu. This book documents the culture of the ghetto through the
example of a central character, someone who is to be regarded as a
catalyst of the characteristic traits of his community.”
Like the tales of so many other unheralded talents among bluesmen, Earl Hooker, Blues Master,
Hooker's life story, has all the elements of a great blues song―late
nights, long roads, poverty, trouble, and a soul-felt pining for what
could have been.
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