Hopkins grew up fast, and by the time he was a teenager, he was ostensibly an adult; he had served jail time, worked as a farm worker, played music on the streets for tips, and traveled around East and Central Texas as a hobo. On September 21, 1928, at age sixteen, he married Elamer Lacy, also known as “Noona.” A year later, on August 29, his daughter Anna Mae was born.58 “My dad was a person that everybody liked that knew him,” Anna Mae recalled. “He’d sit there with his leg crossed and look out the window. And they’d come by and holler at him. He was a joyful person.”59 But he hated working in the fields. “It was hard times,” Sam said. “I was working in the fields, trying to take care of my wife, me, and my mother. Six bits a day. And that was top price. And I swear, I’d come in the evening, and look like I’d be so weak till my knees would be clucking like a wagon wheel. I’d go to bed, I’d say, ‘Baby, well I just can’t continue like this.’”60
But it wasn’t only the farm work that was a problem for Sam. “Me and my first wife were together fourteen years, and I never seen her naked in my life,” Sam said. “Wasn’t nothing wrong with her and I know it. She told me that it was something that she was born with, to never get naked with no man, regardless to whom, husband or anyone else. You understand me? We were together, but she was never showing me, just like you get up here and pull your clothes off naked. ‘You get it under the covers. You can pull off anything and you still won’t see me naked.’ And she never walked in front of me naked in her life. Now, I’m not lying to you.”61
Anna Mae said that her parents split up when she was five: “Mama left and went out to the country. We stayed with Daddy’s mother [Frances]. Daddy always loved his music. And he always let nothing or nobody keep him from it.”62 After Sam and Elamer separated, Anna Mae had very little contact with her father, “with him coming and going,” though she did say she always enjoyed seeing her grandmother, who was then living on Ike Dawkins’s farm.
“Folks were close-knit back then,” Ray Dawkins says. “Mama Frances was in Leona, Texas, down here. She got into some kind of debt and Daddy cleared it and moved her onto our farm. And she had a grey horse and a buckskin horse. We had two houses on the place. The big house was where we lived, and another house was down below. Daddy bought that farm in 1931. He give $900 for 80 acres, eight miles southeast of Centerville on the other side of Nubbin Ridge across Keechi Creek. I was a little bitty boy of five or six when I first remember meeting Sam—he was a tall, kind of slender man. I guess he was about nineteen or twenty, and he come back to help his mama. And in the evenings, he used to sit me on his knee and play and sing. I wanted to imitate everything that he did, but I couldn’t. So I became a dancer, and at house parties I’d tap or buck dance. Just about everyone had someone in the family who played guitar or piano. Not too many people could afford a radio. One or two had wind-up Victrolas. But playing music was the big entertainment. People would ride in a wagon if they had one. They go from one house to the next on Saturdays, and to church on Sunday. And if they didn’t have a wagon, they’d ride a horse or walk.”63
Sam didn’t spend much time with his mother because he was “always going off somewhere to play music or gamble,” Dawkins says, but he “did as much as he could to help her.” From the Dawkins farm, Frances Hopkins moved to Guy Store Prairie a few miles away. “They went to Herman Mannings’s place,” Dawkins says, “and when they left from there, they went to Ben Coleman’s place. Ben Coleman was white; Herman Mannings was white. Sam farmed down there, but he never did work too much. He played music all the time, and the white people had him playing music around the house, piano, guitar, organ. It didn’t make him no difference.”64
According to Dawkins, Sam stayed “some with his mother,” but also with Ida Mae, who lived about a mile and a half away from his father’s farm. “Ida Mae was a light-skinned girl,” Dawkins says, “and they lived together for I don’t know how long.” In Sam’s song “Ida Mae,” recorded for the Gold Star label in 1947, he sang, “Yes, you know that woman name Ida Mae/Folks say she good to me all the time,” but then implies that she was unfaithful, drawing upon a traditional blues verse that had been used by Robert Johnson, among others: “Yes, you don’t think cause Ida Mae got every man in town/Baby, you know ain’t doing nothing but tearing your reputation down.”65 However, Sam, on different occasions, said that Ida Mae was his wife, though there are no records that prove they were ever actually married. In another version of the song, Sam extolled her virtues and his devotion.
