Alan Govenar
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On November 26, 1959, Antoinette Charles, apparently with McCormick’s guidance, handwrote a letter on behalf of Lightnin’ to Folkways. Lightnin’ usually referred to Antoinette as his wife, though in fact they were never married. “Nette,” as Lightnin’ often called her, had a husband and children and a separate residence in Houston’s Fifth Ward. How Lightnin’ met her is unknown, but in 1948 they started having an affair that continued until his death. According to Strachwitz, Antoinette was originally from southwestern Louisiana. She was related to Clifton and Cleveland Chenier, and it may have been through them that she and Hopkins got to know each other. In time they developed a romantic liaison, and at some point during the 1950s, Antoinette became involved in Lightnin’s business affairs. In her letter to Folkways, she complained about the terms that he had agreed to with Charters: [All spellings sic] “I was thinking I was going to get a share of the money that was made, and that would right I think any that sell your records they are suppose to give you part of the money made. If you dont agree I ask you to stop the records. This company doesn’t have the contrack to be selling my songs & my singing on records. they didn’t send me a copy of my records I did think they would send me one. I have a nother record coming out that is paying me Roaltes so I see no reason for not getting a shere from you all.”60
Lightnin’ had never wanted royalties before—even though Quinn had included a provision for royalties in one of his contracts with him—but instead had insisted upon cash payments. When Charters had recorded Hopkins, he had paid him three hundred dollars in cash and explained that it was payment in full.61 But once Charters was gone, McCormick seized the opportunity to challenge Charters and the business practices of Folkways. To his credit, McCormick helped to make Hopkins more aware of the pitfalls of the record business, but he had an ulterior motive—he wanted to prevent Folkways from producing any more of Lightnin’s albums.
Asch responded to Hopkins’s letter by stating that Folkways was not “a large company and the $300 represents a lot of money to us. We could have made this money part of a royalty agreement if you had received $100 advance and the balance to be paid at the rate of 25 cents per record sold. However, you did receive the $300 and we think this covers the lifetime of the record.”62
Hopkins answered Asch in a typed letter, dated December 12, 1959, which sounded as if it had been written by McCormick, asking that Folkways remove the record from sale. Hopkins also explained that prior to recording for Charters, he was paid $350 for recording four songs for the San Antonio–based TNT label: “It was my original idea that I was to receive my standard fee which would have been $200 for two songs. I was trapped into thinking this and did not find out otherwise until the recording had already begun. You got 9 songs altogether and I was only paid a part of the money down and my understanding was that royalties would be paid to make up the rest.”63 In addition, the letter mentioned that he was paid $120 for the lease of a selection of his recordings to be issued in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies and to be sold only by mail order from England (The Blues in East Texas LP on Heritage). Moreover, it stated that Hopkins was “protected by the fact that my original songs are not copyrighted (and so are not subject to the compulsory license provision of the copyright law) and so are still my property and cannot be used without my agreement.”64 Hopkins (McCormick) then reiterated his fundamental point that he would agree to Asch’s “making an album” only if he was given a “fair royalty payment,” and went on to detail what he thought was fair: “That would be 7%-of-the-retail price on all copies sold after the first 100; the first 100 copies would be paid for at $100. This is the same agreement as I have made with the English company. I will give you the same opportunity if you sent [sic] out the contract immediately.” However, Hopkins (McCormick) also insisted that Asch’s contract include “some bond with a $100 penalty” to be paid if he did not receive his royalties on time. In addition, he alluded to the royalty problems that John Lomax Jr. had been having with Folkways and the grievances articulated in McCormick’s December 5, 1959, letter to Ed Badeaux, written on behalf of the Houston Folklore Group, John Lomax Jr., and Lightnin’ Hopkins.65
