Johnny Rivers (born John Henry Ramistella, November 7, 1942, New York City) is an American rock and roll singer, songwriter, guitarist, and record producer. His styles include folk songs, blues, and revivals of old-time rock 'n' roll songs and some original material. Rivers's greatest success came in the mid and late 1960s with a string of hit songs (including "Seventh Son", "Poor Side of Town", "Summer Rain", and "Secret Agent Man"), but he has continued to record and perform to the present.

Career

1950s

Ramistella formed his own band, The Spades, in junior high school and made his first record at age 14, while still a student at Baton Rouge High School. Some of their music was recorded on the Suede label as early as 1956.

On a trip back to New York in 1958, he met Alan Freed who advised him to change his name, so Johnny Ramistella had the Baton Rouge attorney Arthur J. Cobb change his name to Johnny Rivers after the Mississippi River that flows near Baton Rouge. Freed also helped Rivers score some recording contracts on the Gone label. From March 1958 to March 1959, Rivers released three records which did not sell well.

In 1959, Rivers returned to Baton Rouge. While playing throughout the American South along side Southern comedian Brother Dave Gardner, one evening in Birmingham, Rivers met Audrey Williams, the first wife of Hank Williams and she took Rivers to Nashville, where he recorded two more records. They were not successful either, but Johnny stayed in Nashville as a songwriter and demo singer for $25 a demo. While in Nashville, Rivers worked alongside Roger Miller. By this time, Rivers' self-esteem about his singing diminished, and he thought he would never make it as a singer, therefore writing, and not singing, moved to the forefront.

1960s

In 1963, Rivers recorded the theme song for the American broadcast of a British television series, "Danger Man," which starred Patrick McGoohan. At first, Rivers balked at the idea, feeling that he did not have the talent to make a record on an international label, but he eventually relented. The American version of the show was titled "Secret Agent", and the song "Secret Agent Man" reached number 3 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts in 1966. It sold one million copies, achieving gold disc status.

In 1964, Elmer Valentine gave Rivers a one-year contract to open in his new nightclub, Whisky a Go Go, on Sunset Strip in West Hollywood. The Whisky a Go Go opened three days before The Beatles released "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and the British Invasion knocked almost every American artist off the top of the charts. But Rivers was so popular that producer Lou Adler decided to issue ''Johnny Rivers Live At The Whisky A Go Go''. The live album reached #12 on the charts and the single "Memphis" reached the US Hit Parade #2 spot in July 1964. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc. According to Elvis Presley's friend and employee Alan Fortas, Presley played his friend (Rivers) a test pressing of "Memphis" that Elvis had made but not released. Rivers was impressed and, much to Presley's chagrin, Rivers recorded and released it, even copying the arrangement (Fortas writes: "After that, Johnny was on Elvis's shit list" and was persona non grata from then on). Rivers' version far outsold the Chuck Berry original from August 1959 which stalled at #87 in the US. (Lonnie Mack's 1963 instrumental version of "Memphis" reached the US Hit Parade top five in July; the Chuck Berry original and its British rival cover version fought it out in the UK Hit parade in November 1963).

Rivers made a successful transition from nightclub entertainer to chart-busting pop singer and had created the "Go Go sound", part of a scene which included Go-Go dancers. In 1964 and 1965, Rivers continued to record mostly live, Go-Go style records including "Maybellene" (another Berry cover), after which came "Mountain of Love", "Midnight Special", "Seventh Son" (written by Willie Dixon) and "Where Have All the Flowers Gone?" (written by Pete Seeger), all of which were hits.

Rivers wanted to try something different; he switched gears in 1966, and began to record ballads characterized by his smooth, soulful voice, and background vocalists (mostly women), producing such successful hits as "Poor Side Of Town", which would be his biggest hit and his only number one record. Another hit was "Secret Agent Man", the theme from the ''Secret Agent'' television series (written by P.F. Sloan and Steve Barri). He also started his own record company, Soul City Records, where he won a Grammy Award as the producer of The 5th Dimension, which eventually recorded "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In" and "Wedding Bell Blues", two number-one hits with Rivers's label. Johnny is also credited with giving songwriter Jimmy Webb a major break, when the 5th Dimension recorded Webb's song "Up, Up, and Away".

Rivers continued to record more hits, including "Baby I Need Your Lovin'" (cover of the Four Tops) and "The Tracks of My Tears" (cover of the Miracles), both went Top 10 in 1967. In 1968, Rivers released ''Realization'', a number-five album on the LP charts that included the #14 pop chart single "Summer Rain", written by a former member of The Mugwumps, James Hendricks (not to be confused with Jimi Hendrix). The album included some of the psychedelic influences of the time and marked a subtle change in his musical direction, with more thoughtful types of songs, included such ballads as "Look To Your Soul" and "Going Back to Big Sur".

