Track Listing

1. I Miss You So
2. I'm Bad Like Jesse James
3. Dark Room
4. I'll Never Get Out of These Blues Alive
5. Boogie Chillun
6. When My First Wife Left Me
7. Boom! Boom!
8. One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #128144 in Music
• Released on: 2005-04-19
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: Live

Amazon.com essential recording
This brooding lesson in the "Three D's" of the blues--despair, death, and desire--is a window into the melancholy soul of Hooker's art. Each of the two discs are separate sets from a '70s solo concert at New York City's Hunter College. And by the time Hooker asks "How deep and how low can you git?" near the performance's end, we already know. It's not merely the profound darkness of these tales--in which Hooker becomes a killer, a TB victim, an abandoned lover--but the pain with which he suffuses his pinched, red-clay voice. Then there's his guitar, constantly working idiosyncratic variations on his patented boogie; sliding and snapping out replies to the tense lyrics of "Jesse James" or his improvised lonesome wail "Tired of Being Your Doggie." Throughout, Hooker exercises his command of tension and drama. --Ted Drozdowski

From Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD
Suffering from insomnia? Here's a guaranteed cure-two discs' worth of soporific latter-day Delta John in a 1970s concert at a New York college. Hooker's 'Boogie Chillun" was once urgent personal testimony; here it's a rugged endurance test. The preponderance of sloppily played slow blues is a literal drag. (B.D.) -- © Frank John Hadley 1993