John Lee Hooker Four Classic Albums (2-CD)

AVID Roots continues with its Four Classic Blues album series with a re-mastered 2CD release by John Lee Hooker complete with original artwork and liner notes. 'I'm John Lee Hooker'; 'Travelin''; 'Plays And Sings The Blues' and 'Burnin'' The story of John Lee Hooker is another classic blues story but with a twist, this one has a happy ending! Born into a poor sharecropping family with eleven children near Clarkesdale, Mississippi, by 1921 John Lee was saying hello to his new step father, a blues musician called William Moore. John Lee sites Moore as the man who set him on the road of the blues man. By 14 he had run away from home, allegedly never to see his mother or step father again. By the 1940's Hooker had become part of the black migration from the south to the industrial towns of the north. However, whereas the likes of Muddy and Wolf went to Chicago, Hooker landed in Detroit where he found work in the Ford Motor Company all the while checking out and playing in the local clubs around town. It was here that he decided to buy his first electric guitar, in order to be heard, he had discovered, you needed to play LOUD! His recording career began in 1948 when he recorded his first major hit and most famous song 'Boogie Chillun' which trade marked his classic sound, the boogie shuffle. John Lee Hooker falls into that rare category of blues men that includes B.B. King and not many others, who became more popular and successful the older they became. He enjoyed the 1960's blues revival along with many of the early rural blues greats but was able to sustain that success through the following years and indeed enjoyed his greatest success during the 1980's and 90's and was preparing to tour Europe when he died at age 83 in 2001.