Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  The afternoon before the show at the Ash Grove, Lightnin’ got in touch with his old friend Luke “Long Gone” Miles, who was then in Los Angeles with his wife, Hazel.14 “Luke Miles was somebody who appeared on Lightnin’s doorstep some time a long while back in Houston,” Pearl says. “He was very tall and very skinny and very gangly. And he just appeared on Lightnin’s doorstep, and Lightnin’ wanted to close the door on him, and Luke proceeded to just go to sleep on the door stoop. And he just stayed around. He was a real country guy. So, finally, Lightnin’ took a fancy to him and let him hang around…. He was a good singer. And he’d do anything for Lightnin’. He’d carry his guitar if he needed it.”15

  In the dressing room of the Ash Grove, Lightnin’ was uncomfortable, not so much because of the clothes Lomax Jr. had provided for him but because his hair was a mess. He wanted to get his hair conked (processed and straightened), and Pearl didn’t know where to find the chemicals. Lightnin’ and Long Gone piled into Pearl’s car and drove around Los Angeles, stopping at different drug stores, but they couldn’t find the right product. Finally Pearl remembered that beneath his mother’s apartment on West Adams was a black beauty salon. When he went inside, the beautician remembered him and gave him the chemicals. From the beauty salon, Long Gone took them to the home of Joe Chambers (of the gospel group the Chambers Brothers) and he conked Lightnin’s hair. Lightnin’ was pleased, and the show at the Ash Grove was a hit.

  In a radio interview with Dane, Lomax talked about what he was hoping to accomplish by taking Lightnin’ to California. While he didn’t explain why he dressed him as he did, he was well intentioned, even if he didn’t fully understand the expectations of the audience. Clearly he had been influenced by his father, John Lomax Sr., who had dressed Leadbelly for one of his first concerts on January 4, 1935, in a rough blue work shirt over a yellow one, and old-fashioned high-bib overalls and red bandanna around his neck.16 To Dane, Lomax Jr. said, “I was very happy to have made this trip. Lightnin’ has been with me all the time. I just want to say that I’ve had a lot of personal enjoyment out of it, from my own singin’ in a small part, and from helpin’ Lightnin’ to make this trip. I thought that he would be of great interest to all the people he could sing to and that could hear him because he has a big appeal to me. I felt that certainly … he was bound to find some spark with anybody who would take time and be quiet enough to hear him here.”17

  At the Ash Grove on July 6 and 7, Lightnin’ performed as part a program that included Big Joe Williams, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. “Lightnin’ simply created a sensation,” Pearl says, “because the audience seemed so ready for it. I had had Brownie and Sonny and a couple of other traditional blues players before Lightnin’. But Brownie and Sonny had been playing for decades variations of their original music, but it had been adapted to the wishes of a white audience, but Lightnin’ wasn’t that. Brownie knew what songs people wanted to hear.”18 It was the first time Lightnin’ met McGhee, Terry, and Williams, whose 1935 recording of “Baby, Please Don’t Go” was undoubtedly an influence upon him. However, Lightnin’ had relatively little experience playing for white audiences, so when he came on stage, no matter how much Lomax Jr. may have tried to coach him, he could only be himself. There was no pretense. Lightnin’ was still trying to figure out what white audiences really wanted, so he played whatever came to mind, and his songs rambled on in the style he was accustomed to.

  The World Pacific label worked out a deal with Lightnin’ and the other musicians to make an LP together. 19 Pearl says, “Down South Summit Meetin’ was recorded entirely in the studios of World Pacific studio, by Ed Michel, with me there as holding it together, kibbitzing and making suggestions. [Applause was added to the LP master to make it sound as if it was recorded live at the Ash Grove.] It was initially called First Meeting as it was the first time Lightnin’, Brownie, and Sonny had appeared on an LP together. Surprised the hell out of me, but there it was…. I bought a huge bottle of whiskey at the request of the guys as we drove to World Pacific. Big Joe drank half of it in the first couple of hours and not so gradually slipped through incoherence into dreamland. An historic error by yours truly.”20

