John Lee Hooker (c. August 22, 1912 – June 21, 2001) was an American blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist. The son of a sharecropper, he rose to prominence performing an electric guitar-style adaptation of Delta blues. Hooker often incorporated other elements, including talking blues and early North Mississippi Hill country blues. He developed his own driving-rhythm boogie style, distinct from the 1930s–1940s piano-derived boogie-woogie. Some of his best known songs include “Boogie Chillen’” (1948), “Crawling King Snake” (1949), “Dimples” (1956), “Boom Boom” (1962), and “One Bourbon, One Scotch, One Beer” (1966). Several of his later albums were album chart successes in the U.S. and U.K.; additionally, Don’t Look Back (1997) won a Grammy Award in 1998. (More from Wikipedia)
The Soul Agents released their second single on October 15, 1964, also on Pye Records; the band picked two other traditional songs for this 45, “The Seventh Son” b/w “Let’s Make it Pretty Baby”. Of the “B” side, Greg Shaw said in his liner notes for English Freakbeat, Volume 2: “‘Let’s Make it Pretty Baby’ is my favourite, a John Lee Hooker number but with an urgency that was wholly their own.”
(May 2014)
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As described above, the resulting debut album, Crawdaddy Express by the Crawdaddys was comprised mostly of covers of R&B classics by Bo Diddley, Willie Dixon, Chuck Berry, and John Lee Hooker; plus a few from other sources, such as the old Hank Snow tune “I’m Movin’ On” and the magnificent Van Morrison song “Mystic Eyes” that opened the first album by Them. Only a few familiar songs were included on the album, such as “You Can’t Judge a Book” and “Down the Road a Piece”. Just two original recordings were included on the album, the title song “Crawdaddy Express” and “Got You in My Soul” (both written by Ron Silva and Steve Potterf).
(January 2015/2)
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