I have to confess that while I know plenty of music by John Lee Hooker, I didn’t even know the name of his equally talented cousin.

A supremely skilful slide guitarist, Earl Zebedee Hooker was just as important a figure in bluesology, especially to other bluesmen. B.B.King once called him “the best of modern guitarists.”

Recorded at Sun Studio in 1953, Move On Down The Line is one of those ‘missing link’ tunes at the birth of rock’n’roll.

Perhaps he caught some of the magic that Sam Phillips would bring a year or two later to Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis and Roy Orbison in that same small studio in Memphis.

It’s not typical of his blues style but it showcases Earl’s distinctive slide guitar sound, honed on the streets of Chicago after his parents joined the Great Migration from their hometown in the Mississippi delta in the late 1930s.

By the age of 12 he was performing on street corners with childhood friends including Bo Diddley, and was hugely influenced by seeing T-Bone Walker at a residency in a Chicago club.

An inveterate wanderer (he ran away back to Mississippi when he was 13), he learned his slide guitar techniques from another great musician, Robert Nighthawk, later joining his band, and perfected his style with other itinerant street performers including Junior Wells.

This tune, which Sam Phillips inexplicably chose not to release at the time, was one of several he recorded in the early 1950s for a host of independent labels.

It was also a rare vocal performance by Hooker, whose pronounced stutter meant he preferred not to sing, and was consequently better known for instrumental numbers, like the wonderful Blue Guitar and Blues In D Natural.

Hooker’s first vocal recording, in 1952, was a version of the blues standard Black Angel Blues, followed by Sweet Angel, and an upbeat instrumental called Frog Hop.

Sadly, he was dogged all his life by ill health following a childhood bout of tuberculosis and died of TB in 1970, aged only 41.