1970s

1980s to current

In 1998, Rivers reactivated his Soul City imprint and released ''Last Train to Memphis''.

In early 2000, Rivers recorded with Eric Clapton, Tom Petty, and Paul McCartney on a tribute album dedicated to Buddy Holly's backup band, "The Crickets".

In all, Rivers had nine Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 and 17 in the Top 40 from 1964 to 1977. In total, he has sold well over 30 million records.

Rivers is one of a small number of performers such as Paul Simon, Billy Joel, Pink Floyd (from 1975's ''Wish You Were Here'' onward), Queen, Genesis (though under the members' individual names and/or the pseudonym Gelring Limited) and Neil Diamond who have their name as the copyright owner on their recordings. (Most records have the recording company as the named owner of the recording.) This noteworthy development was spearheaded by supergroup The Bee Gees after their successful $200,000,000 lawsuit against RSO, which remains to this day the largest successful lawsuit against a record company by an artist/group.

On June 12, 2009, Johnny Rivers was inducted into The Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

Selected discography

Albums

Compilations

Notable singles

Chart positions are from the Billboard Hot 100:

References

External links

Category:1942 births Category:Living people Category:People from New York City Category:People from Baton Rouge, Louisiana Category:Baton Rouge Magnet High School alumni Category:American rock guitarists Category:American male singers Category:Imperial Records artists Category:Cub Records artists Category:American record producers Category:American rock songwriters Category:Atlantic Records artists Category:Epic Records artists Category:Era Records artists Category:Musicians from Louisiana

John Lee Hooker (August 22, 1917 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist, born near Clarksdale, Mississippi. Hooker began his life as the son of a sharecropper, William Hooker, and rose to prominence performing his own unique style of what was originally closest to Delta blues. He developed a 'talking blues' style that was his trademark. Though similar to the early Delta blues, his music was metrically free. John Lee Hooker could be said to embody his own unique genre of the blues, often incorporating the boogie-woogie piano style and a driving rhythm into his masterful and idiosyncratic blues guitar and singing. His best known songs include "Boogie Chillen'" (1948), "I'm in the Mood" (1951) and "Boom Boom" (1962), the first two reaching R&B; #1 in the ''Billboard'' charts.

Early life

Hooker and his siblings were home-schooled. They were permitted to listen only to religious songs, with his earliest exposure being the spirituals sung in church. In 1921, his parents separated. The next year, his mother married William Moore, a blues singer who provided Hooker with his first introduction to the guitar (and whom John would later credit for his distinctive playing style).

Hooker was also influenced by his stepfather, a local blues guitarist, who learned in Shreveport, Louisiana to play a droning, one-chord blues that was strikingly different from the Delta blues of the time. Around 1923 his natural father died. At the age of 15, John Lee Hooker ran away from home, reportedly never seeing his mother or stepfather again.

Throughout the 1930s, Hooker lived in Memphis, Tennessee where he worked on Beale Street at The Daisy Theatre and occasionally performed at house parties. He worked in factories in various cities during World War II, drifting until he found himself in Detroit in 1948 working at Ford Motor Company. He felt right at home near the blues venues and saloons on Hastings Street, the heart of black entertainment on Detroit's east side. In a city noted for its pianists, guitar players were scarce. Performing in Detroit clubs, his popularity grew quickly and, seeking a louder instrument than his crude acoustic guitar, he bought his first electric guitar.

Career

Hooker's recording career began in 1948 when his agent placed a demo, made by Hooker, with the Bihari brothers, owners of the Modern Records label. The company initially released an up-tempo number, "Boogie Chillen'", which became Hooker's first hit single. Though they were not songwriters, the Biharis often purchased or claimed co-authorship of songs that appeared on their labels, thus securing songwriting royalties for themselves, in addition to their own streams of income.

Sometimes these songs were older tunes which Hooker renamed, as with B.B. King's "Rock Me Baby", anonymous jams "B.B.'s Boogie" or songs by employees (bandleader Vince Weaver). The Biharis used a number of pseudonyms for songwriting credits: Jules was credited as ''Jules Taub''; Joe as ''Joe Josea''; and Sam as ''Sam Ling''. One song by John Lee Hooker, "Down Child" is solely credited to "Taub", with Hooker receiving no credit for the song whatsoever. Another, "Turn Over a New Leaf" is credited to Hooker and "Ling".

