Ellis Hooks

Ellis Hooks knows all too well about the bumpy journey of life. Born in Bayminette, Alabama, he was the thirteenth of sixteen children to an African-American sharecropper and his Cherokee/African-American bride.  Hooks left home at the age of fifteen and like a modern day Woody Guthrie hitchhiked around America performing odd jobs and often times relying on just his voice and acoustic guitar for meals and a place to spend the night. After three years of sleeping everywhere from graveyards to playgrounds and doing anything from baling hay to gutting fish, Hooks ended up in New York City playing music in Central Park with the occasional club gig on Bleecker Street.

It was a street corner in that Park where Ellis Hooks encountered his first real fan in passerby Diana Ross. The soul legend was immediately struck by Hooks’ gravel and honey voice and quickly offered him recording time in the Power Station studio. Unlike many street musicians, Hooks didn’t jump at the seemingly golden opportunity and skipped out on the sessions. “I just wasn’t ready,” he explains. “I really wasn’t comfortable with my own songs at that point. You know, fate and destiny are like cousins, and it just wasn’t my time yet, but it did kick my confidence way up there.”

Ellis Hooks did not wallow in any lost chances, though. Instead he took off for Europe, honing his craft along the way. “I was buskin’, playing on the streets, walking up to people’s dinner tables and performing for them. I hit the tube stops, and just played and played. I was addicted man, but that’s what it takes to get better,” Hooks says of his time spent in Paris, Amsterdam and Milan. Hungry to parlay his talent into a successful career as a professional musician, Hooks returned home to New York City and struck gold when fate and destiny appeared once again. This time the street corner was a strip club and Hooks was not even present when his winning cards were dealt out.

Taken out by friends on his birthday  to a famous gentleman’s club, producer Jon Tiven was approached by a stripper claiming to possess an extraordinary singing voice. Tiven, who has worked with Wilson Pickett and B.B. King, set up an appointment for the woman to audition her vocal skills. She arrived accompanied by a chaperone. When she failed to ignite any interest in the producer, Tiven turned to the chaperone in leather pants and cowboy boots and asked, “What do you do?”  Ellis Hooks grabbed a guitar from Tiven’s wall and answered the man with a song, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In 2002, with Tiven on board, Hooks began recording his debut, UNDENIABLE (Zane Records). Released in Europe to rave reviews, The London Times listed UNDENIABLE as “one of the strongest albums of the year,” and described Hooks as a young Wilson Pickett. Time Out (UK) awarded the record “soul album of the year,” calling Hooks’ tunes “hot, steamy and pure Southern soul.”  Not long afterwards, the BBC inivited Ellis to headline its World Music Festival on New Year’s Day (2003) where he quickly organized a band to back him featuring Glen Matlock of The Sex Pistols.  Ellis and his band (dubbed The Stax Pistols) wowed the British audiences, and
set the stage for a barnstorming tour of Europe.  Ellis and his crack band (with Muzz Skillings of Living Colour on bass) played venues as small as Amsterdam’s Paradiso Club one day and then the next day opening for Terence Trent D’Arby in front of 40,000 soul afficionados, often playing two gigs a day. He attracted the attention of Carla Thomas, who invited Ellis as her special guest on the European festival circuit where he won over new fans at the prestigious Montreaux Jazz Festival and Poretta Soul Festival. Along the way he picked up fans and admirers in Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, and Queen guitarist Brian May, who said of the musician, “Ellis rocks. Must’ve done it from his cradle, because that kind of stuff can’t be learned!”

Hooks followed up his excellent debut with UP YOUR MIND in 2003 (Evidence Music) which featured a duet with soul king Freddie Scott. The record earned a four and a half star rating from Thom Jurek in  All Music Guide  which stated that Hooks “may be a newcomer but carries in his voice the authority and lineage of the entire Southern soul and blues tradition.”  In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Nick Cristiano gave it three and a half (out of four) stars, saying “throughout this strong collection of original songs, the 29 year old singer/guitarist brings a rock-infused fire that gives him a killer presence all his own.”
The Nashville Tennessean’s Peter Cooper chose the album as one of the 20 best records of 2003 to come out of Nashville, even though Ellis neither recorded the album in Nashville nor lives there (he played the town five times in 2003 and recorded most of UNCOMPLICATED there).  Most recently, the Blues Foundation nominated Ellis as
Best New Artist for the prestigious W.C. Handy Awards, which will be given out in late April in Memphis, Tennessee. 

After winning over crowds all over Europe, Hooks returned to America in late 2003 to finish the recording of UNCOMPLICATED, a modern record  forging a style which Ellis likes to call “Americana Soul.” It recalls the Stax-Volt and Muscle Shoals production style that Ellis grew up on, but the fifteen songs conjure comparisons to Van Morrison, Bob Dylan, and Little Richard as easily as the obvious soul prototypes.  “It’s all about remembering to live for today, not caring about tomorrow, and just enjoying life,” Ellis Hooks says of his third record, UNCOMPLICATED. “Oh yeah,” he adds, “have fun with the one you love and your dog. That’s the feeling of my record.”