  Essentially the LP was a loosely structured jam session, with the four performers trading licks in songs that extended longer than five minutes each. Lightnin’s vocals and acoustic guitar picking were impressive because he was able to quickly improvise as he played along, but it was the banter that propelled the session forward.21 “Big Joe Williams, he got over there,” Lightnin’ said, “he told me, ‘You can steal my chicken, Lightnin’, but can you make her lay?’ I told him I had roosters all over my cabin, and I make any hen lay when the times get hard. I think it was great…. I guess we all felt good, and we all went along with it.”22

  Billboard wrote, “A meeting of minds and voices is the accomplished fact of this unusually entertaining folk-blues album by four top names in the current folk-blues revival. All four share playing and singing improvisations on four of the tracks. Two others are shared by Hopkins and McGhee and Hopkins alone. Extremely entertaining fare.”23

  After Lightnin’ returned to Houston, he went back to work in the little joints in the Third Ward, though it was clear that he was rapidly gaining an expanding white audience, primarily as a result of the efforts of Lomax and McCormick, who were vying for his favor. McCormick was more ambitious, and in addition to trying to get bookings for Lightnin’, he continued trying to find other blues musicians to record.

  While Lightnin’ was in California, McCormick and Strachwitz went to Navasota, Texas. “We drove out towards Washington County,” Strachwitz says. “And I literally just got out of the car and I saw people working in the fields and asked them, ‘Have you heard of any guitar pickers out here?’ And they said, ‘You better go to Navasota for that.’ Mack recalled a Hopkins song ‘Tim Moore’s Farm.’ … Mack had a feeling that Tom Moore might have a plantation in the area because he knew Lightnin’ was from that part of the country, and thought the best place to start inquiring would be a feed store. We walked into the feed store and Mack just walked up to one of the employees and said, ‘Does Tom Moore live here in town?’ And he directed us to his office over the bank building in Navasota. And Mack acted very police-like. ‘Can we visit your plantation?’ ‘Well, you have to make an appointment. I don’t have time right now.’ And then Mack asked something to the effect of ‘Do you know of any hands who play music for your workers?’ And Mr. Moore said, ‘There’s a fellow here they seem to like him. I don’t know his name but you need to go to the railroad station and ask Peg Leg. He can tell you.’ So, we went to the railroad station and Peg Leg told us his name was Mance Lipscomb and that he was probably cutting grass out on the highway, but he also told us where he lived. So, we couldn’t find him on the highway and we turned up at his house that evening and those recordings became the first release on Arhoolie Records.”24 Lipscomb subsequently enjoyed a starring role in the folk-blues revival, often paralleling Lightnin’s experiences and occasionally sharing the bill with him. While Lightnin’ and Lipscomb are often grouped together as exemplars of Texas country blues, their music was significantly different. Lipscomb was a songster and played finger-style guitar; his repertoire included folk songs, ballads, and dance tunes. Lightnin’ developed an emotive, single-string guitar style that reflected the commercially recorded blues artists of the 1920s and ‘30s.

  After recording Mance Lipscomb on August 11, 1960, Strachwitz went to Memphis to meet up with Paul Oliver, who was traveling with his wife, Valerie, across the United States, supported by grants from the Foreign Specialists Program of the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs of the United States and the Council of Leaders and Specialists of the American Council of Education. Oliver, in addition to expanding his research of blues, was also conducting interviews for BBC Radio. “A past student of mine happened to have been made a program director,” Oliver says, “so we got in touch. He helped to arrange for me to have the equip
ment, which was difficult in those days … the one [tape recorder] I had belonged to the army, and the BBC had gotten it from the army. It was entirely in a khaki bag that was made to fit it. So I never did get to see what kind of tape recorder it was. It was all very concealed, being a military thing.”25

