Earl Hooker, Blues Master (American Made Music)
Musician/journalist Danchin (Blues Boy: The Life and Music of B.B. King) offers a fascinating account of neglected bluesman Hooker (1929-70) and postwar electric blues. Relying upon dozens of in-depth interviews and exhaustive research of secondary sources, he outlines the affable guitarist's start in the Chicago blues scene and painstakingly tracks his rambles through the clubs and juke joints of the Deep South, Florida, Missouri, Arkansas, California, and back to the West and South sides of the Windy City. While acknowledging that the general public was not familiar with Hooker's recordings on such small, independent labels as King, Chief, Age, and Cuca, the author reveals how respected his subject was by his better-known contemporaries B.B. King, Junior Wells, and Ike Turner. He ends with Hooker's increasing notoriety and major label recordings amid the blues explosion of the late 1960s before his untimely death after a lifelong bout with tuberculosis. A stellar examination of an overlooked blues master and of the roots and cultures of blues after World War II.DDave Szatmary, Univ. of Washington, SeattleCopyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.