French writer, producer, and translator Sebastian Danchin, who played guitar with blues bands in Chicago in the 1970s, was a few years too late to spend time with Earl Hooker, who had died of tuberculosis in 1970. But Danchin was living in musicians’ homes on the South Side, gleaning invaluable insights through the friendships he made. Musicians who knew the colorful Hooker always had stories to tell, whether about his awesome guitar skills, his incessant traveling, or his penchant for pilfering equipment. They provided plenty of material in Danchin’s quest to document the story of a Mississippi-born virtuoso not widely known to the public but hailed as the best by countless fellow musicians, including B.B. King. Earl, a cousin of the more famous John Lee Hooker, was, Danchin writes, the “epitome of the modern itinerant bluesman.” His biography is incisive, first-rate, and to the point, just as Earl Hooker’s artistry was.
