Music

John Lee Hooker Jr. returns to Alaska as a man with a mission

Growing up as the son of a blues legend in the 1950s wasn't much different than growing up in any other family, says John Lee Hooker Jr.

"Life was just a little two-bedroom house on the west side of Detroit that probably cost $10,000 or even $5,000. He wasn't exactly famous," he said of his father. "He would go catch the bus with his guitar and amplifier, sitting next to construction workers with their tools and lunchboxes."

Hooker Jr., who performs at Williwaw this weekend, sometimes came along and watched from behind the curtains while his father performed. He remembers sitting on his father’s lap during a radio interview and singing on the air. “I was a daddy’s guy,” he says.

The elder John Lee Hooker (1917-2001) was the son of a sharecropper from Clarksdale, Mississippi. He had a hit with “Boogie Chillen” in 1949, three years before his namesake son was born, but black musicians didn’t make much in those days and neither blues nor boogie was what record companies wanted as rock ‘n’ roll swept the country. Hooker Jr. describes his father as “a rising moon” during those years, “a star that was waiting to be dusted off.”

In the 1960s the dust came off in a big way with an American blues revival that drew fans from all races. Hooker scored some hits again, including “Boom Boom,” “Dimples” and “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer.” Big-name musicians searched him out for collaborations, including John Mayall, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, Carlos Santana, Bonnie Raitt, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Canned Heat and the Rolling Stones. He had a cameo in the movie “The Blues Brothers.” Fame had finally arrived.

But fame may not have been the best thing for his kid. “My dad was in Europe and my mom was working. I had no one to hold me down,” Hooker Jr. says.

“You know, as a young junior high school teenager you have peers and everyone goes to parties and there’s experimentation. In my case it led to cocaine and heroin. By 16 I was addicted, getting locked up in juvenile. Juvenile led to adult jail and that led to graduation to the ‘big top,’ the state penitentiary.”

For the next several years he was in and out in the revolving door of prison. “There is no rehabilitation inside this so-called rehabilitation,” he says. “Gangs, corruption, violence, gambling, drugs. That’s what I was.”

The one bright spot in jail was music. “Keep in mind, the Tree (Hooker Sr.) lived in my house. I grew up next to the Tree. His musical dew was already on me. I took it into prisons and started musical programs.”

Other children of famous musicians were also incarcerated. They found themselves drawn to each other and the chance to perform with other talented jailbirds.

For certain inmates, every hour they spend making music was one less hour to remember that they’re behind bars. “You can escape the horrors of being locked up by the freedom in music,” Hooker says.

Inmate John Lee Hooker, Jr. performs at the California Rehabilitation Center in the 1970s.
Inmate John Lee Hooker Jr. performs at the California Rehabilitation Center in the 1970s.

But music wasn’t enough to make him change his life. That happened unexpectedly in 1985. “I was on my way to prison for the umpteenth time and it was announced over the loudspeaker that the chapel was open. Someone said they probably had some beautiful women there, so I went over, reluctantly.”

There was only one older woman chaplain and a couple of assistants, he recalls. “She said a few words and had an alter call. She said, ‘If you’re tired of using drugs, why don’t you try the Lord Jesus Christ?’ And I took her up on it. And my life began to change right then and there.”

At the notoriously brutal California prison in Soledad, he became the “Yard Preacher,” sermonizing and witnessing to some of the toughest criminals on the planet. When he got out he started a family and joined a church. “One of the pastors noticed my gift and knowledge about the Bible and made me a minister.”

He preached for five years before an old lover crept back into his life — music. There were offers to tour, record, make money and bask in the cheers of the crowd. “I fell,” he says. “I left the pulpit and went into the music business and started traveling all over the world.” Including to Anchorage, Alaska, where he played with Bo Diddley at the 1999 Blues on the Green music festival at Kincaid Park and was a regular guest at the former Blues Central club in Spenard.

