Guild Aristocrat M-75 Formerly Owned by John Lee Hooker

This 1959 Guild Aristocrat M-75 semi-hollow electric guitar was played by bluesman John Lee Hooker. 

A pioneer of electrified Delta Blues, John Lee Hooker (1912-2001) was a prolific artist who thrilled audiences for nearly six decades, releasing hundreds of tracks until his death in 2001. Hit records such as “Boom Boom,” “One Bourbon, One Scotch and One Beer,” “Dimples” and many others have been covered by legions of musicians since. 

Born in Mississippi, Hooker started playing his idiosyncratic, mesmerizing style of acoustic Blues in Detroit in the early 1940s. But he needed more volume as his often-raucous audiences grew. In 1947, guitarist T-Bone Walker (1910-1975) gave him an electric guitar, and Hooker never looked back. In the intervening decades, Hooker played numerous guitars, including this semi-hollow body 1959 Guild Aristocrat M-75. Hooker was photographed with his then-new guitar the same year on Hastings Street in Detroit, Michigan outside of Joe's Record Shop, where he recorded numerous tracks over the years.