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.
forgive me
John Lee Hooker Lyrics
Jump to: Overall Meaning ↴ Line by Line Meaning ↴
They tell me God forgives you for almost anything you do
Well, if that's the case, that's the case
I think I'm going to kill that man
Then drop down on my knees
Well, this morning, God knows, that man he comes a-waltzing in
Just waltzing in
I started to mow that man down
Yeah, they tell me God forgives you
If that's the case now, people
I'm gonna mow my baby down
You don't put yourself out, you don't put yourself out
You don't treat Margo right, you don't treat Margo right
Now darling, there come a time
You're gonna need my love again
They tell me God forgives me for almost anything you do
You don't seem to understand
I've got your life right in my hands
Yeah, they tell me God forgives you for almost anything you do
Anything you do
Well, if that's the case, that's the case
I think I'm going to kill that man
Then drop down on my knees
This morning, God knows, that man he comes waltzing in
Just waltzing in
Well, I grabbed my shotgun, I broke down
I started to mow that man down
Yeah, they tell me God forgives you for almost anything you do
If that's the case now, people
I'm gonna mow my baby down
I'm gonna mow my baby down
I'm gonna shoot that man
You don't put yourself out, you don't put yourself out
You don't treat Margo right, you don't treat your baby right
Now darling, there come a time
You're gonna need my love again
Yeah, they tell me God forgives you for almost anything
Anything you do
The lyrics to John Lee Hooker's song Forgive Me are quite provocative, expressing a desire for violent retribution towards a man who has wronged the singer's lover, Margo. The opening line, "They tell me God forgives you for almost anything you do" sets the tone for the song's exploration of anger and forgiveness. In this context, forgiveness feels like a license to act on one's worst impulses. The singer proposes to "kill that man, then drop down on my knees," suggesting that he believes he can receive forgiveness from God even after committing such a heinous act.
The second verse expands on this theme, describing a situation in which the man in question walks into the singer's sight with no awareness of the danger he's in. Here, the singer's anger boils over and he believes he has no choice but to "mow that man down" with a shotgun. In both verses, the singer's desperation for forgiveness leads him towards violence, as if forgiveness were something one could buy with blood.
The final verse brings the focus back to Margo, suggesting that she is the reason behind the singer's actions. He warns the other man that "there come a time, you're gonna need my love again," implying that the singer is the only one who can give Margo the love and care she deserves. The song ends with a repetition of the opening lines, emphasizing once again the singer's troubled relationship with forgiveness.
Line by Line Meaning
They tell me God forgives you for almost anything you do
People say that God forgives you for almost anything you do.
They tell me God forgives you if that's the case now, people, I'm gonna mow my baby down
If it's true that God forgives you for anything, then the singer plans on killing someone they love.
You don't put yourself out, you don't put yourself out, you don't treat Margo right, you don't treat Margo right. Now darling, there come a time, you're gonna need my love again
The singer believes that their loved one will regret mistreating them and will want to reconcile in the future.
Well, this morning, God knows, that man he comes a-waltzing in, Just waltzing in. Well, I got my shotgun, I broke down, I started to mow that man down
Someone comes into the artist's life and they react with violence, ready to use their shotgun against them.
You don't seem to understand. I've got your life right in my hands
The artist has total control over the person they are addressing and they don't seem to realize it.
Lyrics © BMG Rights Management, Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, Capitol CMG Publishing, Kobalt Music Publishing Ltd., Warner Chappell Music, Inc.
Written by: CURTIS JAMES JACKSON, C. CONLLEY, DE SHAUN D. HOLTON, B. JOHNSON, LARRY LOUIS, D. MOORE
Lyrics Licensed & Provided by LyricFind