American musician John Lee Hooker (1917-2001) was an influential blues artist who played a role in the development of the genre from the late 1940s through the 1990s. Playing both electric and acoustic guitar, Hooker's distinctive vocal and instrumental style also shaped the development of rock and folk music during the 1960s and 1970s.

John Lee Hooker was born on August 22, 1917 (some sources say 1920), in Clarksdale, Mississippi, the fourth of 11 children born to William and Minnie Hooker. Hooker's father was a sharecropper and Baptist minister who did not like the blues, referring to it as the "devil's music." Hooker's parents separated when he was five and divorced when he was 11 years old.

While Hooker received a limited formal education, music was an important component to his life. He first became exposed to it at church and constructed his first instrument out of a piece of string and an...