1949, Hooker’s deceptively primitive-sounding blues, mostly just his voice and his guitar, was popular with a significant sector of the blues audience, as if it was a stern warning against getting too fancy. In the late 1960s, when American guitar bands rediscovered the blues, Hooker’s blueprint was one of the main ones they used for their extended workouts, and Creedence was no exception, since they served up several Hooker covers on their early albums. As always, they weren’t straight copies of the original, and the Stu Cook-Doug Clifford rhythm section came up with the rhythm they called “chooglin’,” which became one of their trademarks.
The Essential Little Richard
Artist: Little Richard
Release Date: 1958
As with Carl Perkins, any rocker who doesn’t claim Richard Penniman as an ancestor is lying. He pioneered things that people today take for granted: wild onstage behavior, ambiguous sexuality, a driving beat, insane shrieking vocal tics, goofy lyrics. On his records, Earl Palmer took just enough swing out of standard blues beats to invent rock & roll drumming. The Beatles covered his stuff, and, of course, so did Creedence, recording “Good Golly, Miss Molly” on Bayou Country. Hard as it may be to believe now, by 1969, when that album came out, Richard had slipped into the shadows (although some knew Jimi Hendrix had toured as his guitarist), but this was as much due to his having spent time in the ministry and renouncing rock & roll — if only for a short while — as anything. His obscurity didn’t last long, and as of 2007, he was still going strong, showing up in films, on television, and occasional live shows, reminding the youngsters