Charters says Asch had told him that he was going to be sued by McCormick on behalf of Hopkins, but he never heard what ultimately transpired to settle the dispute, and there are no written records in Asch’s files that indicate that the suit was ever filed or brought to court. In a letter Charters wrote to Asch, dated January 13, 1960, he complained, “I am much disturbed that McCormick is bothering you about Hopkins. As I’ve told you, McCormick is simply a leech on Hopkins’ side. I’m sorry I even gave him Hopkins’ address,” implying that McCormick didn’t even know where Hopkins lived until Charters told him.66 Charters, in an effort to bolster Asch’s position, wrote, “If it will be of any help to you in dealing with him—my English contact has written that McCormick sold an LP of Hopkins material to an English company for the total sum of $70. No royalty. I really fail to see where McCormick can involve himself. Especially after we took all the chances and presented him on LP.”67
Over the next several months, the tension surrounding Hopkins’s Folkways album intensified. An unsigned memo, dated May 6, 1960, apparently from Marian Distler to Asch, stated that McCormick had not really been interested in recording Lightnin’, even though he claimed through a letter written for Hopkins, dated December 12, 1959, that he had wanted to make an album two years earlier. In the end, after months of heated exchange, Lightnin’ did sign a contract with Folkways, dated October 21, 1960, in which he was promised a “royalty of 25 cents per record album and/or tape album sold,” a percentage that exceeded the standard commercial contract of that time. However, it’s difficult to determine the extent to which Hopkins ever received royalties, or how many copies of the Folkways album sold.68 Asch’s accounting records are inexact.
While McCormick wanted to help Lightnin’, he was not completely altruistic. Like Asch, McCormick was a complex individual who, though he may have shared Asch’s mission to “record folk music and people’s expression of their wants, needs and experiences,” also saw the potential for personal gain. By acting as Lightnin’s manager and promoter, McCormick probably didn’t make much money, but he was able to enhance his own reputation as a folklorist through his articles and liner notes that espoused the values of the folk revival. McCormick was smart to cultivate his own relationship with Lightnin’ and
Antoinette, but as hard as he tried, he was not able to control them. As time went on, Antoinette was to become a much more important influence upon Lightnin’ than McCormick probably ever realized.
While McCormick and Charters celebrated Lightnin’s “country” roots, they minimized the influence of the urban reality in which he lived and ignored the inherent social stratification within the African American community. Lola Cullum, for example, and to some extent Antoinette were from more financially stable backgrounds than Lightnin’, though the people who frequented the little dives where he played in the Third Ward were more like him, farm workers and day laborers who migrated away from the country hoping to find a better life in the city. Among African Americans, the appreciation of Lightnin’s music, whether for its expressive qualities or finesse, was rooted in a shared cultural experience, and in this way was significantly different from the perceptions of those associated with the folk revival.
Charters, McCormick, John Wilson of the New York Times, and many others writing during this period all denigrated Lightnin’s use of the electric guitar, yet it was this instrument that had propelled his commercial hits and contributed to his vitality in Houston’s Third Ward. By championing the acoustic sound, the folk revival perpetuated a misunderstanding of not only Lightnin’s earlier recordings, but the history of blues in general. Yet, at the same time, the folk revival created a context in which Lightnin’ and many of his contemporaries could reach new audiences and earn more from their performances and records than had ever seemed possible.
5
The Blues Revival Heats Up
While the blues revival overlapped with the folk revival, it had been incubating for years. Record collectors were among the first researchers of blues in the 1930s, if not earlier, compiling discographies to piece together the history of the music. However, for a long time blues was thought of as a basic building block of jazz. Sam Charters, Mack McCormick, and Chris Strachwitz first learned about blues from 78-rpm records, and like their colleagues in the United States and Europe, were arriving at an understanding of the blues from a jazz background.
Prior to the publication of Charters’s book The Country Blues, accompanied by the release of his Folkways recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins in 1959, little had been written about the subject. Certainly McCormick’s research paralleled Charters’s quest, as did the pioneering record work of Paul Oliver, among others, in England and throughout Europe. The first attempt at a Lightnin’ Hopkins discography was compiled by New Yorker Anthony Rotante and published in the British magazine Discophile in 1955.1 Building on Rotante’s work, Strachwitz published a Hopkins discography in the British Jazz Monthly in 1959, with explanatory comments by McCormick.2 These discographies were crucial to the blues revival, which was propelled by an orientation to records and the record-listening experience that became the basis of new documentation and interpretation.
