Here’s one of the heaviest and most wonderful recordings ever made.
The song is so mysterious, so intense, so ancient-sounding yet so fresh. John Lee Hooker recorded it in 1948 at United Sound Systems in Detroit. (He re-recorded it many more times afterwards.) It went to number one on the R&B chart, which is pretty impressive for a song whose only percussion is Hooker’s foot stomping on a miked-up shipping pallet. When I was an ignorant teenager, I assumed that Hooker recorded this way because it’s how he was used to playing on his back porch in Mississippi. In fact, Hooker usually played with a band at the time, and he only recorded solo at the suggestion of his producer, the breathtakingly sleazy Bernie Besman.