The following was written for publication in 1992.

Whenever John Lee Hooker is asked about another person, he always says the same thing first, so it's the second and third things you really want to hear.

``He's a very nice person,'' was the first thing he said about James Cotton.

``But he's kinda wild,'' was the second.

``He don't want to be interviewed,'' added Hooker, sitting on his couch in Redwood City, eating stew and cornbread. ``He'll say, `Get away from me! I ain't talkin'!''

And Cotton didn't talk, his manager explaining ``A journalist asked him some kinda stupid questions once, and he just doesn't want to deal with it anymore.''

Well, that's OK. Cotton, one of the greatest blues vocalists and harmonica players, does his talking through his music. In hot nightclub shows, like last year at Slim's in San Francisco, where these photographs were made, and in Chicago, his adopted home, and on 40 years worth of some of the most important, finest blues records ever made.

Cotton is one of the living links to blues history. He grew up on the road, traveling with Sonny Boy Williamson in the bad old South. He recorded on Sun Records, then moved up to Chicago with Muddy Waters, where he was part of the huge nightclub scene and Chess Records stable that shaped the course of postwar urban blues, and guided the birth and growth of rock 'n' roll.

These days he lives and plays in Chicago, but his latest album was made in Texas, for Antone's Records and Tapes.

``Mighty Long Time'' subtly demonstrates the wide variety of influences in his music, from the technical elegance of T-Bone Walker's ``Call It Stormy Monday'' to the grittiness of his own ``Straighten Up Baby'' to the slow country blues of Sonny Boy Williamson's ``Mighty Long Time.''

``James Cotton knows the words to more songs than anyone I've ever encountered,'' says Clifford Antone, of Austin's famous Antone's nightclub. ``Pick any song -- he's got the lyrics memorized. It's hard to imagine the scope of a mind like his.''

That wildness that Hooker talks about shows up in Cotton's unquenchable love of playing the blues. ``Even after his show is finished and our club is almost empty,'' says Antone, ``he starts up in the office. It's like he can't put his harp down or stop singing. He'll play `Sad Letter' and his genius spills all over the place.''

James Cotton at Slim's in San Francisco, September of 1991.