Travelin' (Spa)

EU-only 180gm vinyl LP pressing including two bonus tracks plus digital download. This quintessential LP release includes Hooker's sensational album, Travelin', originally issued in 1960. His association with Vee Jay Records (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. In 1960, when these sides were cut, Hooker still had a large audience in the primarily Afro-American 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 equaled. In addition to the original masterpiece, this collector's item contains 2 bonus tracks: "You've Taken My Woman" and the great "I Love You, Honey" (both songs were recorded in Chicago, in June 1958, with backing by The Block Busters).