Alan Govenar
Page 10
Lightnin’s Herald recordings did not make the Billboard charts, and by the late 1950s his appeal to record companies declined. Rock ‘n’ roll dominated the pop charts, using a blues-based song structure and insistent back beat to combine the influences of blues, jazz, rhythm and blues gospel, country, and rockabilly into a music that was fast and danceable. The Herald sessions had anticipated the rock explosion of 1955 and 1956, but Lightnin’ had a hard time keeping pace with his contemporaries—Johnny “Guitar” Watson, Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard, to name a few.
Even without more national hits, Lightnin’ continued to have a local following in the little clubs and beer joints in Houston. The people in the Third Ward crowded in to hear him, and the raucous, smoke-filled banter fueled his live performance, but also stifled his career. As much as he was capable of the tight three-piece band sound of his Decca and Herald recordings, when he played locally, he was looser and more idiosyncratic. He played whatever he was in the mood for, and he’d sometimes let people he knew from the neighborhood sit in. Houston bluesman Rayfield Jackson, who grew up in the Third Ward, said he got interested in Lightnin’ when he was in high school in the 1950s. “I used to go over to his house,” Jackson said, “and we’d play on his guitar and laugh and talk. He would show me all he knowed, and a lot of times on the weekend, I’d go on a gig with him and sit in, play right along with him…. Mama knowed where
I’d be going, when I’d get out of school, so she didn’t fuss at me…. I played some
gigs with him, sure did. Right here in Sunnyside, up and down Cullen [Blvd.]…. And we was playing in little old joints with about three or four tables in them, and when you got five or six people in there, you had a crowd…. I’d go in there and play a little while, sit up there and back him up with the guitar, what he taught me how to do…. Wouldn’t have no drummer, just two guitars—and Lightnin’ stomping his feet. That’s it. He’d have them big old shoes on and one of them Big Apple hats, big old wide hats with a feather stuck up in it—looked like a peacock.”79
Why Lightnin’ didn’t travel more at the height of his popularity in the R & B market raises difficult questions about his deep-seated inhibitions. Certainly, if he had a manager to coordinate his bookings and touring, he could have sold more records and made more money from his performances. It’s likely, however, that in many ways, he was unappealing to reputable mangers who knew that he never adhered to the exclusive terms of any record company contract. Lightnin’ was fiercely independent and intensely private. He didn’t have a telephone, either because he couldn’t afford it or he simply didn’t want to be easily found. Moreover, he was a heavy drinker and gambler who lived day to day, following his whims without any apparent long-term ambition. Travel was treacherous for any African American during the years of segregation, and for Lightnin’, the perceived danger associated with unfamiliar places was no doubt frightening. Clearly, his experiences in jail and on chain gangs had imbued him with a deep distrust of law enforcement, the judicial system, and to some extent the white world in general. Yet his record producers were white and helped him achieve a stature and income that was unprecedented in his life, even if he didn’t trust them. Lightnin’ knew what it was like to work for white people. Certainly, the landowners in Leon County where he grew up were predominantly white. Lightnin’ did what he needed to in order to survive, and once he started earning more than subsistence wages, he was content to not take unnecessary risks by venturing too far from home.
When McCormick asked Lightnin’ why he turned down the opportunities for travel that had been presented to him, Lightnin’ explained that he stayed in Houston because he was “treated so nice. Everybody know me and I don’t have to get acquainted with too many people ‘cause they already know me. And in that way, it make me feel like I’m at home. Knowing I’m treated well—not much reason to get up and leave it.”80
As Lightnin’s recording career seemed to be slipping away from him and his income from his music was declining, a new audience of jazz and blues fans, writers and folk music enthusiasts, Europeans and intellectuals, were becoming increasingly aware of him. Lightnin’s records had made him a legend, but his whereabouts to people outside of his community in the Third Ward were largely unknown.
