Hobo Blues

A hypnotic one-chord groove by John Lee Hooker

Now that the novelty of merely getting to talk about the blues in class has worn off, I am dealing with the practical question of how best to teach it. Rather than working from a set of abstract principles, I decided to walk my students through a selection of specific tunes to see what we can learn from them. I am especially interested in examples that don't follow the standard twelve bar blues form or use the I, IV and V chords. Too many music education resources boil the blues down to these tropes, and I want students to understand that the music is more stylistically diverse than that. For example, listen to "Hobo Blues" by John Lee Hooker, which he first recorded in 1949.

This song sounds like the blues, but it doesn't use the twelve bar form or the IV and V chords. Does it even have a form or chords at all? It's more like an open-ended drone. Hooker learned this style of playing from his stepfather William Moore, who was from Louisiana where the blues sounded different from the predominant style of the Mississippi Delta.

Here's a live performance of "Hobo Blues" from the 1965 American Folk Blues Festival. Despite the name, this festival took place in Europe.

If it wasn't for European television, we would have no decent footage of America's best mid-twentieth century Black artists at all.

Here's another live performance from 1992. 

I had always thought that "hobo" was synonymous with "tramp", an old-timey word for "homeless." But back in the early twentieth century, a hobo was a migrant worker, not a bum. Hooker talks about hobo-ing as a way to search for work, not as a way to avoid it.