My first introduction to John Lee Hooker was through the double album "Hooker and Heat". Soon after, I went digging through the racks of used record stores looking for "rootsier" JLH recordings, but I'm still glad to have have met him the way I did.

The most remarkable cuts on the Hooker and Heat LPs are those on which the potent chemistry between John Lee and harp-player Alan "Blind Owl" Wilson spontaneously combusts - and there are several of these gems. At one point, after a particularly hot workout, John Lee says with a mixture of admiration and mild astonishment: "I don't know how that boy follow me...but he do!"

And you're right, LEJ, he was one of the last direct links between the era of Charlie Patton to the present. The brief elegy I heard earlier said he'd recorded over 100 albums in his career; what a legacy!