You know, Ida Mae’s a good girl
Folks say she don’t run around at night (x2)
Yeah, you know, you can bet your last dollar
Oh, Ida Mae will treat you right66
Ida Mae, identified by blues and jazz researcher Mack McCormick (who would later play a pivotal role in Lightnin’s career) as Ida Mae Gardner, appears to have been involved with Sam through the 1950s, even though their relationship was at times tumultuous. By some accounts they had a vicious fight around 1937, and Sam stabbed her. But when Sam was sentenced to two years in the Crockett County jail and served his time on the chain gang, McCormick maintains she “got a job cooking for the prisoners in order to be close enough to Lightnin’ to attend to his wants and at the same time pay off his fine.”67 However, Dawkins says that he knew Ida Mae for many years and that she lived out her life in Guy Store. To his knowledge, she never married, and when asked about these contradictions, Dawkins speculated that there might have been more than one Ida Mae. Certainly, Sam’s loose attitude toward the term wife is a complicating factor in trying to sort out the women in his life. He often bragged about how many women he had over the years. “They just be around,” he liked to say, “don’t you know, I’m some bad man?”68
Sam’s exploits with women were well known in the African American community of Leon County. People recognized that he was gifted as a guitarist and singer who carried forward the musical culture in which he was raised, but many disapproved of his behavior. Dawkins and Langford were among the many who marveled at his capacity as a performer, but understated his reckless and at times violent conduct. As a person, Sam was scurrilous. He was affable and sharp-witted, but introverted; wary, but sly. He was a backslider by church standards, a drinker and a brawler who lied and gambled, doing anything he could to stay away from the chain gang and the cotton field. Yet he was apparently never completely ostracized, and over the course of his life, he never forgot his country roots. Sam’s blues gave voice to the hardships and foibles that he and so many in his community were experiencing, but by the early 1930s, he had gotten himself into enough trouble that he had to move on.
2
Travels with
Texas Alexander
Sam Hopkins was about twenty years old when he met Alger “Texas” Alexander at a baseball game in Normangee, about seventeen miles southwest of Centerville. Normangee was playing against a team from Leona, but off to the side of the field, Hopkins heard someone shouting the blues. “So, I got down there,” Sam said, “and I seen a man standing up on a truck with his hand up to his mouth, and man, that man was singing…. He like to broke up the ballgame. People was paying so much attention to him. They was interested in him.”
Baseball had been a popular sport among African Americans in Texas since the late 1880s. The numerous attempts to organize a viable, professional black baseball association culminated with the formation of the Lone Star Colored Baseball League of Texas in 1897 with clubs representing Galveston, Palestine, Beaumont, Lagrange, Temple, Austin, and Houston.1 The Normangee and Leona teams were not formally part of this league. They were likely amateur, or, in a sense, semi-professional, where the players aspired to advance their careers, but were not necessarily paid. Local teams got some local sponsorship to help defer the costs of equipment, and the games attracted people from the surrounding communities. A blues singer, like Texas Alexander, seized the opportunity to perform for tips.
Sam claimed that Alexander was his cousin, but no direc
t kinship has ever been established. Sam had a very loose definition of the term “cousin” that he tended to use more as an expression of endearment than a statement of fact. Texas Alexander was born on September 12, 1900, in Jewett, Texas, in Leon County, about seven miles from Centerville. He eventually settled in Normangee, a small town that grew up around the railroad stop on the Houston and Texas Central Railway established in 1905 at the intersection of Farm Roads 39 and 3. He was raised by his grandmother because his own mother was “rowdy” and “runnin’ around.” Growing up he toiled as a field hand, but by 1927 he had moved to Dallas, where he worked as a store man in a warehouse and made “spending change” by singing in cafes and on the streets of the Deep Ellum and Central Track area of the city.
