Who Wrote "Boom Boom?"

If you haven't gotten the special edition DVD of "Blues Brothers" yet, you should consider it. It's a good version of a great movie. It's a musical, it's a comedy, it's an action movie and it's a fantasy movie, all rolled into one. The absurdity of the action and the plot are heightened by the lack of explanation for said improbabilities, save for the repeated mantra "We're on a mission from God." The movie simply could not be made today. The costs and the politics involved would be impossible. It was a slice of time when the musical guests were not only still performing at their peaks, but they were all available because of a lull in the popularity of their genre.

The additional footage added to the film for the special edition aren't that substantial, unless you're John Lee Hooker. In the original film his musical number in the film was shortened to a musical introduction as the band enters "Ray's" music store. In the extended edition, you get to hear the whole song, the immortal "Boom Boom." And then, at the end of the song, Hooker argues with members of the band about whether or not he wrote "Boom Boom."

Like many blues standards, nobody really knows who wrote "Boom Boom." It's not one of those songs that necessarily has to have an author. It's basically a simple but powerful blues riff with a backbeat flavor. It's commonly accepted that "Boom Boom" rose out of the Mississipi Delta, and Hooker captured it and applied it to vinyl.

That's one of the beautiful things about Poker Strategy. Nobody can claim authorship to a certain strategy, nobody can say "I was the first person to ever try 'this' in poker."

Everybody is standing on the shoulders of giants, and those giants are essentially anonymous. It's like blues or soul standards. Styles are often copied from people who originally copied the style from someone else.

The truly great players are those who are inspired by the style of others, but work to adapt the style and make it their own. But everyone is working from the same original riff, which grew out of time itself, with no known creator.