Little Red Rooster

This is a slow crawl through humidity and shadow, built on a guitar figure so sparse it almost seems unfinished, until you realize that space is the entire point. The melody is glacial, the harmonica a low moan drifting through the arrangement like smoke from a dying fire, and Wolf's voice descends into registers that feel geological rather than human. There's a hypnotic quality to the repetition that borders on incantation — the song doesn't build toward anything so much as it deepens, pulling the listener further down into its particular atmosphere. The lyrical content carries the weight of Delta tradition, a male narrator and a female subject rendered in the coded language of rural Southern blues, where animals stand in for desires that couldn't be stated plainly. This is one of those recordings that sounds completely different depending on when you encounter it — at twenty it sounds theatrical, at forty it sounds true. The Rolling Stones covered it and added electricity and speed, but something essential was traded away in that transaction. The original's power comes from restraint, from what's withheld. Best heard at three in the morning through decent headphones, when the world has gone quiet enough to hear what Wolf is actually saying underneath the words.