[2] Etta James and Harvey Fuqua had a pop and R&B record chart hit with their duet cover of "Spoonful" in 1961, and it was popularized in the late 1960s by the British rock group Cream.

[3] Earlier related songs include "All I Want Is a Spoonful" by Papa Charlie Jackson (1925) and "Cocaine Blues" by Luke Jordan (1927).

It uses eight-bar vocal sections with twelve-bar choruses and is performed at a medium blues tempo in the key of E.[5] Music critic Bill Janovitz describes it as "brutal, powerful Wolf bellowing in his raspy style.

They were part of a trend in the mid-1960s by rock artists to record a Willie Dixon song for their debut albums.

[14] In an album review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine described Cream's rendition as "where the swirling instrumental interplay, echo, fuzz tones, and overwhelming volume constitute true psychedelic music, and also points strongly toward the guitar worship of heavy metal.

Cream frequently played "Spoonful" in concert, and the song evolved beyond the blues-rock form of the 1966 recording into a vehicle for extended improvised soloing influenced by the San Francisco music scene of the late 1960s.