John Lee Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the blues, often incorporating the boogie-woogie piano style and a driving rhythm into his masterful and idiosyncratic blues guitar and singing. His best known songs include "Boogie Chillen" (1948) and "Boom Boom" (1962).
There is some debate as to the year of John Lee Hooker's birth, 1915, 1917, 1920, and 1923 have all been cited, 1917 (the date on his grave marker in Oakland, California) is the one most commonly cited although Hooker himself claimed, at times, 1920.
Hooker was the youngest of the eleven children of William Hooker (1871–1923), a sharecropper and a Baptist preacher, and Minnie Ramsey (1875–?).
Hooker and his siblings were home-schooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs, with his earliest musical exposure being the spirituals sung in church.
In 1921, his parents separated. The next year, his mother married William Moore, a blues singer who provided John's first introduction to the guitar (and whom John would later credit for his distinctive playing style). The year after that (1923), John's natural father died; and at age 15, John ran away from home, never to see his mother and stepfather again.
He was a cousin of Earl Hooker,
Throughout the 1930s, Hooker lived in Memphis where he worked on Beale Street and occasionally performed at house parties. He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, drifting until he found himself in Detroit in 1948 working at Ford Motor Company. He felt right at home near the blues venues and saloons on Hastings Street, the heart of black entertainment on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its piano players, guitar players were scarce. Performing in Detroit clubs, his popularity grew quickly, and seeking a louder instrument than his crude acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.
Though he stuttered slightly in his normal speech, he performed in a half-spoken style that became his trademark. Rhythmically, his music was free, a property common with early acoustic Delta blues musicians. His vocal phrasing was less closely tied to specific bars than most blues singers'. This casual, rambling style had been gradually diminishing with the onset of electric blues bands from Chicago but, even when not playing solo, Hooker retained it in his sound.
Hooker's recording career began in 1948 with the hit single, "Boogie Chillen" cut in a studio near Wayne State University.
Despite being illiterate, he was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting the occasionally traditional blues lyric (such as "if I was chief of police, I would run her right out of town"), he freely invented many of his songs from scratch. Recording studios in the 50s rarely paid black musicians more than a pittance, so Hooker would spend the night wandering from studio to studio, coming up with new songs or variations on his songs for each studio. Due to his recording contract, he would record these songs under obvious pseudonyms such as "John Lee Booker," "Johnny Hooker", or "John Cooker".
His early solo songs were recorded under Bernie Besman.
John Lee Hooker rarely played on a standard beat, changing tempo to fit the needs of the song. This made it nearly impossible to add backing tracks. As a result, Besman would record Hooker, in addition to playing guitar and singing, stomping along with the music on a wooden palette.
John Lee Hooker's guitar playing is closely aligned with piano Boogie Woogie. He would play the walking bass pattern with his thumb, stopping to emphasize the end of a line with a series of trills, done by rapid hammer-ons and pull-offs. The songs that most epitomize his early sound are "Boogie Chillen," about being 17 and wanting to go out to dance at the Boogie clubs, "Baby Please Don't Go," a more typical blues song, summed up by its title, and "Tupelo," a stunningly sad song about the flooding of Tupelo, Mississippi.
He maintained a solo career, popular with blues and folk music fans of the early 1960s and crossed over to white audiences, giving an early opportunity to the young Bob Dylan. As he got older, he added more and more people to his band, changing his live show from simply Hooker with his guitar to a large band, with Hooker singing.
In 1989 he joined with a number of musicians, including Keith Richards and Carlos Santana to record The Healer, which won a Grammy award — one of many awards.
He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died soon afterwards at the age of 83.
Hooker recorded over 100 albums and lived the last years of his life in San Francisco, California, where he licensed a nightclub to use the name Boom Boom Room, after one of his hits.
Among his many awards, John Lee Hooker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
In 1991 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom" were named to the list of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll.
John Lee recorded several songs with Van Morrison, including "Never Get Out of These Blues Alive", "The Healing Game" and "I Cover the Waterfront". He also appeared on stage with Van Morrison several times, some of which was released on the live album "A Night in San Francisco".
