JOHN LEE HOOKER Vinyl & CDs

Review: Blues legend John Lee Hooker released It Serves You Right To Suffer 1966, back when the blues and jazz impresario had a short-lived folk music division, with the tagline "the new wave of folk is on Impulse!". Thus the only album Hooker made for the label, we hear Hooker perform in exquisite, stereo-surrounded detail here, his distinctive deep drawl poking through a wide-mixed production palette and singing thematically in a vindictive spirit, urging the subject of the album to get up and move on from the past. With Panama Francis on drums, Milt Hinton on bass and Barry Galbraith on second guitar, the album is some of the best John Lee Hooker material with a band that you're likely to come across.