Lightnin' Hopkins - The Rooster Crowed in England [Spain Import]

Lightnin' Hopkins greets his British fans on The Rooster Crowed in England, a 1959 session reissued here as a limited 180-gram Spanish import with two bonus tracks.

By the end of the 1950s, the Houston bluesman was being rediscovered by a new audience of folk and blues enthusiasts, many of them across the Atlantic. This record was made a few years before his first trip to Britain, yet it plays like a letter addressed to those listeners, opening with the spoken "Hello England!" and later tipping its hat with "Blues for Queen Elizabeth".

This is Hopkins in close-up, his voice and guitar front and centre. His style alternates needle-sharp single-note runs with thumping bass lines and the odd slap on the guitar's body for percussion. "Beggin' Up and Down the Streets" is pure hard-luck storytelling, "Have You Ever Seen a One-Eyed Woman Cry?" mixes humour with heartache, and "Children's Boogie" shows just how much rhythm one man could summon on his own.

The bonus tracks, "Bring Me My Shotgun" and "Back to New Orleans", stretch the set further while keeping its raw, conversational feel intact.

For anyone tracing the line from Texas country blues to the British blues boom of the 1960s, this is a fascinating and very human record, as direct and witty as the man himself.