John Lee also recorded in the sixties with british blues band The Groundhogs. These recordings are still available as a CD "John Lee Hooker with The Groundhogs". More importantly, Hooker recorded with the Blues-rock outfit Canned Heat, delivering the album 'Hooker N' Heat' in 1971. Hooker was influential and topical even in his lifetime, as evidenced in the MC5 cover of "Motor City's Burning" on their first album, recorded almost immediately after the riots which are the song's topic.
Black Cat Blues
John Lee Hooker Lyrics
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God knows a black cat had crossed my trail
I had a dream last night
God knows a black cat had crossed my trail
You know I don't want you to
Sweep me with no broom
'Cause I'm afraid I might go to jail
When my right-hand itch
People, you know I'm gettin' money for sure
You know when my right-hand itch
People, I'm gettin' money for sure
You know when my
Left eye get to jumpin'
Somebody's just got to go
I went home last night
I lay down 'cross my bed
I woke up this mornin', God knows
Broken, hungry too; I said, oh
Lord, this black cat have crossed my dream
You know, sometime I wonder, B.G
What in the world's gonna happen to me
Well, I went down to the cemetery
Got down on my bended knees
I asked the good Lord above
To take this spell off of me and I said, "Whoa"
You know a black cat have crossed my dream
You know, I begin to wonder, B.G
What in the world is gonna happen to me?
John Lee Hooker’s song Black Cat Blues tells the story of a dream he had where a black cat crossed his trail. The superstitious nature of the singer makes him feel uneasy and worried about the consequences of the fateful encounter. He believes that the bad omen of the black cat will cause him trouble and bring him bad luck. Therefore, he pleads with the gods to help him and lift the curse. However, the paranoia and fear that the singer expresses in the song suggest that his fate may be determined rather by his own actions than by the superstitions he believes in.
The lyrics of Black Cat Blues invoke the African American folklore of hoodoo, an ethnomagic system of spells and beliefs that originated in West Africa and blended with Christianity in the southern United States. The singer’s fear of someone "sweeping him with no broom" and getting arrested is a reference to the belief that a witch could put a spell on someone by sweeping their footprints with a broom. Likewise, the itching of the right hand is said to be a sign of good luck, while the jumping of the left eye portends an impending disaster.
Overall, Black Cat Blues is a powerful song that delves deep into the world of superstition and mythology in African American culture. It reveals the singer’s fear of the unknown and the mysterious, his belief in fate and destiny, and his hope for divine intervention in the face of adversity.
Line by Line Meaning
I had a dream last night
I dreamt last night
God knows a black cat had crossed my trail
I had a dream about a black cat crossing my path
You know I don't want you to
Sweep me with no broom
'Cause I'm afraid I might go to jail
I don't want you to sweep me with a broom because it's a superstition that it brings bad luck and I don't want to go to jail
You know when my right-hand itch
People, I'm gettin' money for sure
When my right hand itches, it's a superstition that I'll be getting money for sure
You know when my
Left eye get to jumpin'
Somebody's just got to go
When my left eye twitches, it's a sign that someone is going to die
I went home last night
I lay down 'cross my bed
I woke up this mornin', God knows
Broken, hungry too; I said, oh
Last night I went home, laid down on my bed, and this morning I woke up broken and hungry
Lord, this black cat have crossed my dream
You know, sometime I wonder, B.G
What in the world's gonna happen to me
This dream I had about a black cat crossing my path makes me wonder what's going to happen to me
Well, I went down to the cemetery
Got down on my bended knees
I asked the good Lord above
To take this spell off of me and I said, "Whoa"
I went to the cemetery, knelt down, and prayed for God to remove this curse from me
You know a black cat have crossed my dream
You know, I begin to wonder, B.G
What in the world is gonna happen to me?
I'm worried about what will happen to me because of the dream I had about a black cat crossing my path
Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
Written by: BESMAN, HOOKER
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind