John Lee Hooker - His Best Chess Sides (1998)

CD 1
01. Mad Man Blues 
02. Hey Boogie 
03. Louise 
04. High Priced Woman 
05. Union Station Blues 
06. Ground Hog Blues 
07. Leave My Wife Alone 
08. Ramblin' By Myself 
09. Dreamin' Blues 
10. Just Me and My Telephone 
11. Walkin' the Boogie (Alternate) 
12. Sugar Mama 
13. Please Don't Go 
14. I Don't Want Your Money 
15. Hey Baby 
16. Bluebird

CD 2
01. Walkin' the Boogie 
02. Love Blues 
03. Lonely Boy Boogie (a/k/a New Boogie) 
04. Apologize 
05. The Journey 
06. Worried Life Blues 
07. Down at The Landing 
08. You Have Two Hearts 
09. It's My Own Fault 
10. Blues for Big Town 
11. Women and Money 
12. Big Fine Woman 
13. Tell Me Baby 
14. Blues for Christmas 
15. Cry Baby Cry

John Lee Hooker – guitar, vocals
Eddie "Guitar" Burns – guitar
Eddie Kirkland - guitar
Lafayette Leake – piano
Fred Below - drums

John Lee Hooker, as anyone with a decent-sized blues collection knows, recorded for a virtual parade of labels early in his career, including Chess, although his stays with the company were fairly brief. Hooker's best early recordings, most would agree, were issued on Modern and Vee-Jay, not Chess. Still, if the only Hooker extant consisted of his Chess sides, his greatness would be readily apparent. Approached not as a best-of but simply as one of many Hooker compilations, this 15-song disc is fine, leaning heavily on early-'50s material (the source for 11 of the songs). This is typical of his early work in its stress on his great guitar work, walking rhythms, and drumless arrangements (most of it is played solo). It's good stuff, even if much of it is derivative of things he recorded elsewhere, and the mike plainly catches him coughing on "Bluebird." The solo on "Leave My Wife Alone" is almost avant-garde in conception, a series of plucked runs up and down the scale with little relation to convention, even by blues standards. Closing the set are four much more modern-sounding cuts from the mid-'60s, the "I'm in the Mood"/"Let's Go Out Tonight" single and a couple of cuts from the Real Folk Blues LP (including his standard "One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer"). --- Richie Unterberger, allmusic.com

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