A Factory Worker Turned Detroit's Hastings Street Into a #1 Record

When people list the giants of the blues, John Lee Hooker is always near the top — and his rise happened in Detroit.

Hooker was a sharecropper’s son from Mississippi who, like hundreds of thousands of Black Americans during the Great Migration, came north for factory work. He landed in Detroit in 1943, drawn by the booming wartime auto plants, and took day jobs as a janitor in the city’s auto plants. At night, he played guitar in the blues clubs and saloons along Hastings Street, the heart of Detroit’s Black Bottom and Paradise Valley neighborhoods — the center of the city’s African American life.

Detroit was a piano town, so a guitar player stood out. The noisy clubs pushed Hooker to plug in, and his electric sound — a deep voice, a half-spoken delivery, a hypnotic one-chord “boogie,” and a stomping foot — was like nothing else. In 1948, a local record-shop owner connected him to a producer, and Hooker cut a song called “Boogie Chillen’” at a Detroit studio. It became a number-one hit on the R&B charts in 1949 and launched a career that stretched more than fifty years.

“Boogie Chillen’” is essentially a musical postcard of Detroit nightlife, name-checking Hastings Street itself. There’s a sad footnote there: that vibrant stretch of Hastings Street was later largely cleared away for freeway construction. But the music it produced — raw, electric, unforgettable — helped shape rock and roll itself.