John Lee Hooker – It Serve You Right To Suffer

Hooker meets a jazz rhythm section

On 23 November 1965, John Lee Hooker recorded in New York with musicians experienced in jazz and studio work. Barry Galbraith supplied the second guitar, Milt Hinton played bass and Panama Francis drums. Producer Bob Thiele recorded the encounter for Impulse!. Released in 1966, It Serve You Right to Suffer remained Hooker’s only album for that label.

The personnel already suggest the appeal of the meeting. Hooker’s voice and guitar are joined by players who must respond to the turns in his performances. Eight tracks give this compact group several different ways to work together.

Rhythm around the singer

“Shake It Baby” opens the programme, with “Country Boy” and “Bottle Up and Go” taking other directions. Some of the material had been in Hooker’s repertoire before this session. These are new performances within a longer musical history.

Listen to what happens at the ends of his vocal lines. How does the guitar fill a pause, and how do bass and drums maintain the movement? Following those responses reveals the band’s work from the inside, through the relationship between the singer and his accompanists.

Milt Hinton and a guest voice

Hinton and Galbraith knew one another through New York studio work. Their shared experience provides a reason to devote a separate listen to the accompanying parts. “Decoration Day” and the closing title track offer opportunities to follow the spaces between the entrances.

“Money” introduces a different instrumental colour: Dicky Wells plays trombone. His contribution belongs to that track, rather than to every performance on the record. For one song, Hooker’s group opens out to include another jazz voice.

This Acoustic Sounds Series edition

AVER 64567 is a single 180-gram LP in the Verve Acoustic Sounds Series. The publisher credits Matthew Lutthans at The Mastering Lab with mastering from the original analog tapes. QRP manufactures the pressing, with a Stoughton tip-on gatefold jacket. Impulse! was the original label; the reissue is presented within Verve’s programme. Kevin Gray’s credits on the separate Analogue Productions 45 RPM and SACD releases do not apply to this edition.

You order from Michael 45 in Germany. We arrange the US import and dispatch from Hilden. Editions not currently in stock are dispatched after the goods arrive.

More by John Lee Hooker: Burning Hell · The Healer

Musicians

Documented selection of participating musicians. Personnel may vary by track; this list does not claim to be complete.