Despite being illiterate, Hooker was a prolific lyricist. In addition to adapting the occasionally traditional blues lyric (such as "if I was chief of police, I would run her right out of town"), he freely invented many of his songs from scratch. Recording studios in the 1950s rarely paid black musicians more than a pittance, so Hooker would spend the night wandering from studio to studio, coming up with new songs or variations on his songs for each studio. Because of his recording contract, he would record these songs under obvious pseudonyms such as John Lee Booker, notably for Chess Records and Chance Records in 1951/52, as Johnny Lee for De Luxe Records in 1953/54 as John Lee, and even John Lee Cooker, or as Texas Slim, Delta John, Birmingham Sam and his Magic Guitar, Johnny Williams, or The Boogie Man.

His early solo songs were recorded under Bernie Besman. John Lee Hooker rarely played on a standard beat, changing tempo to fit the needs of the song. This often made it difficult to use backing musicians who were not accustomed to Hooker's musical vagaries. As a result, Besman would record Hooker, in addition to playing guitar and singing, stomping along with the music on a wooden pallet. For much of this time period he recorded and toured with Eddie Kirkland, who was still performing as of 2008. Later sessions for the VeeJay label in Chicago used studio musicians on most of his recordings, including Eddie Taylor, who could handle his musical idiosyncrasies very well. His biggest UK hit, "Boom Boom", (originally released on VeeJay) was recorded with a horn section.

Later life

He appeared and sang in the 1980 movie ''The Blues Brothers''. Due to Hooker's improvisational style, his performance was filmed and sound-recorded live at the scene at Chicago's Maxwell Street Market, in contrast to the usual "playback" technique used in most film musicals. Hooker was also a direct influence in the look of John Belushi's character Jake Blues.

In 1989, he joined with a number of musicians, including Carlos Santana and Bonnie Raitt to record ''The Healer'', for which he and Santana won a Grammy Award. Hooker recorded several songs with Van Morrison, including "Never Get Out of These Blues Alive", "The Healing Game" and "I Cover the Waterfront". He also appeared on stage with Van Morrison several times, some of which was released on the live album ''A Night in San Francisco''. The same year he appeared as the title character on Pete Townshend's ''The Iron Man: A Musical''.

Hooker recorded over 100 albums. He lived the last years of his life in Long Beach, California. In 1997, he opened a nightclub in San Francisco's Fillmore District called "John Lee Hooker's Boom Boom Room", after one of his hits.

He fell ill just before a tour of Europe in 2001 and died on June 21 at the age of 83, a month shy of his 84th birthday. His last live in the studio recording on guitar and vocal was of a song he wrote with Pete Sears called "Elizebeth", featuring members of his "Coast to Coast Blues Band" with Sears on piano. It was recorded on January 14, 1998 at Bayview Studios in Richmond, California. The last song Hooker recorded before his death was "Ali D'Oro", a collaboration with the Italian soul singer Zucchero, in which Hooker sang the chorus "I lay down with an angel". He was survived by eight children, nineteen grandchildren, eighteen great-grandchildren, a nephew, and fiance Sidora Dazi. One of his children is the musician John Lee Hooker, Jr.

Among his many awards, Hooker has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and in 1991 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Two of his songs, "Boogie Chillen" and "Boom Boom" were included in the list of The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll. "Boogie Chillen" was included as one of the Songs of the Century. He was also inducted in 1980 into the Blues Hall of Fame. In 2000, Hooker was awarded the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award.

Music

He maintained a solo career, popular with blues and folk music fans of the early 1960s and crossed over to white audiences, giving an early opportunity to the young Bob Dylan. As he got older, he added more and more people to his band, changing his live show from simply Hooker with his guitar to a large band, with Hooker singing.

His vocal phrasing was less closely tied to specific bars than most blues singers. This casual, rambling style had been gradually diminishing with the onset of electric blues bands from Chicago but, even when not playing solo, Hooker retained it in his sound.

Though Hooker lived in Detroit during most of his career, he is not associated with the Chicago-style blues prevalent in large northern cities, as much as he is with the southern rural blues styles, known as delta blues, country blues, folk blues, or "front porch blues". His use of an electric guitar tied together the Delta blues with the emerging post-war electric blues.

His songs have been covered by Buddy Guy, Cream, AC/DC, ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, Tom Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Van Morrison, The Yardbirds, The Animals, The Doors, The White Stripes, MC5, George Thorogood, R. L. Burnside, The J. Geils Band, The Gories, Cat Power, and The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion.

Awards and recognition

Grammy Awards: :* Best Traditional Blues Recording, 1990 for ''I'm in the Mood'' (with Bonnie Raitt) :* Best Traditional Blues Recording, 1998 for ''Don't Look Back :* Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, 1998, "Don't Look Back" (with Van Morrison) :* Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2000

Discography

Singles

Albums

THE DETROIT YEARS (recordings 1948-1955)

THE ROSEBUD YEARS (recordings 1975-2001)

Compilations

Notes

References

External links

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