Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"(A) meticulously researched portrait...Hooker comes to life as a petulant, triumphant figure: complex and sometimes just unknowable, but as a genius for whom blues is as vital as a heartbeat."—
Rolling Stone"Surely the most exhaustive biography of any bluesman."—Chicago Tribune
Synopsis
Award-winning rock critic Murray explores the life and times of a legend whose career has spanned more than half a century: John Lee Hooker, the last of the Mississippi Delta bluesmen. 8-page photo insert.
Synopsis
With John Lee Hookers death in June 2001 the world lost one of the last great Mississippi Delta bluesmen. Acclaimed writer Charles Schaar Murrays
Boogie Man is the authorized and authoritative biography of this musician whose extraordinary career spanned over fifty years and included over one-hundred albums and five Grammy Awards. Murray was given unparalleled access to Hooker, and lets him tell his own story in his own words, from life in the Deep South to San Francisco, from the 1948 blues anthem “Boogie Chillen” to the Grammy-winning album
The Healer nearly a half-century later.
Boogie Man is far more than merely a brilliant biography of one man; it also gives the story of the music that inspired him. “When I die,” Hooker said, theyll bury the blues with me. But the blues will never die.” Here is the book that does him and his music full justice.
About the Author
Charles Shaar Murrays previous book,
Crosstown Traffic: Jimi Hendrix and the Postwar Rock n Roll Revolution, was called by
Entertainment Weekly “the best book on Hendrix,” and rode their A-list for over two months before winning the prestigious Ralph J. Gleason Music Book Award. He lives in England.