Deep Ellum was the area of Elm Street in Dallas, north of downtown, where immigrants to the city flocked. The spelling Ellum resulted from the mix of dialects of the people who settled there—African Americans displaced by the ravages of the boll weevil in East Texas and Eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms and persecution in their homeland. The juncture of Elm Street and Central Avenue was where day laborers were picked up and dropped off, taken to the cotton fields of Collin County or to do other jobs. Many of the black businesses were strung out along Central Avenue, which ran alongside the railroad tracks. Black show business and musical activity flourished in Deep Ellum. As early as 1908, John “Fat Jack” Harris opened the Grand Central Theater there and featured local and touring acts. The Grand Central was followed by the Swiss Airdome, the Star, the Circle, and the Palace. The Park Theater was operated by vaudevillians Chintz and Ella B. Moore and offered “high class vaudeville and moving pictures.” Black vaudeville entertainment took various forms, including the “tab” or “tabloid” musical comedy show, as well as touring minstrel and stock companies; novelty acts such as the five-hundred-pound Cleo-Cleo and Jack Rabbit, the hoop contortionist; comedians such as Little Jimmie Cox, a Charlie Chaplin imitator; high-kicking dancers; duos such as Butterbeans and Susie; and musicians and singers.2 In 1920, Chintz Moore and about thirty other black Southern and Midwestern theater owners established the premier black vaudeville circuit, the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which grew to more than eighty theaters and eventually became known as the “Chitlin’ Circuit.” Performers often joked that the acronym stood for “Tough on Black Asses” because contracts heavily favored management and the conditions of work were often harsh.
Pianist Sam Price, who worked at R. T. Ashford’s shine parlor and record shop on Central Avenue in Dallas and was instrumental in the discovery of Blind Lemon Jefferson, was looking for new talent when he heard Texas Alexander singing on the street. “Texas Alexander had an uncanny voice,” Price said, “but he couldn’t keep time. That was one of the things I had to teach him.” 3 With Ashford’s help, arrangements were made for Alexander to go to New York to record in August 1927 and for Lonnie Johnson to accompany him.
Texas Alexander’s slow moaning style and his inability to sing in meter made it especially difficult for Johnson, who remarked, “He was liable to jump a bar, or five bars, or anything. You just had to be a fast thinker to play for Texas Alexander. When you been out there with him you done nine days work in one! Believe me, brother, he was hard to play for.” 4
Despite the irregularities of his singing, Alexander’s emotionally charged vocal style had great appeal, and the sales of his records were unexpectedly high. He was invited back to the OKeh studios, and between 1927 and 1930 he recorded fifty-two songs with a wide range of accompanists, from Eddie Lang and Lonnie Johnson, who were already established as two of the best guitarists of the era, to an ensemble that included the great King Oliver, Clarence Williams, and Eddie Heywood, to lesser-known regional guitarists like Carl Davis and Little Hat Jones, and even the legendary Mississippi Sheiks with Bo Chatman (Carter) on violin, Sam Chatman on guitar, and Walter Vinson on second guitar. Unlike his other accompanists, the Mississippi Sheiks, a popular and influential guitar and fiddle group of the 1930s, provided Alexander with a rare string band setting that was uncompromising, forcing him to discipline his singing into an uncharacteristic swing.5
By the mid-1930s, when Sam met him, Alexander’s recording career had tapered off because of the Great Depression, but he was still highly regarded as a performer, and wherever he sang, he had a commanding presence. Hopkins recalled, as did others, that Texas Alexander carried a guitar with him so that anyone who wanted to accompany him could do so. Alexander didn’t play the guitar himself, and Sam picked up the instrument and showed him what he could do. “He come … ready with that singing. He couldn’t play no music,” Sam said. “Never played an instrument in his life. But he’d tote a guitar; he’d buy a guitar. But he’d tote it in case he’d run up on you or me or somebody could play, and he’d sing. And he kept a guitar because if he asked could you play a guitar and you say ‘Yeah.’ Well, he got one, see. And then y’all tear it off.”6 Before long, Hopkins was traveling with Texas Alexander and accompanying, or following, him on guitar. Given that Alexander often broke time, Sam must have struggled at first to keep up, but was apparently able to eventually learn his songs sufficiently to play with him. Clearly, Alexander was not that particular when he showed up at a little juke joint or cafe in East and Central Texas ready to perform.
