Chicago, 1959. Ask any blues musician where to go, and the answer was likely, “Wherever Earl Hooker is playing.”
Earl was the blues-guitarist’s guitarist, a commanding presence on the city’s scene who captivated countless listeners, but remained an enigma even though his skill reduced B.B. King to tears. His instrumentals rival Freddie King’s ditties and he affected players across the spectrum – the short list includes George Harrison, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and anyone else purveying standard-tuned slide guitar. Listening to Two Bugs and a Roach or his work as side man leaves the impression one has heard a dozen players in his spot. Maybe his lack of a formula is one reason he didn’t ignite the greater public.
Earl Zebedee Hooker was born January 15, 1930, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, home of the Delta blues, and moved to Chicago with his parents as a toddler. His family was musical – father played harmonica, guitar and sang, mother sang, sister, Earlene, played organ and sang. The family circle also included cousins John Lee Hooker and vocalist Joe Hinton (“Funny How Time Slips Away”). By age 12, Earl had taught himself fundamentals on a Sears acoustic and was soon performing on street corners with Bo Diddley. Initially drawn to jump blues and T-Bone Walker’s jazz/swing sounds, he learned slide guitar from Robert Nighthawk, with whom he toured the South in the mid ’40s, making stops in Helena, Arkansas, where he was heard on radio’s “King Biscuit Time.” After a tour with Ike Turner, Earl relocated to Memphis in ’49 and became part of the Beale Street crew that included B.B. King, Johnny Ace, and Bobby Blue Bland. The paragon of an itinerate bluesman, he formed his own band, began touring, and developed a regional reputation. After impressing a talent scout in Bradenton, Florida, he made his debut recording, “Race Track” on King, then recorded for numerous labels in the ’50s (including “The Hucklebuck” for Sun). He became a valued sideman with Junior Wells, Bobby Bland, Sonny Boy Williamson, and many others, appearing prominently on Williamson’s “Baby, Please Don’t Go.” Plagued by tuberculosis, he recorded few vocals after 1953’s “Black Angel Blues,” but became admired for his instrumental prowess.
Earl’s command of alternating slide and standard phrases and the range of the instrument are epitomized in this example from “Blue Guitar.” Note the continued use of contrasting lines in measures 1-4, expanded with chord punches in 2-3 and very effective use of space. The wailing slide line in 5 is a climactic phrase in the high register that builds on the minor-pentatonic sound with functional half steps. It’s answered in the middle register by a blues-scale fingered phrase that ends the chorus on a decisive note before finally dropping into the low register for closure. Check out the position changes along the way and the traditional blues cadence lick in 6-7.
In ’56, Earl returned to Chicago to play clubs and continued touring. From ’59 to ’63, he was prolific as house guitarist for the Chief, Mel-Lon, and Age labels, recording more than 40 albums with Wells, Magic Sam, A.C. Reed, “Big Moose” Walker, Jackie Brenston, and many others; his playing featured prominently on classics like “Messin’ with The Kid” and “It Hurts Me Too.” His own output consisted of important instrumentals like “Calling All Blues,” “Blues in D Natural,” and “Blue Guitar.” The latter, cut in ’61 while the band was rehearsing, sold surprisingly well for an impromptu instrumental and became a signature piece. Leonard Chess exploited Hooker’s cachet in ’62, when he struck an arrangement with London to overdub Muddy Waters’ vocals (lyrics by Willie Dixon) on the track, renamed “You Shook Me.” Chess then hired Earl to record other instrumentals for Waters using a similar formula and found they sold better than Muddy’s earlier releases. “You Need Love” (“Whole Lotta Love”), and “You Shook Me” were adapted by Led Zeppelin on it first two albums. From ’64 into ’67, he recorded for Cuca and released the appropriately titled Genius of Earl Hooker, a landmark instrumental opus that contained the prototype-funk ode to tuberculosis, “Two Bugs in a Rug.” He was hospitalized in ’67/’68 then, against doctors’ orders, formed a band with vocalist Andrew Odom, resumed performing and touring, and even upped the ante with Two Bugs and a Roach.
