Blues legend John Lee Hooker's career will be celebrated with a 4-CD box set that culls material from all eras – from a primitive 1948 recording of "Boogie Chillen'" to a version of the same song recorded exactly 50 years later in 1998 with Eric Clapton.

According to the release announcing the box set, Hooker was born in 1917 to Mississippi sharecroppers and first heard blues on a wind-up Victrola and on KFFA-FM in nearby Helena, Arkansas. His parents were convinced that blues was the music of the devil and insisted that he practice in the barn. His stepfather, Louisiana guitarist Will Moore, brought John Lee in contact with what music journalist, and author of the collection's liner notes, calls the "rolling, mesmeric beat" of Shreveport blues, "which had more in common with the ancestral African origins of the music than the Delta sound."

The box set is due to hit stores October 31st and includes performances with Clapton, Robert Cray, Bonnie Raitt, Carlos Santana, Van Morrison, Ry Cooder, Jimmie Vaughan, Charles Brown and Los Lobos.