John Lee Hooker (1917-2001) is the most down-home of the major post-war blues figures, “a most authentic singer of the way-back, close-to-the-soil kind of blues,” as Orrin Keepnews commented in this 1959 album’s liner notes. Of Hooker’s innumerable recordings, the Riverside session is perhaps the truest to his Mississippi roots. Unaccompanied and playing acoustic instead of his usual amplified guitar, he turned in a wonderfully varied set of deep Delta blues, moans, boogies, one field holler, and even a bit of hokum. Some are autobiographical, others reworkings of blues standards--all stamped with the hauntingly personal Hooker touch.