Bluestone on The Doors

The Doors covered both Crawlin' Kingsnake, by John Lee Hooker, and Howlin' Wolf's Back Door Man.  These tunes are both mannish and lend themselves to Jim Morrison's baritone voice.  Hooker's Kingsnake is one of his best.  It's repetitive: a simple, repeated lick between lines.  You caught me crawlin' when the grass was very high, I'm just gonna keep on crawlin' baby until the day I die!  The Doors do what they can with this song.  It's a simple song, but Hooker just had something in him that made it great; I can't say the same about the Doors on this track.

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On back Door Man, however, I think The Doors outdo Howlin' Wolf on his own tune.  The two versions of Back Door Man are much more similar than those of Crawlin' Kingsnake, but I just don't dig Howlin' Wolf's voice here, it's harsh.  Here's The Doors' versions of Back Door Man and Crawlin' Kingsnake.  Realize how similar this rock band is to some classic blues guys, another testament to the foundation blues set for American music.  Also, realize how similar The Doors' versions of these songs are to each other!  To put it nicely, their style is very, very recognizable.

Bluestone's Track of the Day: Blues Before Sunrise

This tune has a piano, a lead guitar, a rhythm guitar, and some brass, but it has the vibe of a country blues.  John Lee Hooker lived from 1917 to 2001, and he was from Mississippi, where he began as a sharecropper.  He developed a kind of talking blues style, where he plays a lick then the only accompaniment to the lyric is the tapping of his foot.  Hear it here in his famous Boom Boom.  Lightnin' Hopkins does some good talking blues, too, like I'm Beggin' You.  Lightnin's kind of talkin' blues is even a bit more sparse than Hooker's, which I like.  They build this real relationship between the singer and the guitar, where the guitar's voice is no more valuable nor abundant than the spoken word, but I digress.  Blues Before Sunrise is a sincere tune.  Hooker got a little mannish with some of his songs and sounded like Muddy Waters, but not here.  Blues Before Sunrise is somewhere between Lightnin' and Muddy (not a bad couple o' guys to be between.)  It's just the right balance of sadness and hope, it's the right balance of music and lyrics, the right balance of guitar and piano.  It's a delicately put together blues that could not have been done better.  I chose the above photo of Hooker with purpose.  He usually plays a hollow body jazz guitar, but he has an acoustic here.  I don't know what he really plays Blues Before Sunrise with, but I picture it as an acoustic, simple and sincere.