4
Rediscovery
Lightnin’ Hopkins first met Mack McCormick around 1950 through McCormick’s mother, who was then working as an X-ray technician at the Telephone Road office of a doctor whose patients included Bill Quinn of Gold Star Studios.1 McCormick supported himself by doing part time and intermittent jobs as an electrician, short-order cook, taxi driver, and record librarian at KXYZ, but in his free time he was a record collector, playwright, and freelance writer, who regularly contributed articles to Down Beat magazine and other jazz journals, reviewing Stan Kenton, Frank Sinatra, and Chubby Jackson, among others. He was also active in the Houston Folklore Group, which had been founded in 1951 by John A. Lomax Jr. and Howard Porper with the mission “to sing, collect, and perpetuate the folklore of the people.”2
In 1958, Sam Charters, a music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet, contacted McCormick. Both Charters (b. 1929) and McCormick (b. 1930) were originally from Pittsburgh, and their careers had in some ways paralleled each other, especially in terms of their interest in blues, jazz, and other styles of folk and traditional music. Both believed blues was the bedrock of jazz, echoing the thinking that informed such writers as Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith in Jazzmen (1939), Hugues Panassie in Real Jazz (1942), and Alan Lomax in Mister Jelly Roll (1950). Moreover, both McCormick and Charters had written numerous articles for jazz journals, though Charters was also a musician who had been playing and leading his own New Orleans–styled groups since 1948. Charters was also a more accomplished writer. He was college-educated; after being kicked out of Harvard because of his political activism, he attended Sacramento City College and the University of California at Berkeley, where he finally received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1956. Charters had started listening to jazz early on, and when he moved to New Orleans at the age of twenty-one, he began to absorb the history and culture he had only read about, and he studied jazz clarinet with the legendary George Lewis. A year later he and his wife Ann Charters began making field recordings for Folkways Records.
Folkways Records and Service Corporation had been founded by Moses Asch in 1948 to document musical and spoken-word traditions from around the world. Among his earliest releases on ten-inch, 33⅓ rpm records were Square Dances with Piute Pete and His Country Cousins, Who Built America with Bill Bonyun on guitar, Darling Corey with Pete Seeger on five-string banjo, Take This Hammer with Leadbelly and his twelve-string guitar, and Songs to Grow On with Woody Guthrie. Asch’s tastes in music were eclectic and reflected not only the values of the burgeoning folk revival, but also included gospel, traditional jazz, blues, and different musical styles from around the world. Asch had been heavily influenced by John Hammond’s 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall, which set the stage for Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, and others to crossover into playing for white folk/blues audiences. Frederic Ramsey (the producer of Leadbelly’s “Last Sessions” for Folkways), introduced Asch to Charters, who was beginning to gain a reputation as a jazz scholar. Charters’s first Folkways release was a recording of the Six and Seven-Eighths String Band from New Orleans and was followed by numerous other albums of traditional New Orleans bands, notably the Eureka Brass Band that had been formed in the 1920s.3
Shortly after the publication of Charters’s first monograph in 1958, Jazz: New Orleans 1885–1957, Nat Hentoff interviewed him on a radio show in New York City, and asked him what he wanted to do next.4 When Charters told him about his deep interest in blues, Hentoff gave him the name of his editor at Rinehart, and within days after dropping off a sample text, Charters had a contract and a five-hundred-dollar advance to write a book on country blues.5 At this point, there had been numerou
s articles published on blues in small magazines, but never a full book devoted to the subject.
