Major release from the vaults of John Lee Hooker, blues master

While always open to new blues singers, I tend towards the view that the genre peaked from about 1945 to 1965, and then died a long, lingering death. So most of the blues releases which are vital to me are reissues of material up to fifty years old.

Highlight of 2006’s blues releases has to be the sumptuous new repackaging of the catalogue of one of the blues masters, John Lee Hooker.

His (messy, confusing, mammoth) catalogue gets a long-awaited career-spanning retrospective in Hooker, a new 4CD box, which tracks the great man all the way from his late 1940s raw solo material, through his 1960s success, decline in the 1970s and his late-career blossoming, when middle-aged rock stars from Van the Man to Clapton were queuing up to pay tribute.

Hooker: highly recommended.


Gerry Smith