Hooker was very productive in ’69 (his final year), reuniting with Junior Wells for a concert series that included Chicago’s Kinetic Playground. He also recorded Sweet Black Angel using Ike Turner’s arrangements, and guested with cousin John Lee Hooker on If You Miss ’Im… I Got ’Im. For Bluesway, he recorded six more albums with Charles Brown, Jimmy Witherspoon, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, Andrew Odom, “Big Moose” Walker, and his own date as leader, Don’t Have to Worry. The latter is a masterpiece with consistent performances and a sympathetic band that included second guitarist Paul Asbell. He appeared at the Fillmore and Matrix, recorded Hooker and Steve, his ode to Wes Montgomery and Jimmy Smith, and retuned to Chicago in August to participate in the Chicago Blues Festival.
Less than a year later, following a successful tour of Europe in October, he was just 40 years old when he succumbed to TB on April 21, 1970. Respected by peers and adored by fans, he remains unheralded in blues history, though he has influenced countless players.
INFLUENCES
Hooker’s primary influences were Robert Nighthawk and T-Bone Walker; he learned slide from the former, and modern electric blues (including showmanship) from Walker.
Earl’s reworking of a classic country-blues lick is immortalized in the instrumental “Blue Guitar,” where his intro showcases the transformation of a famed Tampa Red line (likely played on a National resonator) into a haunting electric-guitar melody that affected Muddy Waters and, ultimately, Led Zeppelin. It’s highlighted by Earl’s singing standard-tuned slide and demonstrates his use of pure melody in the form of decorated D minor pentatonic and blues-scale lines in contrast to the triadic chord-tuned norms of earlier rural bottleneck styles. Note the use of his vocalesque vibrato and purposeful chromaticism throughout, particularly in the leading-tone effect of half-step motion (A-G#-A and D-C#-D) in measures 2-3 and the microtonal slide melody in 4. This was the basis for “You Shook Me,” covered by Zep and countless blues and rock bands.
STYLE
Hooker explored more of the music spectrum than any Chicago blues guitarist, and arguably more than any blues guitarist, period, and was legendary for his mastery of numerous styles. These divergent aspects are memorialized in backstage renditions of “Walking the Floor” and “Rocket 88” as well as electric blues performances in footage from his ’69 European tour.
It’s instructive to break his style into three categories – standard blues guitar, slide guitar, and everything else. Among standard blues players, his approach and technique are commensurate with the Kings, Buddy Guy, and Otis Rush. He’s equally fluent with the genre’s pentatonic/blues-scale vocabulary, single-note melodies, triplet-based phrasing, and idiomatic string bending established by T-Bone Walker, but reveals greater diversity in his application of country, jazz, rock and roll, and other seemingly incongruent elements. He is acknowledged as the “most immaculate” Chicago blues guitarist, which not a denigration of his colleagues; B.B. called him “the best of the modern blues guitarists.” “Immaculate” succinctly describes his controlled playing at all tempos, intricate solo lines (check out his quick-picked flurries in “Galloping Horses a Lazy Mule”), well-placed fills, and clean, tuneful slide playing. It’s equally appropriate in describing his song-oriented riffs and rhythm-guitar style, elements personified in his superb backing work with Junior Wells, and on recordings as leader.
Earl was concerned with dynamics and contrast in his playing. A typical Hooker solo would find him combining and contrasting tonal shadings in dialoguing phrases, exploiting extreme changes of timbre, either through alternating pickup selection, playing near the bridge, working the guitar’s Tone control, or all of the above. Earl often blended these dynamic/timbral changes with changes in volume, attitude, vibrato, and articulation within the same line or stated as call-and-response phrases, as in “End of the Blues” and “Something You Ate.”
He sidestepped the confines of playing in the vein of T-Bone Walker and B.B. King. In addition to his fretted blues style, he developed an uncommon standard-tuned slide approach based on his experience with Robert Nighthawk that deviated markedly from chord-tuned norms established by Elmore James and rural blues artists. Hooker authority Billy Flynn verified he wore a small metal tube on his left pinky, leaving the remaining fingers free for fretted licks and chording. He used the slide as a true melody-conscious voice, as in “Blue Guitar.” In many tracks, he exhibited skill at alternating slide and fretted lines in solos and fills as in “New Sweet Black Angel.” He sometimes used the slide above the pickups to create stratospheric effects, as in “Nothing But Good,” like Duane Allman’s lines in “Layla.” In fact, modern rock owes much to Earl’s slide juju. Consider the influence on Page’s bottlenecking in “You Shook Me.” Moreover, Beck was inspired by his slide work, and used wah and slide during “IAin’t Superstitious,” while Harrison’s style recalls the Hooker melodic mystique of “Tanya.”
