John Lee Hooker was born on August 22nd 1917 in Mississippi, the youngest of eleven children of poor sharecroppers. He was exposed to church music, as his father was a preacher, but his parents divorced and his mother married a blues singer. He ran away from home when he was 15, generally living in Memphis, performing at parties and on Beale Street. During WWII he worked in various mid-west factories, and in 1948 was working at the Ford plant in Detroit, where he began performing in earnest, building up a big local following, and acquiring his first electric guitar. He made a demo disc that was placed with the Bihari Brothers' Modern label, and immediately hit with "Boogie Chillen". He recorded for a variety of labels, using pseudonyms, and often recording different versions of the same song. His style was a somewhat unstructured variant of Delta blues, often thought to be based on a boogie-woogie piano style, but with Hooker varying the tempo and metre to accommodate the lyrics and licks - his unpredictable approach made it hard for bands and backing musicians, which is why much of his early work was performed solo. Many of his songs have become classic blues standrads, performed by bands across the world - "Baby please don't go", "Boom Boom", "Dimples", "Tupelo Blues" and others - and during the '60s, with the folk and blues revival, he crossed over to appeal to young white audiences. Although largely Detroit-based, he was by no means typical of the Chicago style of Muddy Waters, Little Walter and the like, his music always being more reminisicent of an electric version of southern rural blues, and in many ways he was the link between Delta blues and the emerging post-war electric blues styles. He moved to San Francisco, opening a club in Fillmore in 1997, when he was 80, and continued playing, touring Europe on a regular basis, as well as recording, through to his death. His influence pervades the rock era, his songs covered by many major artists. Acrobat has on catalogue an album of his work - for details click here.