John T. Hunter, Jr. was born in Lousianna in 1931 and grew up in Arkansas and Texas. He didn't know he was to become a musician until, at age 22, co-workers took him to see B.B. King in Beaumont, Texas. Hunter was amazed at the adulation B.B. was getting from the crowd, especially the frenzy of women in the audience. The very next day Hunter bought a guitar and, even though he had never played before, spent hours and hours finding and playing sounds he likes. Within a few weeks he put a band together and very quickly developed his own style, a vibrant mix of jump blues, zydeco, razor sharp guitar playing and some rhumba boogie. Within a year of seeing B.B., Long John Hunter was headlining at the Raven. Word spread to Houston, where Don Robey released Hunter's first single, Crazy Baby/She Used To Be My Woman, in 1954. The record didn't win Hunter a national audience but it did genrate enough interest to keep him working full time as a musician.

Hunter moved to Houston in 1955 to try and capitalize on his Duke single. He played shows with Little Milton, Johnny Copeland and many others. Two years later, he moved west to El Paso. He continued to play the same mix of blues and proto-rock and roll as he did in Houston. The people in El Paso wasted no time in proclaiming Long John Hunter their reigning kind of rocking West Texas blues.

The very night Hunter arrived in El Paso, he was booked into the Lobby Bar in Juarez, Mexico, where he stayed--playing seven nights a week from sundown to morning for the next 13 years! The Lobby Bar was a raucous mix of Mexicans, New Mexico and West Texas cowboys, ranchers, Fort Bliss soldiers, frat boys and the like, all juiced up and ready for anything. "If you didn't see it or hear it at the Lobby, it just didn't happen in life," says Hunter about the club. "Everything you could imagine happened there."

To keep the crowd happy and interested, Hunter would get outrageous, often swinging from the rafters while playing his guitar. Word of this wild man, whose dramatic sense of timing was nothing short of remarkable, began to spread around Texas, and Hunter's association with many musical legends began: Gatemouth Brown (and his brothers Widemouth and Bigmouth) Albert Collins, Big Mama Thornton, Lightning Hopkins, Etta James and Lowell Fulson are just a few of the blues men and somen who he had the opportunity to play with. Twice James Brown and his band dropped by the Lobby Bar to sit in with Hunter. He's said to have greatly influenced Phillip Walker, Lony Brooks, Billy Gibbons and even the early rock 'n roller Bobby Fuller.

Hunter rrecorded a number of singles for the Yucca label from '61 to '63 (these sides were later rereleased as Texas Bordertown Blues on the Dutch Double Trouble label in 1986). Although all of these recordings were well received locally, Hunter's reputation never spread (due in no small part to his desire to stay in Juarez.) He occasionally toured outside of Juarez, but he always returned to the Lobby. Even without new recordings, Hunter continued to be the blues king of Juarez and West Texas.

After the Lobby Bar closed down, Hunter spent a few years in El Paso and began working the West Texas club circuit. He recorded an album for the Boss label in 1985 before moving to Odessa, Texas in 1987, where he continued to play his ferocious brand of rocking blues. 1992 saw the release of Ride With Me for the now-defunct Spindletop label which gave John his first taste of a more widespread audience. The album was hailed by critics, and his days at the Lobby Bar were being talked about in reverential tones by those lucky enough to remember them. "Fully formed with supernova brilliance. Hunter sings like a reedier B.B. King. He slices and dices on the Strat and he writes what sound like classics," said Pulse magazine. "He gets busy with a gritty authority," agreed Rolling Stone.

The world outside of Texas was taking notice and Bruce Iglauer, president of Alligator Records, was listening. "I knew of Long John's legend," remembers Iglauer,"but I wasn't too familiar with his music until recently. He's the best kept secret from the same wellstpring of swinging Texas guitarists that brought us Albert Collins and Gatemounth Brown."