Walker's swing-influenced blues guitar, including 'the jazzy way he would sometimes run the blues scales' and intricate chording, appealed to Hooker.

He had considerable impact on Hooker, with both his playing and his showmanship. In 1942, the popular guitarist T-Bone Walker began a three-month stint at the Rhumboogie Club in Chicago. In this period, country-influenced blues was giving way to swing-influenced and jump blues styles, which often featured the electric guitar. From the beginning, the blues was Hooker's favorite music. The disease did not become critical until the mid-1950s, but it required periodic hospitalizations, beginning at an early age.īy 1942, when he was 12, Hooker was performing on Chicago street corners with childhood friends, including Bo Diddley. Hooker contracted tuberculosis when he was young. He had pronounced stuttering, which afflicted him all his life. He developed proficiency on the guitar but showed no interest in singing.

He was self-taught and picked up what he could from those around him. About age ten, he started playing the guitar. His family was musically inclined ( John Lee Hooker was a cousin), and Earl heard music played at home at an early age. In 1930, his parents moved the family to Chicago, during the Great Migration of blacks out of the rural South in the early 20th century. Hooker was born in rural Quitman County, Mississippi, outside of Clarksdale. It was nobody else like him, he was just one of a kind'. King, who commented, 'to me he is the best of modern guitarists.

His guitar playing has been acknowledged by many of his peers, including B.B. Just as his career was on an upswing, he died in 1970, at age 40, after a lifelong struggle with tuberculosis. In the late 1960s, Hooker began performing on the college and concert circuit and had several recording contracts. His 'Blue Guitar', a slide guitar instrumental single, was popular in the Chicago area and was later overdubbed with vocals by Muddy Waters as ' You Shook Me'. He recorded several singles and albums as a bandleader and with other well-known artists.

An early player of the electric guitar, Hooker was influenced by the modern urban styles of T-Bone Walker and Robert Nighthawk. Considered a 'musician's musician', he performed with blues artists such as Sonny Boy Williamson II, Junior Wells, and John Lee Hooker and fronted his own bands. Earl Zebedee Hooker (Janu– April 21, 1970) was a Chicago blues guitarist known for his slide guitar playing.

My Brown-Eyed Earl by Anna Bennett