John Lee Hooker (Coahoma County, Mississippi, August 22, 1917 – Los Altos,… Read Full Bio ↴John Lee Hooker (Coahoma County, Mississippi, August 22, 1917 – Los Altos, California, June 21, 2001) was a highly influential American blues singer, guitarist and songwriter.

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.

Blues Before Sunrise
John Lee Hooker Lyrics

Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴

Blue before sunrise
Tears standing in my eyes
Blue before sunrise
With tears standing in my eyes
Such a horrible feeling
Boy, that I do despise

Nobody know

What a shape I'm in
Nobody know
What a shape I'm in

My wife had left me
Left me for another man
For seven long years
Lord knows I tried
Everything I could
To get along with my wife

Oh, blue before sunrise
Tears standing in my eyes
A horrible feeling, boy, that I do despise

I lost everything
Everything I ever owned
I lost everything
Everything I ever owned

For seven long years
I tried too hard

Blue before sunrise

With tears in my eyes
Tears down in my eyes

Overall Meaning

The lyrics to John Lee Hooker's "Blues Before Sunrise" depict a man drowning in a sea of sadness and despair. The opening line, "Blue before sunrise," serves as a metaphor for the singer's condition. He is sad and despondent, and there is no light on the horizon that can relieve his suffering. Tears are standing in his eyes, and the pain he feels is unbearable. The singer is expressing his feelings of loss, loneliness, and abandonment. He has been left by his wife, who has chosen another man over him. This abandonment has caused him to lose everything he has ever owned, leaving him in a deep state of depression.

The singer seems to feel that no one truly understands his plight. "Nobody know what a shape I'm in" suggests that he feels isolated and alone. Despite his efforts to save the marriage, nothing worked out, and he was ultimately left with nothing. The repetition of the phrase "for seven long years" reinforces the idea that he has been stuck in this state for an extended period. The song's tone is mournful, and the lyrics emphasize the singer's pain, highlighting the depths of despair a person can experience after being left by someone they loved.

Line by Line Meaning

Blue before sunrise
The feeling of sadness and despair is so intense, it is present even before the sun has risen.

Tears standing in my eyes
The singer is crying so much that the tears are physically present in their eyes.

Such a horrible feeling Boy, that I do despise
The singer hates the overwhelming feeling of sadness they are experiencing.

Nobody know What a shape I'm in
The artist feels like no one understands the pain they are going through.

My wife had left me Left me for another man
The artist's wife has betrayed them by leaving them for someone else.

For seven long years Lord knows I tried Everything I could To get along with my wife
The singer has been trying to reconcile with their wife for seven years, but nothing has worked.

I lost everything Everything I ever owned
The singer has lost all their possessions, likely due to their wife leaving them.

With tears in my eyes Tears down in my eyes
The artist is still crying uncontrollably.

Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Universal Music Publishing Group, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd.
Written by: JOHN LEE HOOKER

Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind

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