Hooker, John Lee: Travelin' (Vinyl LP)

This essential LP release includes Hooker’s sensational album, Travelin’, originally issued by Vee-Jay Records in 1960. His association with that label (from the 1950s to the early 1960s) marked a creative peak for Hooker. Travelin’ (also known as the “No Shoes” album) contains some of Hooker’s best material and is widely regarded as an essential blues classic. Songs like “Canal Street Blues” and “Whiskey and Wimmen” are deep, heavy, slow and dark, while “No Shoes,” and “I’m a Stranger” are the very essence of despair.

In 1960, when these sides were cut, Hooker still had a large audience in the primarily AfroAmerican blues community and was known to a lot of Jazz lovers as well. During this period he was able to channel years of pent up emotion caused by the extremely difficult life he led. He was forced to contend with loneliness, isolation, poverty, defeat and hunger in the brick and concrete squalor of the black ghettos that were about to explode in revolt. There is no question that John Lee Hooker and the blues were intimately acquainted. He was a true original who was often imitated, but never equalled.

In addition to the original masterpiece, this vinyl collector’s LP contains 2 bonus tracks from the same period: the great “Little Wheel” and “Maudie".

1. No Shoes
2. I Wanna Walk
3. Canal Street Blues
4. Run On
5. I'm A Stranger
6. Whiskey And Wimmen
7. Little Wheel
8. Solid Sender
9. Sunny Land
10. Goin' To California
11. I Can't Believe
12. I'll Know Tonight
13. Dusty Road
14. Maudie