![]() ![]() While John Lee was a juvenile, his sister took up with another bluesman, Tony Hollins, who gave him a guitar and taught him songs that would serve the kid all his days. His mother married again, to William Moore, a blues guitarist who handled his instrument in a droning, insistent style, which his stepson would adapt into a method he later half-parodied in his 1971 song “ Endless Boogie, Parts 27 & 28” – though Hooker was anything but a musical stereotype, as we shall see. He was raised to be God-fearing, but this changed when his parents split up in 1921, when he was nine (though accounts of Hooker’s birth date differ). Hooker, born on August 22, 1917, the youngest of 11 children to a sharecropping (a smallholding farmer) Baptist preacher in Mississippi, didn’t need lessons in being poor. Listen to the best John Lee Hooker songs on Spotify. Oh, but isn’t the blues a noble cry of the poor African-American who is suffering? Hell yes, but Hooker’s telling us if you got feet, you can use them to beat the blues. This 1948 anthem is a call to get ya dance freak on. And that’s where we’ll start our rundown of the best John Lee Hooker songs, because this was his debut single. And armed with nothing but a guitar and his dark, moody, mumblin’, barking voice, he’d make you dance: “ Boogie Chillen,” as he once called it. But John Lee Hooker was a blues survivor who’d rock you to the socks that were poking out of the hole in your soles he was street-smart, adaptable, even crafty. ![]() He couldn’t terrify you from across the hall like Howlin’ Wolf. He wasn’t an outlandish marketable character like Bo Diddley. The song can also be heard on the soundtrack to the second part of the computer game Mafia.He couldn’t boast the effortless authority of Muddy Waters.In 2002, the song was featured in a commercial for The Gap.For a long time, Hooker did not perform Boom Boom live.John Lee Hooker played Boom Boom in The Blues Brothers (1980), but the song was not included on the official soundtrack.Now let’s listen to Boom Boom performed by The Animals. It is included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s list of “The Songs That Shaped Rock and Roll”. But it won the British public only thirty years later, in 1992, when it appeared in an advertisement for Lee jeans.īoom Boom turned out to be Hooker’s most famous composition, his calling card. In 1962, Boom Boom became a hit in the US and appeared on the top charts. One day, Hooker thought that this “boom-boom” could make a good song. When he showed up, Willa the bartender would say, “Boom boom, you’re late again.” And so every evening. By that time, John had been playing Apex Bar in Detroit for quite some time and was consistently late for work. The history of the creation of the song is interesting. History and meaning of the song Boom Boomīoom Boom was released as a single in 1961. It was covered dozens of times, and some bands did it more than well, like The Animals or The Yardbirds, but they failed to surpass the author. In confirmation, we can cite the song Boom Boom by the unique John Lee Hooker. Moreover, in most cases, cover versions of these compositions, performed by virtuoso musicians, lose to the original. Almost all the best blues are initially simple and unsophisticated, which does not prevent them from being insanely popular. ![]()
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