Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American Twentieth Century

By Charles Shaar Murray

Book Overview

Acclaimed writer Charles Shaar Murray's Boogie Man is the authorized and authoritative biography of an extraordinary musician. Murray was given unparalleled access to Hooker, and he lets the man from Clarksdale, Mississippi, tell his own story. "Everything you read on album covers is not true, and every album reads different," he told Murray. Murray helps Hooker set the record straight, disentangling the myths and legends from truths so rock-ribbed that we understand, as if for the first time, why they have provided the source for a lifetime of unforgettable sound.Murray weaves together Hooker's life and music to reveal their indissoluble bonds. Yet Boogie Man is far more than merely an accomplished and brilliant biography of one man; it gives an account of an entire art form. Grounded in a time and place in American culture, the blues are universal, and in the hands of the greatest practitioners its power resides in the miracle of using despair to transcend it. "The preacher's mantle," Murray tells us, "passes to the bluesman." This bluesman traveled a hard road out of the American South, from obscurity to adulation and back-and back again. John Lee Hooker has seen it all and sung it all, and his music is both a living legacy and an American treasure. Here is the book that does him and his music full justice.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312265638
• ISBN13: 9780312265632
• Release Date: October 2000
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 2.02 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.8" x 6.5"

Customer Reviews

A Great Book by a great author

I found this book to be insightful and well produced from beginning to end. I found the anecdotal material from family, friends, and peers to be very entertaining and useful. The portrait that is portrayed of John Lee Hooker is personal and with admiration. There were key elements which led to a better understanding of the artist and his development. I was talking to someone at a blues festival whom confided that their favorite John Lee Hooker song was The Healer. This is pretty typical. It's the collective social memory that remembers the latest thing you've done, not the most significant and not the first. This book is chock full of important details in this artist's career and life. From his humble beginnings in Mississippi to Memphis to Ohio to Detroit and eventually to San Francisco. To ignore the mention of the author over the subject would be a gross oversight. Charles Shaar Murray is a gifted and insightful author. He makes this encyclopedic biopic a fast entertaining read. Murray's talent isn't in the gathering of information, anyone can do that, rather, it's his insightful and respectful portrait painting with words.

Good Read!

This book came as a surprise. Right or wrong biographies of musicians are in a different category from other biographies in my mind. This book was delightful. It was articulate, engaging, well organized and researched. I found the tone personable. It gave me an appreciation for a man and for a musician that I did not know well. It also gave me an insight into the musical tradition of the blues with its Delta and African roots.This book felt like a fascinating conversation, over a period of weeks, with an insightful, appreciative and knowledgeable music and blues lover, somebody I would have loved to talk to over coffee and whose record collection it would be great to be introduced to and guided through. John Lee Hooker comes across as a good person who cares for others despite the fact he had a hard life and could have become bitter after been abused consistently by record companies.At times the final chapter is a bit over the top, but heck, there is nothing wrong with wanting the world to be healed.Good job Mr. Charles Shaar Murray!

Good As It Gets

This is the book John Lee deserved, written by someone who, thank heaven, gets it. If any blues artist has ever been the subject of a better biography, I haven't come across it. I began the book with great respect for Hooker as an artist. I finished it loving him as a human being, and convinced that although I have adored his music for more than 40 years, ever since a radio station that wouldn't play his records gave some of them to me, I have if anything underestimated his achievement. I wouldn't have believed Murray could teach me anything about how to listen to John Lee, but he did, he did.

just tell the story

I thank Mr Murray for writing a well researched biography and letting John Lee Hooker tell his own story. But I would offer him (or any other would-be biographers) the following suggestion: people are not interested in hearing how hip you are, they're interested in John Lee Hooker. Try to make yourself as inconspicuous as possible; don't get in the readers face with frequent references to "your correspondent"; use your own voice without inserting phrases in pseudo-Black English which only sound affected and draw attention to yourself instead of the subject matter (people writing on blues musicians often feel the need to sound hip and street-wise). Just tell the story.

The intellectual's Blues

The blues is primal as this biography reminds us more than once. Scholar's have used more words than a presidential candidate in trying to explain the blues. This book succeeds when it directly discusses John Lee Hooker, his life and thus the blues. When it repeats Blues 101 information found in other books it fails. Many other works by Sam Charters, Pete Welding, Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka) and others do it much better. Read works by these authors if the history and etiology of the blues is what you need. But if you want to know more about Hooker... this is the place! The author admits when the information he has conflicts with the various sources, yet lets you know where the truth may be found. An Hooker's words are worth the price alone! Read and then listen to the Man to find a answer to the question "What is the Blues?"