Album Review: King of Boogie [Craft] [Box Set] by John Lee Hooker

At a hundred songs and five discs, box set King of the Boogie cuts right to the essence of John Lee Hooker.   The blues icon's hypnotic and idiosyncratic style — a clipped acoustic rhythmic guitar hung on a single chord and moaning vocals accompanied with his own foot taps — was captured to devastating effect on his first recording session in November, 1948 which yielded "Boogie Chillen," one of the biggest R&B hits of the post-war blues era.   Followup singles like "Crawling King Snake" helped cement Hooker's presence, and the ….

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Unlike many of the blues giants who mapped out the sonic and psychic territory for future generations, multi-Grammy-winner John Lee Hooker lived to see his work rewarded and enjoy the spoils. The final disc in this collection (With Friends) shows just how far his music reached and the voluminous cast of those who benefitted from his inimitably rowdy, implacable fearsome and determined sound. Stoicism and unchanging resolve are the keynotes that tie together Hooker.

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Bonnie Raitt, who features on this box set’s 1989 duet remake of Hooker’s early 50s US R&B hit, I’m In The Mood, once described the Mississippi man’s guitar sound as “the most erotic thing I ever heard”, which is wholly understandable perhaps, given that her first encounter with his music was when she was an impressionable teenager who had grown up in an affluent, Hollywood-based Quaker family. Hooker’s distinctive “boogie” playing, which had a crude, untutored rhythmic virility, projected an aura of primal sensuality that would have seemed alien to, and several worlds away from, Raitt’s own privileged and cocooned milieu. As a budding guitar player, Raitt might have been smitten with Hooker’s rough-hewn fretboard work but, as the 100 tracks on King Of The Boogie cogently demonstrate, the blues man’s declamatory, almost sepulchral, vocal style was an equally important component of his music.

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