John Lee Hooker
House of the Blues

THE REVIEW

One of the greatest bluesmen of all time, a pioneer of the post-war "Detroit style" and simultaneously an enigmatic and original composer and performer, John Lee Hooker crossed the Mississippi and the entire history of the blues, from the "rural model" to the electric boogie of the '50s, continuing later as a virtuoso with small American bands of the '60s and ending with the revival influenced by the "psychedelia" of Canned Heat and in various duets with contemporary artists.

His discography is vast, but I have always preferred the handful of records recorded and released by Chess Records. Perhaps because these fully showcase his solo style: melancholic, strong, even fierce in some passages with that fiery voice and obsessive guitar. Perhaps because I am attached to the discography of the "small" label of the Chess brothers (for those who don't know, I recommend watching the movie "Cadillac Records," a fictional but still worth rediscovering story).

House of the Blues (1960) was released two years after the biting LP debut (at least the official one since he often recorded under various pseudonyms to evade contracts) and remains one of his essentially most brilliant records. Hooker plays in the studio live with only the aid of guitar and voice, thanks to the dramatically narrative approach that distinguishes him, a series of tracks that had long been part of his very original repertoire. The rhythm is aided, already abundantly present in his intense electric playing style, by marking the time with his feet, measured and constant. The songs "Women & Money" and "It's My Own Faul" come from a recording session the previous year with Vernon Harrison on piano and Eddie Kirkland on guitar, less brilliant pieces in the vocal parts. The atmosphere is hypnotic mainly due to the mechanical reverb and the right doses of delay; the sound expresses, with an alternating mix of harshness and reflectiveness, the raw and painful life in the black ghetto as opposed to the cover image that seems to take the matter back to the rural origins in Clarksdale and hence to primitive sounds. In reality, the record transmits through the figurative contradiction both the charge of repressed violence in Hooker and his compassionate nostalgia.