John Lee Hooker Birthplace — Coahoma County, Mississippi

John Lee Hooker was born on 22 August 1917 in a rural area of Coahoma County, Mississippi, near Clarksdale — the same Delta county that produced Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, and Sam Cooke. His stepfather, William Moore, was an itinerant blues musician who introduced Hooker to the guitar and to the rhythmic, hypnotic style that would become his signature. Hooker left Mississippi in the early 1940s, moving north through Detroit before settling in that city, where he began recording in 1948. The Mississippi Blues Trail honours his Delta origins as the foundation of one of the most distinctive sounds in American blues.

Hooker's style was unlike any other blues musician's. Where most Delta blues followed a 12-bar structure, Hooker often played in open-ended, non-metered forms that followed the rhythm of his voice and foot-stomping — a more ancient, hypnotic approach rooted in the field hollers and work songs of the Mississippi plantation. His first hit, 'Boogie Chillen' (1948), recorded in Detroit, captured this primal energy in a three-minute record that sold a million copies. He went on to record prolifically across multiple labels and styles, and enjoyed remarkable commercial revivals in the 1960s British blues scene — working with Van Morrison on 'TB Sheets' — and again in the late 1980s and 1990s on the Chameleon and Silvertone labels.

Coahoma County, with Clarksdale at its centre, is one of the most musically significant counties in the United States. The Blues Trail marker for Hooker is in the Clarksdale area, though the exact rural location of his birth is in unincorporated farmland. Visitors to Clarksdale can explore the full concentration of Blues Trail markers in the downtown area, including the Delta Blues Museum, the Ground Zero Blues Club, and markers for Muddy Waters, Ike Turner, and Sam Cooke.