Lightnin' Hopkins/Sonny Terry: Last Night Blues (3 bonus tracks) [BLUES JOINT]

Why you'll love it

This 180g Blues Joint edition adds three bonus tracks Hopkins cut in Houston in 1961 and 1962, "Worried Life Blues," "Good Morning Little School Girl" and "Walkin' This Road By Myself." Down Beat gave the original album five stars.

This edition

• 180g vinyl
• 3 bonus tracks
• Pressed in the EU
• Blues Joint Collection insert

About the album

Put a Texas guitarist and a Carolina harmonica player in a New Jersey studio and you might expect a polite handshake. Lightnin' Hopkins and Sonny Terry gave Rudy Van Gelder's Englewood Cliffs room something much better on October 26, 1960: two men of similar age and background, each at the top of his tradition, finishing each other's musical sentences.

Hopkins brings the raw, rolling blues of east Texas, Terry answers with whoops and wailing harp from rural North Carolina, and Ozzie Cadena produced the session for Prestige's Bluesville label. "Rocky Mountain" and "Got To Move Your Baby" set a loose, easy pace, the title track aches beautifully, "Lightnin's Stroke" lets the guitar do the talking, and "Conversation Blues" is exactly that, two old friends trading lines. The bonus sides, produced by Kenneth S. Goldstein at Gold Star Studios in Houston, show Hopkins on home turf.

AllMusic called it stripped-down, soulful and full of truth, and the Penguin Guide to Blues Recordings praised Terry's playing as entirely and discreetly responsive. That's the most polite compliment ever paid to a harmonica, and Terry earned every word of it.

Also at Kops: more Lightnin' Hopkins on vinyl · browse Blues

Tracklist

Listen

On Blues Joint (cat# 8029), a reissue of the 1961 album.