  Oliver had corresponded with Strachwitz after reading his early article on Lightnin’, and together they went back to Texas, where Strachwitz introduced him to Lipscomb. But Oliver was especially interested in Lightnin’ because he was familiar with his records and wanted to interview him for his radio series and for the book he was then developing, titled Conversation with the Blues.26 “The interview was in the Third Ward,” Oliver says, “on the front door step basically of his house. We met there socially and independently with a couple of his friends. One of them, L. C. Williams, died very shortly after, a very nice young singer, and Long Gone Miles and Spider Kilpatrick.27 … I interviewed him [Lightnin’] I suppose for twenty minutes of actual time. But the amount of text from him was very limited. He was a kind of slow speaker. He’d just give an answer to a question, and then I’d have to reshape another question, and get another one sentence answer, and so on and so on. It wasn’t really flowing. My wife Val was there, and I think that seemed to reassure him in a sense. He was feeling safe without stress and so on. His wife brought us some coffee. It was very relaxed actually.”28

  When Oliver completed the interview, he asked Lightnin’ to sign a release for the BBC, and then paid twenty-five dollars. Oliver says that he didn’t “want to tell him at the start that he was going to be paid, because I wanted him to speak honestly rather than because he was going to get some money.” On each of the next three days, Oliver met up with Lightnin’ and also went to see him perform at both Irene’s and the Sputnik, Third Ward bars where Lightnin’ was a regular. Oliver was amazed by Lightnin’s inventiveness and his ability to not only play both acoustic and electric guitars, but to “come up with different words and different themes. He seemed to have the capacity to improvise on the spot. He was great. He was playing acoustic at Irene’s, but he was playing electric at the Sputnik bar. Irene’s was a very little place. Sputnik bar was more a cafe-bar with tables. Irene’s was a bit cozier. You asked for a drink at Irene’s, whereas at the Sputnik, you could be served.”29

  Although McCormick didn’t accompany Oliver and was not present at his interview with Lightnin’, he had corresponded with him and was eager to work with him. McCormick had a grand plan for a book on Texas blues, and Oliver, impressed by McCormick’s research and liner notes, agreed to collaborate with him. The two worked together throughout the 1960s, but they ultimately had a falling out after Oliver had completed thirty-four chapters, and the book was never finished.30

  In the early 1960s, McCormick was extremely busy as Lightnin’s manager, promoter, and agent, in addition to “a number of other roles” that included picking him up, taking him to gigs, and bringing him home. As early as 1959, McCormick had been contacted by Harold Leventhal, a New York folk music impresario, who was the manager of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and wanted to present Lightnin’ in New York.

  Leventhal had been “a song-plugger for Irving Berlin,” Seeger recalls, “and then he decided to take a job with his brother, who was a clothing manufacturer, but he met the Weavers and was interested. And he suggested to a friend of his that his friend become our manager. However, when the Weavers were finally blacklisted out of work [by McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities], we took a sabbatical, and as Lee Hayes said, it turned into a Mondical and Tuesdical.” 31

  Blacklisted as communists by McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities, the Weavers were forced to disband in 1952, but Leventhal persisted in trying to find them an audience, and in 1955 he organized a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall. “Town Hall had turned him down,” Seeger says, “unless we would sign anti-Communist oaths, but he went to Carnegie Hall and they said, ‘We’ll rent to you. Just give us the money.’ And to everyone’s surprise, it was standing room only.”32 The success of this concert in 1955 led to others, and for the Hootenanny on October 14, 1960, at Carnegie Hall, organized as a benefit for the folk music magazine Sing Out!, Leventhal booked Lightnin’ as part of a program that included Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Bill McAdoo, Elizabeth Knight, Jerry Silverman, and the Harvesters.

  John Lomax Jr. had corresponded with Irwin Silber at Sing Out!, and negotiated the terms for both Lightnin’ and him to perform not only at Carnegie Hall, but as part of another Pete Seeger concert in Philadelphia, as well as a Sunday afternoon show at Art D’Lugoff’s Village Gate. The fees agreed upon were: $250 for a 20 minute set at Carnegie Hall, $200 in Philadelphia, and $150 against 50 percent of the gross at the Village Gate.33

  Leventhal worked with Silber to promote the shows, and in a letter dated September 23, 1960, to George Hoefer at Down Beat, wrote: “I am bringing Sam ‘Lightnin” Hopkins to New York for a limited period to do concerts and club work in the New York and Boston areas. This is the first time that Lightnin’ Hopkins will be appearing [in public] in the north, and should you be interested in interviewing him or getting a story, I would be glad to arrange this.”34

