John Lee Hooker
Desert Island Discs
BBC
4.3 • 14.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 1995
⏱️ 32 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is one of the oldest and deepest voices in rock music - the legendary bluesman John Lee Hooker. The son of a preacher man, he was brought up in Clarksdale, Mississippi, and his first guitar was made from an old inner tube tied to the barn door. By the age of 14, he had his own guitar and ran away to Memphis with two dollars in his pocket for a life touring small blues clubs.
With hits like Boom Boom, Dimples and Boogie Chillun, he has been one of the major influences on rock stars like Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones.
[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]
Favourite track: Goin Down Slow by B.B. King & Bobby Bland Book: A book with pictures (of pretty women) Luxury: His guitar
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. |
| 0:05.0 | For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music. |
| 0:08.0 | The program was originally broadcast in 1995, and the presenter was Sue Lawley. My castaway this week is the oldest star in rock music. Born 74 years ago in the Mississippi Delta, |
| 0:38.0 | his resonant deep-throated voice now has more than a hundred blues albums to its credit. |
| 0:43.8 | He comes from a family of southern sharecroppers. |
| 0:46.8 | He ran away when he was 14 and he went on the road as a musician. |
| 0:50.9 | Greatly revered by stars such as the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton, his career seemed to have |
| 0:56.4 | come to an end during the late 70s and the 80s. |
| 0:59.3 | And then at the age of 69 he came out with the album The Heeler. |
| 1:04.0 | It was one of the most astonishing comebacks in the history of the business. |
| 1:08.6 | I love people, small nightclubs and pretty women, he says. After that that I just get on with singing he is |
| 1:15.5 | John Lee Hooker is that why you go on singing the blues as well as you do John |
| 1:22.1 | because you stay close to the things that you love. |
| 1:24.6 | I admit I do like pretty women I admit that that I wouldn't be a man whatever |
| 1:31.1 | if I don't but I do. And people, the young people, trying to get |
| 1:36.4 | them to see what the blues is all about. But the blues, as I understand it, isn't about |
| 1:41.6 | feeling blue, is it? It's about feeling better. |
| 1:44.5 | It's better. That's why I try to get the people to see. |
| 1:49.4 | Blues is not a downer. |
| 1:52.0 | Blues is a heaver. get people to feeling better. |
| 1:55.0 | When something on your mind really bothers you, you can put on some good blues. |
| 2:01.0 | As soon as your mind, it picks you up, not put you down. |
... |
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