Charters first learned about Lightnin’ Hopkins in 1954 when he heard one of his records, “Contrary Mary,” which had been recorded for the Jax label three years earlier. “It was still around town on the jukeboxes,” Charters says. “And a musician I knew heard it and got a copy up on Rampart Street.” Mistakenly, Charters thought Lightnin’ was accompanying himself on an unamplified acoustic guitar, when in fact he was playing electric, but the song made a lasting impression. Lightnin’ was singing “a mean, unhappy blues in the long, irregular rhythms of a man who learned his singing in the fields or along dusty southern roads.” Charters tried to find Lightnin’, but to no avail. Then, one day, a cook overheard Charters talking about Lightnin’ in a small restaurant on Bourbon Street and identified himself as Lightnin’s cousin. He told Charters that Lightnin’ was in Houston, but didn’t know how to contact him. “I was in and out of Houston the next five years,” Charters wrote, “recording, interviewing musicians, and asking about Lightnin’ Hopkins. When I’d come from California to Houston, I’d find out Lightnin’ had gone back to California, and when I’d get to California, I’d find out Lightnin’ was back in Houston.”6
On one of Charter’s trips to California, he met Chris Strachwitz in Berkeley. Strachwitz (b. 1931), a Silesian German immigrant who listened to blues and jazz on British and American Armed Forces Radio in the years after World War II, came to the United States with his family in 1947. Once in California, Strachwitz began to actively collect records. In 1951 he enrolled at Pomona College, where, he says, “I remember hearing this amazing voice [on Hunter Hancock’s radio show in Los Angeles] singing: ‘Hello Central, Give me 209/ I want to talk to my baby, She’s way on down the line.’ … I was just totally wigged out. I was a teenager, rebellious, insecure, skinny, couldn’t speak English right. I thought this was paradise; this was heaven. And somehow this voice—that guitar style—Lightnin’s sound just kind of haunted me and became really my favorite…. Certain sounds just grab you; that’s all there is to it. I could just tell he must have just made this stuff up on the spot, at least that was my conviction. And I kept being a hound for this music, scrounging up 78s.”
After two years at Pomona, Strachwitz transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated after serving in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956. He got a job as a high school social studies teacher, but in his free time he read jazz magazines and continued to collect records. “I bought anything I could find that I had heard on the radio—blues, jazz, hillbilly, anything,” Strachwitz says. “I very rarely would buy a brand new R & B record because they were expensive. They were seventy-nine cents plus tax. But I had discovered Jack’s Record Cellar in San Francisco and the Old Englishman on Eddie Street, also in San Francisco, and the Yerba Buena Music Store in Oakland, which specialized in traditional jazz and blues and several record shops in the black neighborhoods. This was a time when 78s had gone out of style and were being dumped because they were being replaced by 45s. Then there were the jukebox operators like the Tip Top Music Company and I had to go and see what they had to sell. They were real cheap and they would sell you records at ten to twenty-five cents a piece, sometimes only a nickel. There I would pick up anything that said ‘blues singer’ and ‘guitar.’ That’s how I got to know that stuff. I was listening to KWBR out of Oakland and deejay Jumpin’ George Oxford played people like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Lightnin’ Hopkins.”7
In early 1958, Strachwitz met Charters in Berkeley at a club where Charters had performed with a New Orleans–style jazz band; they started talking and realized they were both record collectors. “I would go over to his place, where he had a trunk full of these old 1920s records that he had picked up at junk stores in the South. Sam was primarily interested in prewar blues and New Orleans jazz. And Sam would in turn come to my place and listen to some of the current blues that I liked—Sonny Boy Williamson, and I played him Lightnin’ Hopkins’s records because he was one of my favorites. We were probably listening to some of Lightnin’s Herald recordings.”8
