“I don’t play a lot of fancy guitar. I don’t want to play it. The kind of guitar I want to play is mean, mean licks.” John Lee Hooker

First Ever album length recording session released as it was recorded for the Very First Time.

Had things worked out differently, the songs collected on this disc would have comprised John Lee Hooker’s first full-length album and been released on the Vee Jay label in the final months of 1958. With the micro-grooved 33rpm record format very much in its infancy, the songs that Hooker and his backing group recorded in Chicago on 10 June that year represented the first time that the blues pioneer had committed an album length set to tape in one session.

Despite the quality of the material recorded on that showery Tuesday, Vee Jay Records opted only to release two songs from the session – A precise version of rhythm ace Freddie Williams’ ‘I Love You Honey’ emerged as a single in September, while a second cut, Hooker’s own ‘You’ve Taken My Woman’, was selected as the B-Side. Many of the remaining tracks subsequently became spun out within the complex fabric of retrospective releases and compilations that now account for so much of John Lee’s back catalogue.

•Extensive liner notes by author and music journalist Dick Porter.