John Lee Hooker – Burnin’

Okay, we’re about to go through a slew of new John Lee Hooker records. I currently have 20 albums by John Lee Hooker. Five of those, I’ve bought in the past year. And that’s because one day, I came home from the record store and mentioned that there had been a new JLH re-release there, and I hadn’t bought it because I just wasn’t sure – and my wife practically marched me back to the store, and gave Forever Changes owner Shawn Cephas strict instructions that if I ever questioned whether to buy a John Lee Hooker album, he was to tell me to just buy it. And so, five new JLH records this year.

This was, I think, the first of those, acquired back in February 2024. It’s a 2023 Craft Recordings reissue of a 1962 album. JLH’s first single, “Boogie Chillen,” went to No. 1 on the US R&B chart in 1948 – and he had several more singles before his first album was released in 1959. But by 1962, this was the 10th album of JLH material to be released. Issued on black-owned label Vee-Jay (which also had the first Beatles releases in the US), Hooker is backed on these tracks by the Funk Brothers, so it’s full band material with horns. It opens with a version of “Boom Boom,” probably the most familiar track on this album.

Like a lot of blues artists of the time, John Lee got paid mostly for cutting sides – so ideas were used over and over, songs and lyrics were reworked but in different ways. So it’s fascinating that while I have any number of albums with any number of songs called “Boom Boom,” for example, every single version is different – sometimes wildly different.