Detroit Rock & Roll by Ben Edmonds for Our Purposes, The
"KICK OUT THE JAMS!" Detroit Rock & Roll by Ben Edmonds For our purposes, the story of Detroit rock & roll begins on September 3, 1948, when a little-known local performer named John Lee Hooker entered United Sound Studios for his first recording session. Rock & roll was still an obscure rhythm & blues catchphrase, certainly not yet a musical genre, and Hooker's career trajectory had been that of the standard-issue bluesman. A native of the Mississippi Delta, he had drifted north for the same reason that eastern Europeans and Kentucky hillbillies, Greeks and Poles and Arabs and Asians and Mexicans had all been migrating toward Michigan in waves for the first half of the 20th Century. "The Motor City it was then, with the factories and everything, and the money was flowing," Hooker told biographer Charles Shaar Murray." All the cars were being built there. Detroit was the city then. Work, work, work, work. Plenty work, good wages, good money at that time."1 He worked many of those factories, Ford and General Motors among them, and at night he plied the craft of the bluesman in bars, social clubs and at house parties. But John Lee Hooker was no ordinary bluesman, and the song he cut at the tail of his first session, "Boogie Chillen," was no ordinary blues. Accompanied only by the stomp of his right foot, his acoustic guitar hammered an insistent pattern, partially based on boogie-woogie piano, that Hooker said he learned from his stepfather back in Mississippi as "country boogie." Informed by the urgency and relentless drive of his Detroit assembly line experiences, John Lee's urban guitar boogie would become a signature color on the rock & roll palette, as readily identifiable as Bo Diddley's beat or Chuck Berry's ringing chords.
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