Charters became more familiar with Lightnin’s music, but felt that “something was being lost” as he “turned out more and more records that were simply designed to sell to the teenage rhythm and blues audience. He was using a loud amplified guitar and there were usually a loud bass drummer and bass player to do away with the subtle rhythm that made his earlier records so memorable.” 9 At this point, Charters didn’t seem to understand that virtually all of Lightnin’s recordings had been made with an electric guitar, even those on Aladdin, Gold Star, Sittin’ In With, and Jax that he liked the most, because they didn’t have bass and drums. As Charters was writing his book The Country Blues, he started to feel that Lightnin’ was “perhaps the last of the great blues singers,” despite the fact that “his professional career was a series of clumsy mistakes.” Charters believed that “Lightnin’ was one of the roughest singers to come out of the South in years…. He was the last singer in the grand style. He sang with sweep and imagination, using his rough voice to reach out and touch someone who listened to him.”10
During the fall of 1958, Charters heard about McCormick from Frederic Ramsey at Folkways, who suggested that Charters contact McCormick in Houston and Asch in New York about recording Lightnin’. By then, Asch had already issued several blues LPs, featuring Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and was in the process of producing others with Big Bill Broonzy, J. C. Burris, Sticks McGhee, and Memphis Slim.11
McCormick was interested in getting to know Charters and invited him to stay at his house in January 1959. Together they went looking for Lightnin’. One lead led to another, but they couldn’t find him the first time they went hunting around the Third Ward. “Everyone was very guarded all the time,” Charters says. “But you could feel safe. No one was going to do anything to this white boy wandering around. I wasn’t looking for drugs and I wasn’t looking for sex, and so this meant I wasn’t fitting into the categories in which I could easily be placed. I was just the right age and build to be a young cop. I was wearing a knit shirt and chinos. I was not prepossessing.”12
A pawnbroker who had two of Lightnin’s guitars had an address for him in his files. When they got to the house, he wasn’t home, though a young boy directed them to Lightnin’s sister, who suggested they check two or three bars that Lightnin’ was known to frequent, but he wasn’t there either. Frustrated, they went back to McCormick’s house, and the next morning, while McCormick was busy, Charters went to Dowling Street to look around. “And on that day, he found me,” Charters says. “Everyone was aware that I was moving around through the ghetto looking for Lightnin’, and everyone was reporting this to Lightnin’. The cab drivers were watching me, and I’m sure they all knew where he was. But who was I? And finally the word was passed onto Lightnin’. So I was stopped at a red light in my coupe and a car pulled up beside me and there was a man with sunglasses saying, ‘You lookin’ for me?’ And I said, ‘Are you Lightnin’ Hopkins?’ And Lightnin’ said, ‘Yeah.’ So he found me. I had been checked out and the decision was that I was safe.”13
They both pulled over, and Charters told Lightnin’ that he wanted to record him. Lightnin’ was interested, but he had pawned his guitars, a fact that implied that he wasn’t playing music at the time. “Lightnin’ was wearing Salvation Army clothes, baggy, grey, no color at all,” Charters says. “He was poor.”14 When they got to the pawnshop, Lightnin’ wanted his electric guitar, but Charters picked the acoustic because he knew that was what the white folk audience wanted to hear. As much as Lightnin’ may have preferred the electric, he didn’t object. He needed the money and certainly knew that he could play either instrument well. But the acoustic wasn’t in very good shape, and apparently Lightnin’ hadn’t played it in some time. “I had to get him some strings,” Charters recalls, “but as we passed some school kids, Lightnin’ beg
an playing with the five strings, playing more guitar than I’d ever heard, playing ‘Good Morning Little School Girl.’” Finally, after getting some guitar strings, they went to Lightnin’s rented room at 2803 Hadley Street, where Charters recorded him with a single Electrovoice microphone and his portable Ampex tape recorder.
“Lightnin’ had a room in the back. It was a quiet street. The room was small, it had a bed, one chair, and it was in the back of the house…. I sat on the bed holding the microphone while Lightnin’ sat in the chair in the room, and we made the record that afternoon.” Charters says that Lightnin’ introduced him to his “wife,” named Ida Mae, but she didn’t say much. She was “watchful, and very aware that it was a complicated situation, and she made nice, as simple as that.”15 No one had ever come to Lightnin’s residence to record him. He had always gone to a studio, and the presence of this equipment crowded into Lightnin’s bedroom, with a white man holding a microphone in front of him while he played and sang, must have seemed very strange. Charters had had fieldwork experience, but for Lightnin’ and Ida Mae, the circumstances were completely new.