As the blues revival evolved, it became a kind of romantic movement, as Jeff Todd Titon suggests, among “idealists of all ages, involving a love for blues as a stylized revolt against bourgeois values.”3 Blues revivalists idealized African American life and music, especially as it related to the apparent rejection of the conventions of work, family, worship, and sexual propriety. The blues singer appeared to embody what many blues revivalists lacked—the confidence to express his or her innermost feelings and desires in music without reproach.
In the context of the early years of the blues revival, Lightnin’ became a focal point of discussion, documentation, recording, and, to some extent, controversy among those who sought to advance their own careers by championing his. McCormick was trying to manage all of Lightnin’s affairs. However, concurrent with McCormick’s promotional efforts, John A. Lomax Jr. also tried to help Hopkins advance his career. Lomax Jr. was not a professional musician, though he did like performing and sometimes appeared on stage with Lightnin’. McCormick disapproved, and, in an interview with researcher Andrew Brown years later, commented, “John and he [Lightnin’] started playing a game that can best be described as ‘The Nigger and the White Man.’ And that really started getting to me, because it was like old times have come again. Lightning was perfectly willing to play it. And they ended up with some dialogue on stage, little set routines, that were like Amos ‘n’ Andy, and even worse. Just patronizing little exchanges: ‘Yeah, boss, yeah.’ So some of the Lightning Hopkins/John Lomax Jr. concerts I was hearing about—and a few I attended—turned into these essentially offensive exchanges. That aggravated me.” 4 At the time, however, McCormick also imposed his views about how Lightnin’ should perform, though he did not appear with him on stage in such a patronizing fashion. Both McCormick and Lomax wanted Lightnin’ to recreate his past for an audience hungry for what they thought was a “pure” sound, though in fact it was contrived. During this period, Lightnin’ was changing sharply. He was more self-conscious and aware of himself as an entertainer. He played along with the wishes of McCormick and Lomax because the money was good, but he also held out for more. “Lightning had this habit of doing as little as possible musically on stage,” McCormick said, “and talking as much as possible. The story that led into ‘Mr. Charlie’ got up to twenty minutes at one point. If you’re on stage and you got an hour-and-a-half, two hours, you get a restless audience pretty quickly that way.”5
Lightnin’ liked to perform the song “Mr. Charlie” about the man he remembered who ran the mill in Centerville. “See, that child, little old boy,” Lightnin’ recalled, “he couldn’t talk, he stuttered. He went to Mr. Charlie … but Mr. Charlie didn’t figure that he could work.” But one Sunday, he “run on up to Mr. Charlie’s house…. He tried to tell Mr. Charlie that his mill was on fire…. He tried to tell him but he stuttered so. Mr. Charlie said, ‘You back again, boy, I got my work to do.’ And the boy kept trying, but couldn’t get the words out, ‘Y … Y … Y …’ And Mr. Charlie said, ‘If you can’t talk it, just sing it.’ And the little boy sang, ‘Ohhhh, Mr. Charlie, your rollin’ mill is burnin’ down.’”6 Lightnin’ loved to tell this story, and it became a kind of prologue, which varied in length, before Lightnin’ started singing.
