And no wonder, given his technical mastery of slide and fretted picking with or without effects, supreme economy of motion, and ability to make the guitar talk in a human voice like no other blues guitarist,” remembers blues authority Dick Shurman. Guitarist Paul Asbell
(see CD review in Phonograph Blues), who played with Hooker, adds, “What Earl did great while I was playing with him was play slide, in an amazingly vocal style that resembled no other Chicago player I heard except Robert Nighthawk. He often furthered the vocal effect by combining it with the wah wah pedal. I never heard anything on recordings that really showed how well he could do this, or how great he sometimes sounded. We did a version of James Brown's "I Feel Good" on which his vocal impression was uncanny.”
“Hooker was the best,” is the most common response when hip blues folk are queried about Chicago blues guitarists. Though similar to “hot stove league” baseball arguments about Babe Ruth vs Ty Cobb, or heaven forefend, Barry Bonds, it is a telling answer. Not Otis Rush or Magic Sam or Buddy Guy, but Earl Hooker. In fact, Buddy will be the first to point to the magnificent virtuoso. Along with his mentor, the legendary and elusive Robert Lee “Nighthawk” McCollum McCoy, Hooker was the unchallenged Jedi master of standard-tuned slide. With a few deft slices of his “guitar saber” he could cleanly cut to the heart of any song as famously demonstrated on Muddy Waters’ “You Shook Me” (1962). Attesting to the almost supernatural control he exerted over his gear, his last recordings show him bending the problematic wah wah pedal to his will. If only he could have sung with the singular eloquence, inventiveness and expressiveness of his fancy fretboard frolics – and had lived longer – he may have been regarded more universally as the undisputed six-string champ.
Earl Zebedee Hooker (born January 2, 1929 in Vance, Mississippi, died April 21, 1970 in Chicago, Illinois) was begat by musical parents and was a cousin to John Lee Hooker. He taught himself to play guitar around the age of 10 and shortly thereafter his family migrated to Chicago where he began attending the Lyon & Healy Music School in 1941. A self-described “bad boy” who consorted with gangs and had “sticky fingers,” Hooker ran away from home back to Mississippi when he was 13, only to return again to Chi-Town. He played street gigs with Bo Diddley and then quite fortuitously made the acquaintance of Robert Nighthawk. He hung out at the slide master’s music store, scoring tips in the fine art of bottlenecking “catch as catch can” around 1945 and later played with the Nighthawk band circa 1947 on radio station KFFA in Helena, Arkansas. Lessons with jazz guitarist Leo Blevins only heightened his interest in music beyond the blues and no doubt encouraged him to develop his remarkable technique.
In 1949 Hooker went to play with Ike Turner’s band in Memphis, where he also appeared with Sonny Boy Williamson II on the King Biscuit Time show on KFFA across the Mississippi. His first instrumental sides, “Shake “Em On Up,” ”Race Track,” “Happy Blues” “and “Blue Guitar Blues” were cut in Florida for King Records in 1952. A year later he waxed a vocal version of Nighthawk’s “Sweet Black Angel” that clearly showed the older bluesman’s influence. The limitations of Hooker’s singing voice were immediately apparent and, with a few exceptions, he concentrated on instrumentals for the remainder of his career. The same year, however, he sang well in Memphis on “I’m Going Down the Line,” along with playing like a demon on the instrumentals “Guitar Rag” and “Earl’s Boogie Woogie” with backing by a band that featured Pine Top Perkins on piano. One wonders what may have happened if he had more confidence in his vocal abilities and had given them the chance to improve alongside his guitar work.
Hooker returned to Chicago as his home base in the mid-1950s while barnstorming the country with his own band and recording intermittently for a number of independent labels. In 1956 he played gigs with Otis Rush as the future Chicago star was just turning heads in the gin mills on the South Side. Hooker’s reputation as a guitar wizard, particularly on slide where he went unchallenged for supremacy, grew wherever he touched down, including once at a C&W gig in Iowa (Check out “Galloping Horses A Lazy Mule” from 1960 for his hot “pickin’ ‘n’ grinnin’”). In Chicago his dazzling, vocal-inflected lines helped to engineer the emphasis away from harmonica to guitar and it has been reported that his fellow string-benders would often split the scene in resignation when he would arrive to jam.
In 1959 he “hooked up” with producer/record label owner Mel London and for the next four years contributed his estimable talents as a leader and a sideman with artists such as Junior Wells (“Calling All Blues” and the fret-melting “Universal Rock,” 1960), A.C. Reed and Lillian Offitt. Though the exuberance and un-harnessed energy of his earliest work had become somewhat tempered, numbers such as “Blues in D Natural” (1960, featuring a motif that would influence Rush’s version of “I Wonder Why” in 1971), “Blue Guitar” (1961) and “Tanya” (1962), on Chess/Checker, are rightly considered major blues guitar classics.
From the early 1960s on recurring bouts with tuberculosis would hamper his rambling, though he managed to do hospital benefits. Recordings for the Cuca label in Sauk City, Wisconsin that sometimes included Freddy Roulette on steel guitar, kept him going as did a trip to England in 1965 where he appeared on Ready Steady Go with the Beatles.
In the late 1960s he experienced a minor resurgence that brought him much-deserved attention beyond his traditional blues audience. Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records sought him out in 1968 on Buddy Guy’s advice, recording the still vital slide samurai that year and the next. Sessions for Bluesway,
Blues on Blues and Blue Thumb followed before he succumbed to the TB (the “bug”
in his composition “Two Bugs and a Roach” from 1968) in 1970 that had
relentlessly dogged him to the end.
Recommended Recordings
Two Bugs and a Roach (Arhoolie CD-324)
The Moon Is Rising (Arhoolie CD-468)
Blue Guitar (Paula PCD-18)
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