John Lee Hooker: It Serve You Right to Suffer (Verve Acoustic Sounds Series) [VERVE]

Why you'll love it

This Verve Acoustic Sounds Series reissue is remastered and pressed on 180g vinyl in a gatefold jacket. It was the one record Hooker made for the jazz label Impulse!, and producer Bob Thiele surrounded him with a band of jazz players.

This edition

• Verve Acoustic Sounds Series
• Remastered
• 180g vinyl
• Gatefold jacket
• Stereo mix

About the album

A jazz label isn't the first place you'd go looking for John Lee Hooker, which is exactly what makes this one so good. In 1966 Impulse! briefly ran a folk and blues line with a slogan borrowed from its jazz ads (the new wave of folk is on Impulse!), and producer Bob Thiele brought Hooker in with a crew of jazz session men: Barry Galbraith on guitar, Milt Hinton on bass and Panama Francis on drums.

The result is Hooker at his moodiest and most hypnotic, the boogie loosened up and given room to breathe. "Shake It Baby" and "Bottle Up and Go" still move, "Decoration Day" and the title song are slow, deep and haunting, and there's a gritty cover of Barrett Strong's Motown hit "Money," with William Wells adding trombone.

Hooker mixed new songs with fresh takes on older ones, so it plays like a career's worth of blues in a single sitting. The grammar in the title is entirely his own, and frankly we wouldn't argue with him either.

Also at Kops: more John Lee Hooker on vinyl · browse Blues

Tracklist

Listen

On Impulse! / Verve (cat# AS-9103), a reissue of the 1966 album.