Tale #24.Healing Blues

The urban myth surrounding John Lee Hooker's re-discovery from obscurity by Carlos Santana and Canned Heat is only marginally based on truth. He stayed very active in the blues community: Into the 1980's his Coast to Coast Blues Band worked consistently from its base in San Francisco and John added regular sessions on others' blues albums to his "Jealous" project - as well as that appearance in the Blues Brothers movie. By 1987 he was in the studio with Charlie Musselwhite and three of Canned Heat and a year later with Bonnie Raitt and then with Carlos Santana and his group. Those recordings were put together in Summer 1989 for the "Healer" project that brought John Lee Hooker back into mainstream focus and kick-started an interest in a newly cool genre, blues.

Purists disliked the album and its subsequent projects, decrying Hooker's involvement as cameos on his own albums. Putting those observations on one side he did include some haunting solo pieces as good as any he'd done 40 years earlier. He still approached the music in his own inimitable way with varying bar counts.

STAR BLUES on 19th June 2011 chose the title track of the turning-point album "the Healer" to mark the tenth year since John's death on 21st June 2001.

Tale #23.The Guitar Master's Swing Out Rhythm

The single-stringing style of Lonnie Johnson [rn: Alonzo Johnson, born 1899] was the inspiration for B. B. King, Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. We think it common place for electric rock guitarists but Johnson perfected his technique before going electric and he used his gifts for dozens of jazz, blues and r&b recordings.

Initially he was signed to the Okeh label and he duped many with his pairing with Blind Willie Dunn (in reality white jazz player Eddie Lang). After some commercial success, both solo and as a duo, Okeh dropped him out of the blue and for five years he looked for work outside music. By November 1937 he was in the studio again to record "Swing Out Rhythm" - a piece of dexterous grace and beauty with Joshua Altheimer on piano. It would be another two years before he got chance to record again for labels like RCA Victor and King.

His 1952 song "Tomorrow Night" was a hit for him but he got the big royalty cheques for the versions recorded by Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis. Ironically the coming of rock'n'roll made him seem old-fashioned and he slowly drifted out of music again.

Our STAR BLUES playlist on 5th June took "Swing Out Rhythm" from the 4-disc survey of his career up to 1952 called "Original Guitar Wizard" issued on the Proper label some while ago.