Earl Hooker was the ‘blues guitarists’ guitarist,’ the most respected six-string wizard in Chicago blues musicians’ circles during the 1950s and ’60s. A cousin of John Lee Hooker and a protege of slide guitar master Robert Nighthawk, Earl Zebedee Hooker was born near Vance, Mississippi, on January 15, 1929, but raised in Chicago. As a youthful prodigy, he preferred playing on the streets to attending school and frequently ran away from home for extended stays down south. He joined the King Biscuit Time radio show in Helena, Arkansas, for a stint in 1949, and made his first recordings in Florida, where he entertained fruit and vegetable pickers, in 1952. In 1953, he recorded for Sam Phillips of Sun Records in Memphis in the company of Pinetop Perkins or Boyd Gilmore. The Sun sides amply displayed Hooker’s prowess but remained unissued until after his death, when European labels began to mine the Sun vaults. In Chicago his records included his best known instrumental, ‘Blue Guitar,” and session work with Junior Wells (‘Messing With the Kid’ and ‘Little By Little’) and Ricky Allen (‘Cut You Loose’). Chess Records used Hooker instrumentals as backing tracks for Muddy Waters’ ‘You Need Love’ (reworked by Led Zeppelin as ‘Whole Lotta Love’) and ‘You Shook Me’ (also covered by Zep). The restless Hooker often took to the highway with his Roadmasters band, sometimes without advance bookings, depending on his ability to hustle up gigs. Despite trickery that sometimes got him trouble with band members, club owners or the law, Hooker was still well-liked among fellow musicians. Hooker recorded several albums in his final years, and during 1969 alone he recorded four LPs of his own and several live tracks that later appeared on other albums, in addition to playing guitar on sessions by Charles Brown, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, Jimmy Witherspoon, and his cousin John Lee, among others. Hooker, who battled tuberculosis for most of his life, succumbed to TB in Chicago on April 21, 1970. In 1975, B.B. King named Hooker one of his ten favorite guitarists in Guitar Player magazine. An excellent biography, Earl Hooker: Blues Master by Sebastian Danchin, was published in 2001.