In the everything-else category, he was a true fusion artist, reconciling hillbilly, swing, Hawaiian, country, pop, boogie woogie, funk, soul jazz, rock and roll and nascent psychedelia with electric blues guitar in its modern form, which he was partly responsible for developing. “Off the Hook” and “Hot and Heavy” hint at soul-jazz leanings while “Galloping Horses a Lazy Mule” features a swing-jazz chording episode in the form of chromatic 9th chords, that presaged and likely influenced “Jeff’s Boogie.” Earl showcased Hawaiian and pop sounds on “Bertha,” acknowledging slide’s early slack-key roots. His percussive muted country riffs on “Galloping Horses a Lazy Mule” come off like a more-animated Luther Perkins (Johnny Cash) while “Walking the Floor” and “Guitar Rag” are the closest any modern blues guitarist has gotten to authentic country/western or Western swing. Funk and soul elements are highlighted in “Hooker Special” and “Hold On, I’m Coming” (rendered on 12-string slide). Ethnic-tinged sounds are mingled with blues and R&B in “Apache War Dance.” “Bright Sounds” channels the mood and B3 colors of “Green Onions.” Not ambivalent about stretching the blues, he incorporated steel-guitar instrumentation on Two Bugs and a Roach. Unlike many of his forebears and contemporaries, he exploited the full tonal range of the electric guitar and reached beyond traditional blues to incorporate electric 12-string and atypical effects like spring-reverb on “Calling All Blues” and rockabilly slap echo on “Universal Rock.”
Hooker was the undisputed master of combining and alternating standard fingered notes and slide technique. This passage from “Blue Guitar” is a striking case in point. Note the familiar flurries and string bends (without slide, reminiscent of the T-Bone/B.B. King school) in measures 1-2 and 4-5. These are alternated with his uncommon standard-tuned slide lines (with slide) in 3-4 and 5-6 in call-and-response phraseology. His slide intensifies the minor-major blues polarity with a powerful approach line in 5. The overlapping, contrasting effect is musically compelling and provides sonic variety that transcends either style.
In the late ’60s, Hooker was the most successful of mainstream Chicago blues guitarists to exploit wah in his playing. The pedal was not a gimmick or sound effect for him, but a natural outgrowth, as he had experimented with rapid motion of the Tone pot for similar effects years earlier. His slide-wah is exemplified in “Wah Blues,” “Earl Hooker Blues,” and “You Don’t Want Me,” which demonstrate his personal application as a tool for blues phrasing.
ESSENTIAL LISTENING
Genius Of Earl Hooker, Blue Guitar, and Two Bugs and a Roach are essential. Simply The Best gathers tracks from Chess, Blue Thumb, and Bluesway sessions.
ESSENTIAL VIEWING
Highly recommended are “Earl’s Boogie” “Off the Hook,” and footage from the American Blues Festival (Europe, 1969).
SOUND
Earl played a number of instruments. In the ’50s and early ’60s, he favored a Stratocaster heard to good effect on Junior Wells tracks including “Messin’ With the Kid.” Unique among bluesmen, he employed doubleneck guitars like a Danaelectro 3923 guitar/bass and Gibson EDS-1275. Between 1958 and ’62, he used the Double 12, a hollow double florentine-cutaway made a for him, then later, the solidbody EDS. According to Paul Asbell, by ’68, he preferred an SG Standard but experimented with an ES-345, a Gibson Trini Lopez (on Hooker and Steve), and an import Shaftesbury 3264 Barney Kessel knock-off. His black Univox was also a Japanese Les Paul Custom copy with his name in stick-on letters and flower decals.
Asbell says Earl likely played a blackface Super-Reverb, as favored by many Chicago blues guitarists. During his ’69 European tour, he achieved a very potent blues-rock tone with this unassuming guitar and Sound City stacks.
Wolf Marshall is the founder and original editor-in-chief of GuitarOne magazine. A respected author and columnist, he has been influential in contemporary music education since the early 1980s. His books include 101 Must-Know Rock Licks, B.B. King: the Definitive Collection, and Best of Jazz Guitar, and a list credits can be found at wolfmarshall.com.
This article originally appeared in VG’s April 2022 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
