John Lee Hooker – Hooker / Buddy Guy – Can’t Quit The Blues

How does a musician cope with change when his very livelihood demands that he maintain his status as an avatar of authenticity? These two retrospectives provide some insights into how two legendary blues artists have wrestled with this conundrum.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about John Lee Hooker’s early sides is that such primitively executed fare could make it to the charts in the first place. “Boogie Chillen'”, Hooker’s first release, went #1 R&B in 1949 (he’d eventually chart eight more times over the next fourteen years, including another #1, 1951’s “I’m In The Mood”). He played the song unaccompanied in a boxy 4/4 cadence, and sang it in a pinched cottonpatch moan. It wasn’t until “Dimples” in 1956 that what we’d now consider Hooker’s fully realized sound was in place: his voice had deepened, and he was now accompanied by a bass-and-drums rhythm section along with a deft but unobtrusive guitarist (in this case, Eddie Taylor).

“Boom Boom” (complete with raw but in-the-pocket horns) in 1962 was the end of the line for Hooker as a chartmaker, but by then he’d been discovered by the revivalists. He increasingly found himself showcased for white audiences as everything from an acoustic “folk” act to an electrified boogie master capable of transforming even the most staid auditorium or festival into a backstreet juke.

But his basic sound remained constant: songs built around single-chord drones (or, occasionally, vocals that laid a droning, modal-sounding line over blues changes); unrhymed lyrics that often sounded improvised; propulsive but stripped-down rhythmic patterns usually devoid of standard structure or timing. As this set shows, all that really changed was the instrumentation, the timbre of his voice, and, occasionally, the musical context.

Buddy Guy presents a more complex case. Despite his occasional penchant for poormouthing, he’s one of today’s best-selling blues artists. And, as evidenced by recent efforts, he can still create music of merit when appropriately inspired. But through the years he’s faced accusations that he abandoned his early craftsmanship; some charge that he replaced passion with bombast, imaginative showmanship with cheap-seats pandering, and musicality with pyrotechnic self-indulgence.

This compilation makes it clear, though, that at least some elements of Guy’s latter-day style were present from the beginning. “The Way You Been Treating Me”, a demo recorded in 1957 in his native Baton Rouge, sounds eerily similar to what he’s been doing ever since. His leads are less frantic and the Guitar Slim influence is more pronounced, but his vocal style — dramatic swoops and smears; an introductory scream pitched an octave above the tonic — is almost fully developed. So is his penchant for unmitigated intensity, emotional heat, and anguished overstatement. Subtlety has never been Buddy Guy’s forte.

It was his guitar style that evolved — and, some would say, mutated — after he traveled north. In Chicago, Guy recorded first at Eli Toscano’s West Side studios. Two of those sides, both originally released on Artistic, are included here: “Sit And Cry (The Blues)” and “This Is The End”. Later, at Chess, he recorded such now-classic items as “First Time I Met The Blues”, “Stone Crazy”, and the voodoo-inflected “When My Left Eye Jumps”.

He has claimed repeatedly that Chess constrained him by not letting him crank up the volume and stretch out on guitar the way he wanted to — the way, he insists, he was already playing in clubs. A clip of him performing at a South Side tavern, shown in Harley Cockliss’ 1972 documentary Chicago Blues, revealed Guy stretching out more, of course, than he usually did on record, but his overall approach was pretty much the same.

So what happened? Well, judging from what’s here, maybe not quite as much as his more vociferous detractors would have us believe. Yes, there’s plenty of dreck: A Blue Cheer-like assault on “Mustang Sally” and live versions of Denise LaSalle’s “Slippin’ Out, Slippin In” and his own “My Time After Awhile” sound more like enactments of borderline-hysteria pathology than musical performances. But elsewhere it often sounds as if Guy’s backing, rather than his own out-of-control impulses, sabotages him. On “Damn Right, I’ve Got The Blues”, for instance, his leads soar with exuberant and imaginative directionality, but his sidemen sound as if they’re slogging through Oobleck.

Some unassailable gems are also here, such as Ray Charles’ “Mary Ann”, on which Guy uncorks Longhair-like yodels over a rhumba backbeat, and John Hiatt’s moody, atmospheric “Feels Like Rain”, which finds both Guy’s vocals and his fretwork at their most well-crafted and emotionally probing. His experiments with Northern Mississippi “trance blues,” from 2001’s Sweet Tea, are ponderous when they should be propulsive, but he achieves an admirable sense of existential terror throughout.

The set ends on an optimistic note. Three samples from Blues Singer and five tracks (two previously unissued) from this year’s Bring ‘Em In sessions showcase Guy in a challenging variety of latter-day contexts that seem to have motivated him to come up with his most fully realized and deeply textured work in years.