  Leventhal’s promotion attracted considerable attention, and Robert Shelton devoted most of his concert review in the New York Times to Lightnin’, stating: “Although Carnegie Hall is hardly the ideal forum for this sort of musician, Mr. Hopkins was surprisingly effective in surmounting the size and impersonality of the auditorium. His voice is dark, supple and intense. In a half-dozen surging blues songs, derived and adapted from his own experience as field hand and rambler, he demonstrated some of the pain and some of the release that make the country blues such a strong vehicle…. His highly imaginative guitar work was impressive throughout.”35

  For Shelton, the highlight of the evening was Lightnin’s “relaxed, verse-swapping number with Pete Seeger, the master of ceremonies, and Bill McAdoo, a 23-year-old folk singer from Detroit, [in which] Mr. Hopkins began to show those gifts of wit and flair and improvisatory skill on which part of his justifiable reputation rests.”36 Years later even Seeger commented that what impressed him the most about Lightnin’ was his ability to improvise lyrics on the spot. “Lightnin’ would look over,” Seeger says, “and see someone: ‘Oh that man with a big moustache, he’s met a woman with red hair,’ and it would become a song.”37

  Nat Hentoff, writing in the Reporter, described the Carnegie Hall show and its audience in greater detail: “At most ‘folk’ events, the audience was predominantly young, very young. They looked like—and some were—the intense questioners at meetings of the Young People’s Socialist League and the Saturday picketers at Woolworth’s. The folk music they prefer consists largely of ballads and novelty songs they’ve learned from records by Pete Seeger and the Weavers. They are most moved by traditional songs with new lyrics that condemn Jim Crow and the Bomb.”38 Hentoff went on to praise Hopkins as “the only real folk singer on the program as distinguished from singers who ‘interpret’ folk material,” noting that he made “some contact with audience … avoiding his harshest songs and focusing instead on women, those lost and those invited back. The applause was loud but dutiful.”39

  Lightnin’ impressed the audience with his authenticity; he was an intrinsic part of the African American culture that he sang about, and in this sense he was a true folk singer, not a singer of folk songs, like the members of the Weavers, who were revivalists. Yet his performance at Carnegie Hall was still staged and lacked the direct interaction with the audience that he was accustomed to in Houston. In the little joints of the Third Ward, Lightnin’ engaged in a kind of running dialogue with his audience, who sometimes shouted out to him and interrupted his singing so that he could respond in kind. At Carnegie Hall, the audience was much more polite, applauding after each song.

  Pete Welding, writing in Coda, also praised Lightnin’ and pointed out that he had already released o
ver two hundred sides on a variety of labels, but his recent recordings, made by McCormick on both American and British labels, have “served to introduce Lightnin’ to a wider audience and to establish his reputation as the finest of the unalloyed blues singers still performing.”40 However, Welding also voiced the concern of many writers “as to whether Lightnin’ will be able to weather the adulation of the ‘folkniks’ who now comprise the bulk of his audience…. Will success spoil Lightnin’?” Welding didn’t think so, and acknowledged that Lightnin’ was actually quite sophisticated in his understanding of his different audiences. “Lightnin’ is aware of the sharp dichotomy that exists between the fare he offers his concert audiences and the powerful, impassioned and fiercely introspective blues he sings for his friends on Houston’s Dowling Street. ‘I stay with my own people,’ he says. ‘I have all my fun and I have my trouble with them.’ Since his songs reflect this situation, he reserves the full force of his artistry for them—and they’ll always serve as a touchstone for him.”41

  Welding was essentially right, though what he didn’t seem to fully understand was that even in his own community, Lightnin’ catered to his different audiences. McCormick had observed, “In his finest moments Lightnin’ becomes a dramatist with an incredible knack for spontaneous rhyme and crisp, scene-setting narratives. He’ll state an experience in the first-person present-tense, picking some intimate memory and bringing it completely forward to the moment—while the guitar suggests shifts of mood and underlines the action.”42