Texas Alexander showed Sam that he could make a living singing blues. By the 1930s, Sam was fed up with farm work. “I didn’t make too much picking cotton,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth because they wasn’t paying but fifty cents a hundred [pounds of cotton picked]. Man, I’d make me two dollars and something. I was picking four and five hundred [pounds]. But you know, man, I’m telling you the truth, if you just know what it takes to get two dollars out of that cotton patch…. But I wasn’t on that farm much longer. I left.”7
While Sam was used to performing for tips, he was beginning to figure out how to get paid for his music. “I commenced to playing for dances,” he said. “See, when I got good, and when I went to finding them there places where they barrelhouse [drinking and dancing], I didn’t know. I just had to run up on them places, see, around Jewett, Buffalo, and Crockett. And they had little old joints for Saturday nights, you know. But what you gonna do through the week? I found Mart and out there and around Coolidge and where they had one every night, man, I did all right for myself because that was my business. Those joints, cafe joints, you know, where they’d get back in this part and they’d do a little dancing in there, and they’d drink a little. And I was getting three and a half [$3.50] in Coolidge, Texas. Got pretty good, and so they raised it to around six dollars to go to Mart, making six dollars a night.”8
With Texas Alexander, Hopkins was able to even earn more. Alexander was known as a recording artist, so he tended to attract bigger audiences wherever he went. Hopkins followed Texas Alexander through the East and Central Texas towns of Crockett, Grapeland, Palestine, Oakwood, Buffalo, Centerville, Normangee, and Flynn. For Sam, Texas Alexander became a kind of mentor, who, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, who played novelty songs and country tunes, in addition to blues.
Once Prohibition ended in 1933, juke joints and barrelhouses on the outskirts of little towns, which had essentially functioned as speakeasies, became more public. However, the laws related to the sale and consumption of liquor varied from county to county, and bootlegging was still rampant. The little joints where Sam and Texas Alexander performed were likely not licensed to sell liquor and probably served booze illegally. They were places where sharecroppers and day laborers alike found some reprieve from the hardships and suffering of the Great Depression, proffering booze, women, music, dancing, and gambling. It was in these gritty, smoke-filled shacks that Sam honed his skills as a guitarist and singer, composing and performing the blues that gave voice to what those around him were feeling and experiencing. While he ventured off on his own at times, he often played with Texas Alexander.
While Sam never recorded with Alexander, he was influenced by
his songs, which not only evoked a poignant sense of what life and work must have been like at that time, but also expressed a bitter sense of irony. In “Levee Camp Moan,” Texas Alexander’s extended hums and moans drawn out over unevenly spaced measures punctuated the lyrics. “Section Gang Blues” combined elements of a traditional work song that might have been shouted by gandydancers lining out railroad track with a sarcastic commentary: “Nigger lick molasses and the white man likes it too/Lord, I wonder what in the world is the Mexican gonna do.” In “Boe Hog Blues,” [a mistitling of “Boar Hog Blues”] a sexual explicitness underscored the song’s strident sense of humor:
Oh tell me mama, how d’ye want your rollin’ done (x2)
Says, your face to the ground and your poodle up to the sun
She got little bitty legs, gee, but below her thighs (x2)
She’s got something on-a-yonder works like a bo’ hog’s eye
Says, “I’ll be your doctor, pay your bills” (x2)
Says, “If the doctor won’t cure you, I’ve got something will”
From Texas Alexander, Hopkins learned to emphasize lyrics and the need to rhyme, often at the expense of meter. Alexander rarely sang in meter, though he could turn a phrase and extend his lyrics into a looser, more sprawling structure that might have an extra measure, or thirteen or fourteen bars instead of twelve. By taking this approach, Alexander demonstrated to Sam the power of improvisation, and how ordinary speech could become the fodder of a song lyric.
Moreover, Texas Alexander gave Hopkins a tangible sense of the benefits that making records might bring. Alexander drove a Cadillac, and it made Sam realize that even a black musician from a small town in Texas could be successful in the music business. “First Cadillac that I was known to be,” Hopkins said, “one them expensive cars, you know, he went somewhere and he showed up in Normangee and that was longest and most ugly car. Long Cadillac—one of those the first made, you know. Cuz colored people they didn’t have even T-Model Fords then. He come in a Cadillac. Texas was doing all right for hisself.”9 To own a Cadillac at the onset of the Great Depression was impressive, but apparently Texas Alexander’s records had sold quite well in the late 1920s to rural audiences, as well as among people who had started moving to the city but still enjoyed a taste of the older country styles.
Alan Govenar Page 4