Featuring his eternal hit “Boom Boom,” the blues legend’s 1962 classic gets an anniversary reissue that showcases how rock’n’roll took shape around his timeless, elemental boogie.

Burnin’ upends many myths orbiting John Lee Hooker, one of the iconic blues musicians of the 20th century. Whether you know either his name or his records, you know his heavy-footed boogie, a rollicking rhythm absorbed and assimilated by such acolytes as George Thorogood and ZZ Top, who once faced a lawsuit from the copyright holder of Hooker’s 1948 breakthrough hit “Boogie Chillen,” claiming the Texas trio ripped off Hooker with their 1973 single “La Grange.”

ZZ Top won the lawsuit with the court claiming that the rhythm is in the public domain, a ruling that in a perverse way proves how deeply entrenched Hooker’s music is in popular music: It’s impossible to imagine rock’n’roll would sound without him. Hooker’s boogie is so endless, it not only survives long after his death but seemed to exist prior to “Boogie Chillen.” Critics picked up on this eternal essence early in Hooker’s career. Charles Shaar Murray, the author of the definitive John Lee Hooker biography Boogie Man: The Adventures of John Lee Hooker in the American 20th Century, cites the French blues critic Jacques Lemetre as the first to describe the bluesman as “one of the most primitive (from a musical point of view) and, I would say, one of the most African of blues singers” back in 1964, a framing that’s echoed through the years.

Calling Hooker’s music primitive obscures a crucial trait, one as essential to understanding his art as his slippery sense of timing: He was a modernist, not a traditionalist. He wasn’t anchored to his birth state of Mississippi: He hightailed it up north as soon as he could, settling in Detroit where he played an electrified update of Delta blues for factory workers in the 1940s. “Boogie Chillen” captured how Hooker played not for a rural audience but for city folk: He bent the bars of a blues vamp, extending the groove to gin up the energy in the room. He didn’t sing laments; he played dance music.