Lomax didn’t want to interfere with Lightnin’s performance on stage and tended to let him ramble on for as long as he wanted to. Despite the criticism leveled against him, Lomax was not deterred in his efforts to bring Lightnin’ to a wider audience, and he didn’t want any financial compensation for helping him. Lomax was a successful builder and real estate developer who headed a construction company in Houston and participated in the activities of the Houston Folklore Group when he had the time. After the 1959 Alley Theatre hootenanny, Lomax corresponded with Barry Olivier and his staff at the Berkeley Folk Festival, to be held on the University of California campus in July 1960, and was able to get Lightnin’ booked for four hundred dollars, a fee that exceeded that for any of his previous public performances. However, Lomax did have some reservations. In a letter to B. J. Connors, secretary of the Committee for Arts and Lectures at the University of California, Lomax wrote: “If Lightning’s presence adds to the rich flavor to the Festival, as I believe it can, I wish you know that I will be due at least a large pink rosette for my extra curricular duties with him. Largely, he lives each day to itself…. You might be surprised at the number of conversations and meetings I have already had with him to get the proceedings to this point. I had to agree to stay with him at all times throughout the trip; this includes his performance too.”7
Lightnin’ was high maintenance, and although McCormick had a fairly good working relationship with him, he knew that he could be difficult. “Lightning behaved like he was some great star who should have champagne cooling in his hotel suite when he arrived,” McCormick told Andrew Brown. “He didn’t demand those kinds of things, but he did demand an awful lot of care and protection in terms of arrangements, getting to places, this and that. Otherwise, he just suddenly wasn’t there. So you couldn’t just call a university and say, ‘Would you like Lightning Hopkins to appear?’ You better be prepared to deliver him—to take him personally, to go get him up, buy his beer, carry his guitar, and all of that. And he had the people that would do that around town, all these young guitar players that wanted to learn from him, and people who treated him like a celebrity. So that was his existence here. He had an entourage; he went around like a prizefighter. Why should he, because he’s going to a university, be this lonely person propelled into this world he really didn’t want?”8 Although Lightnin’ seemed content to simply be a “star” in the Third Ward, shying away from the audiences McCormick was dragging him toward, he was nonetheless beginning to earn more than he ever had before.
In the summer of 1960, Chris Strachwitz came back to Houston with his portable Roberts tape recorder and Electrovoice 664 microphone, hoping to record Lightnin’. But Lightnin’ was in no position to record because he was getting ready to leave for California.9 On June 30, 1960, Lomax flew to San Francisco with Lightnin’, who performed at the Berkeley Folk Festival on July 3 and 4 to great success. Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle called Lightnin’ a “great, authentic folk artist … whose gorgeous bass voice, colossal rhythm, and subtly shaded delicacy in guitar-playing provided the festival with one of its most distinguished moments.”10
Lightnin’, when asked about the Berkeley Folk Festival the following week in a radio interview, said, “I liked it so well I just can’t tell you. I had a wonderful time. I could go up on top of those hills and see the beautiful lights, cool breeze, just look down…. It was m
y first time up there which I hope it don’t be the last time. I enjoyed it so, I want to go back again.”11
From San Francisco, Lomax took Lightnin’ to Los Angeles, where his sister Bess Lomax Hawes helped to arrange a couple of dates at the Ash Grove, a folk club owned by Ed Pearl. Hawes was a folklorist and musician who was Pearl’s guitar teacher, and when Lightnin’ and Lomax got to Los Angeles, she hosted a “welcoming party.” In attendance were lots of people from the L.A. folk scene who had heard Lightnin’s records but had never met him, including the singer, songwriter, and radio host Barbara Dane, a regular at the Ash Grove who was eager to meet Lightnin’. But she was shocked when she saw that Lomax had dressed Lightnin’ as “a country bumpkin” in a flannel shirt and dungarees, because apparently that was his impression of what the folk scene was. “It was completely the wrong approach,” Dane says. “Ed was very sophisticated about these things and had plenty of the old timers, like Reverend Gary Davis, Jesse Fuller, a whole range of people coming to sing there. So it was not necessary to go through this charade.”12 Finally, after watching Lightnin’ from afar, Dane moved closer to him. “I could see that he was uncomfortable,” Dane recalls, “so I wanted to give him a chance to be a little more relaxed, and just walk around with him a little bit in a blues manner. And he kind of let his hair down to me about the whole situation. He said, ‘You know, Mr. Lomax wanted me to dress like this.’ And then he said he wasn’t going to have his electric box, he was going to have a natural box. He was very uncomfortable in all of that, and so having said that to me, I said, ‘Don’t worry about it. He [Ed] will see it through. He knows quality when he sees it and relax.’ And he was fine with all that. And Ed did; he would have booked him sight unseen because, the thing is, Lightnin’ had actually been very popular in the black cultural arena in years past…. So it was ridiculous to think you had to present him in some other way.”13