If they played more blues, people would just get it - they try to hold it back but just about can't hold it back now because the blues is really going. ~ John Lee Hooker
John Lee Hooker was born August 22, 1917 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. His father was a sharecropper and Baptist minister, and only gospel music was allowed in their home. His parents divorced when he was four, and the next year his mother remarried Will Moore, a blues singer and guitar player. Hooker learned guitar from his stepfather, who played in the one-chord Shreveport style, and through him met other bluesmen such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton and Blind Blake.
Hooker left home at the age of 15, originally going to Memphis and then working in factories Cincinnati and other cities before he settled in Detroit where he played at house parties and in the clubs along Hastings Street.
He began his recording career with Modern Records in 1948 with the release of "Boogie Chillen". Because of contract constraints he recorded for different labels under a number of names over the next two decades. In the sixties he was part of the blues revival discovered by folk and rock musicians, influencing groups like Canned Heat, The Animals and The Yardbirds.
Hooker performed with contemporary artists, winning Grammy Awards in 1990 and 1998 for recordings with Bonnie Raitt and with Van Morrison. He also won Grammies in 1996 and 1998 for his albums "Chill Out" and "Don't Look Back", as well as a lifetime achievement award in 2000.
"Boogie Chillen' was named one of the songs of the century by the Recording Industry Association of America, and Hooker is a member of the National Blues Hall of Fame. He died in Los Altos, California on June 21, 2001 at the age of 83.
One of the last performers in the 19th century "songster" tradition with a wide repertoire including dance music, ballads and popular songs such as "Harvest Moon" as well as the blues, Mance Lipscomb was born in 1895 to a former slave father and Cherokee mother in the Grimes County town of Navasoto, Texas.
He sang and played guitar at suppers and dances while working as a tenant farmer. Just as he disliked the term "bluesman", he objected to being called a sharecropper. When working for the notorious landowner Tom Moore he was forced to leave the county suddenly after striking a foreman for abusing his mother and wife. He later recorded the local ballad "Tom Moore's Blues" anonymously.
After two years in Houston, he returned and was working on a highway mowing crew when he was discovered by blues researchers Mack McCormick and Chris Strachwitz as part of the 1960's blues revival. He appeared at the Berkeley Folk Festival in 1961 with a crowd of over 40,000 and at the first Monterey Folk Festival in 1963. He recorded seven albums and is included in a number of blues anthologies. A book, I Say For Me a Parable: The Oral Autobiography of Mance Lipscomb, was written with Glen Alyn and published after his death in 1976. He is also the subject of a documentary, A Well-Spent Life, by Les Blank.
An influence on Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton, the "Texas Cannonball" was born near Gilmer on September 3, 1934. His family moved to Chicago when he was fifteen where he immediately began sneaking into South Side nightclubs listening to such artists as Muddy Waters and Elmore James. He later became a headliner in the newly-emerging blues clubs on the West Side.
King is best known for his aggressive guitar style in instrumentals such as "Hideaway", which led to the release of the album "Freddie King Goes Surfing". He died of heart failure in Dallas on December 28, 1978 at the age of 42.
Raised in Orange, Grammy winner Brown is among the many noted Texas bluesmen. He began his career in San Antonio and later moved to Nashville where he appeared on Hee-Haw. During the 1970's he toured in Europe and Africa, including tours sponsored by the U. S. State Department. He retired to Louisiana where his home in Slidell was destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, resulting in a return to Orange where he passed away on September 10, 2005. His grave is noted with a Texas Historical Commission marker.