“Frank (Dahl) would bring me up every year for eight or nine years,” Hooker says. (Dahl was the owner of Blues Central and the producer of the upcoming concerts at Williwaw.) “I always made sure my Decembers were vacant so I could do it.”

It was a good life with Grammy nominations, big shows, festival appearances, solo gigs in prominent nightclubs, travels abroad, singing his father’s songs for fans from Paris and Russia to Africa and Turkey.

John Lee Hooker, Jr. with Taj Mahal.
John Lee Hooker Jr. with Taj Mahal

“Turkey was radical,” he says. “We did a 23-day tour and we had to be, like, guarded. They wanted to storm the stage. They wanted to touch you, to shake your hand. They demanded photo ops. I’d start with ‘Boom, boom, boom, boom’ and they’d all be singing it with me. My dad had never even been to Turkey. Who knew?”

Then, three years ago, something happened to make him reconsider the details of his career. “I was playing a club in Sacramento. It was packed. It was only supposed to hold 200 people and there were close to 400. After I finished, violence broke out.”

At that moment, he says, he heard the spirit of God tell him, “Get out and do what I told you to do. Leave the blues culture and those lyrics and come back and serve the Lord Jesus Christ.”

He told his wife that he was going back to the ministry. She left him. “She’s a good lady,” he says, “but she didn’t want anything to do with my new life. It was too much culture shock for her. We’re still friends. And it wasn’t a big shock for me, because God told me it would happen.”

He went back to concentrate on his calling, recently graduating from college with a degree in biblical studies. “I already had a degree in robbery and a degree in burglary. Now I have a real degree. My first!”

As an ordained minister with the Church of God in Christ, one of the largest majority-black denominations in the world (and often praised for its music ministry), he volunteers at the Sacramento County Jail and serves as a chaplain at Sutter General Hospital near his home in Roseville, California, and at the maximum security Pelican Bay prison.

“It’s one of the worst prisons in the world,” he says. “I’m back in the same place that held me most of my life. But now I can leave and go back home. When I talk to the men I tell them, ‘I’m just like you. God sent me to come back and tell you.’ ”

He visits prisons and performs there whenever he can while on tour. He’ll sing at Hiland Mountain and Goose Creek correctional facilities in Alaska while here for his public show at Williwaw. Because the Rev. John Lee Hooker Jr. is still very much in the music business. He’s just more selective about his material.

“When you hear the sound, you’re going to say, ‘Oh, that’s funky,’ ” he says. “But I don’t glorify the drinking, the immoral things, like they do in some lyrics. You know, ‘Me and my baby got drunk last night.’ I sing about the Army and the Navy, my heroes. I sing about letting the evil go. I sing about Jesus.

“I sing some funny songs.” Humor has ever supplied brilliance to the blues. “And I sing some of my daddy’s songs out of respect for his fans.”

“I’m not going to preach at the audience,” he says. “But I will tell them that God came into my life. He didn’t make me a robot. He made me to love everybody no matter where they are in life.”

He sums up what’s happened to him as “a miracle. It’s not about John Lee Hooker Jr. It’s not about my dad,” he says. “All of this is for the glory of God.

“You make sure you put that in your story.”

“FROM THE BLUES TO THE PEWS,” AN EVENING WITH THE REV. JOHN LEE HOOKER JR., will be presented at 7 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17. Tickets are $25 in advance, $35 at the door. This is a 21-and-over concert. The concert will be at Williwaw, Sixth Avenue and F Street. Advance tickets are available at williwawsocial.com.

Editor’s note: Williwaw has announced that a previously scheduled Gospel Brunch with the Rev. John Lee Hooker Jr., slated for Sunday morning, has been canceled. According to the venue’s website, “all ticket holders are eligible for a full refund or can use their ticket to attend Saturday night’s concert.” Visit williwawsocial.com for more information.

John Lee Hooker, Jr. in concert. (Suzanne Foschino photography)
John Lee Hooker Jr. in concert (Suzanne Foschino photography)

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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