Search - John Lee Hooker :: Graveyard Blues

This is a review of exceptionally bad reviews

Pauldog | St. Paul, MN USA | 12/03/2003

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Some of these review remind me of when I played Thelonious Monk for my mother. She remarked, "I could play like that before I took lessons." Yeah, Ma, whatever you say...Those reviews tell me nothing about whether this is a decent Hooker album, which is what I want to know, so I can decide whether to buy this one, or something else from Hooker. I know he mainly plays one chord. But does he play that chord well on this album?I know, that makes me a "liberal idiot" who can't appreciate Django Reinhardt, and who listens to American roots music because I feel sorry for black people, and I want to do a little affirmative action. Not.I like Django and I like Hooker. (I like Bach, too, for that matter. Does that make me a polymorphous perverse liberal? And I can't take Pete Seeger or too many other "earnest" folksingers.) I like John Fahey, too, and that's who got me to listen to all these "primitive no-talent three-chord" blues musicians, Skip James, Bukka White, Son House, Robert Johnson...It reminds me of that Bob Dylan line, "Don't criticize what you can't understand." On the other hand, as Mojo Nixon once sang, "Don Henley Must Die," but then I heard that Henley sang it along with Mojo on stage once. So 10 points for Henley, zero for the Philadelphia fan."

The best of his kind

C. I. Holloway | Great Britain | 10/29/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This album is great. The negative reviews are misguided - referring to Wes Montgomery or Charlie Christian is pointless. If you wish to hear technical mastery coupled with great feeling and improvisation - Montgomery and Christian are perfect. If you wish to hear dark intense blues SINGING (NOTE - SINGING), propelled by a primal boogie beat bashed out by old shoes on a wooden board, and with an insistent, hypnotic, fantastically monotonous guitar (which is infinitely inferior in virtuosity to Django or Wes) then buy this CD. If you want to hear something else then buy something else. Simple as."

The blues haters need to find a Donny and Marie cd to review

Jon Adcock | Citrus Heights, Ca. United States | 04/04/2004

(4 out of 5 stars)

"If you are looking at these reviews in order to decide if this is a cd worth buying, then the answer is a resounding YES. John Lee Hooker wasn't a guitar virtuoso, but he was a virtuoso bluesman and this cd has some of his best work. If you love the blues, then you need to own this cd (and if you don't love the blues, why are you wasting everyone's time reviewing a blues cd)"