Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  In performance, Hopkins might slump back, rambling on about his day until he found an up-tempo boogie to suggest coming awake, and then fade into a more religious tone that evoked a different mood, singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” While these shifts kept the audience engaged, they also reflected a sensitivity to what the people listening might be feeling, though Lightnin’ usually did exactly what he wanted to and expected those around him to keep up with him.

  After Carnegie Hall, Lightnin’ appeared on October 23, in his first full concert at Art D’Lugoff’s Village Gate at 185 Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. The show time was 3:30 P.M., and once again, it attracted an enthusiastic audience and the attention of Robert Shelton, who, in his review in the New York Times, commented that Lightnin’ was more relaxed than in his Carnegie Hall appearance. “Although Mr. Hopkins’ sentiments are primitive,” Shelton wrote, “their expression is not. Trouble was treated sardonically, with broad humor and pathos. The blues form may seem simple and limiting, but at the hands of a master, they burgeoned into a subtle expression of moods.”43

  Three days after playing at the Village Gate, Lightnin’ went to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on October 26, 1960, to record at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio (famous as the site for many Prestige and Blue Note jazz recordings). Ozzie Cadena, who had worked for the Savoy label as an in-house producer and A&R scout in the 1950s, produced the session, and Bluesville later issued the recordings. Bluesville was a subsidiary of the jazz label Prestige, which was founded in 1959 to focus primarily on older “classic” blues artists.44 Lightnin’ was a perfect fit for the Bluesville catalogue, and this album titled Last Night Blues featured him accompanied by Sonny Terry on harmonica and two New York area sidemen, Leonard Gaskin on bass and Belton Evans on drums. Both Gaskin and Evans were veterans of the jazz scene; Gaskin’s musical associations included Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Eddie Condon, and Lovelle had worked with Earl Hines, Arnett Cobb, Teddy Wilson, and Buck Clayton.

  For Last Night Blues, McCormick wrote the liner notes and discussed the parallels in the artists’ rural upbringings and their respective developments as individual stylists.45 McCormick posited that Hopkins and Terry eventually became aware of each other through their recordings: “Sam sat in front of Houston jukeboxes hearing about [Terry’s] ‘Hot Headed Woman’ and Saunders [Sonny’s given name] heard about a nappy-headed [Hopkins’s] ‘Short Haired Woman’ from one end of Lenox Avenue to the other.”46 While some of McCormick’s comparisons were a stretch, his fundamental premise was sound in that both were part of the same generation, born six months apart, and their music expressed the plight of their fellow African Americans, moving to the city to work as “mill hands, freight loaders, porters, and yardmen.” Moreover, both Hopkins and Terry were itinerant before they settled in urban areas, though “for all their similarities of heritage and experience, the men are direct opposites. Where Lightnin’ is leery of strange situations, dependent and suspicious, and the victim of his handicaps, Sonny is the strong one, a man on casual terms with his handicap—blind-ness—and one capable of warm, binding affection for the men he plays with.” Ultimately, however, McCormick saw their differences as deeply reflective of their personalities—“These personal qualities are reflected in the music heard here: Lightnin’s sly charms and innocence set against Sonny’s warm-hearted joy of life.”47

  Musically, Terry’s harmonica was well suited as accompaniment for Hopkins; the production values were much more polished than the field recordings of Charters and McCormick. In a new version of “Rocky Mountain,” one of Lightnin’s first Aladdin recordings, Hopkins’s guitar and vocals were matched by Terry’s heartfelt response on harp. According to McCormick, the song was based on Lightnin’s travel to Arizona in the 1930s on a cotton-picking contract, though this contradicted what Hopkins had told Charters about how he wrote the song when traveling to Los Angeles with Lola Cullum. In any event, in this version, Lightnin’ did sing about going through Arizona. In one verse, he even expressed his contempt for the federal prohibition law and his compassion for the American Indians, who, McCormick said, Lightnin’ met when he got involved in bootlegging Mexican wine and whiskey into the Papago and Gila Indian Reservations.

  If you ever go out in Rocky Mountains

  Boy, will you please stop by Arizona town (x2)

  You know they won’t sell them Indians nothing to drink

  And they don’t hardly allow them around

  In “Got to Move Your Baby,” Lightnin’ sang about a sixteen-year-old girl who apparently found him irresistible, warning “if you got a young girl/you better keep her away from me.” In the end, the implication was ambiguous:

  Just one more time before you leave me here

  Baby, I know you love me somethin’

  But you still in mama and papa’s care

  Then, in “So Sorry to Leave You,” he complained about being homesick and his longing to be back home:

  If I had wings like an angel

  I want to tell you where I would fly

  Whoa, I’d fly to the heart of Antoinette

  That’s where poor Lightnin’ would give up to die

  This was Lightnin’s first mention of Antoinette in a song, and while Lightnin’ was devoted to her, he was certainly known to have affairs with other women.

  Perhaps the most moving song on the Last Night Blues LP was “Conversation Blues,” in which Terry sang, “Junior, I want you to tell old Sonny something to make him see,” to which Lightnin’ responded:

  Well, you ask Po’ Junior to give you something

  Whoa Lord, to make poor Sonny Terry see

  You know I only got two eyes and I offer you one

  Whoa, now yes, don’t you think well of me

  On November 9, 1960, Hopkins recorded another LP for Prestige/Bluesville, produced by Cadena, titled Lightnin’, with accompaniment again by Gaskin and Evans and liner notes by Joe Goldberg.48 Highlights on this LP included Lightnin’s version of Big Boy Crudup’s “Mean Old Frisco” with a loose and fast swing in the guitar; a remake of “Shinin’ Moon” that he recorded for Gold Star and Herald; the slow and melancholy blues “Thinkin’ ‘Bout an Old Friend” about love “way out in the West somewhere”; and “Automobile Blues” (also an update of a Gold Star single) in which he pleaded with a kind of sexual innuendo: “Yes, your car so pretty, baby, please will you let me drive some time.” Billboard, in its review of this album, wrote, “Lightnin’ Hopkns is one of the great blues artists of the decade. Prestige’s recording of him captures his driving intensity and individualism.”49

  On November 13, 1960, CBS Television Workshop taped Lightnin’ for his first television appearance in its production of A Pattern of Words, a program produced by Robert Herridge and advertised as a “lyrical entertainment” that was “an experiment in four elements of expression, all of which deal with basic experiences of human life—joy, love, birth and death.”50 Broadcast on Sunday, November 20, the program featured the “contrasting techniques” of four individuals: the talking blues of Lightinin’ Hopkins; the harmonica of John Sebastian, performing the works of Bach and his own original compositions; and the folk songs of nineteen-year-old Joan Baez.51 Little is known about how this television program took shape, but it is likely that Harold Leventhal was in part behind it, given the involvement of Hopkins and Baez, who had both performed at the Carnegie Hall hootenanny.

  Two days after the taping of A Pattern of Works and Music, Nat Hentoff brought Lightnin’ to Nola Penthouse Studios in New York to record an LP for Candid, founded by Archie Bleyer, the owner of the Cadence label, who wanted another label to record the jazz and blues that he loved. Bleyer had approached Hentoff, and together they produced LPs until the label went out of business in 1962, not long after the release of the Lightnin’ in New York recordings.52 It’s surprising that Lightnin’ recorded for Candid, especially since he was under contract to Prestige/Bluesville, though apparently some kind of arrangement wa
s made, given there is no evidence of any complaints or lawsuits.

  In his liner notes, Hentoff said that Lightnin’ was relaxed during the session: “He had found out that Carnegie Hall was not all of New York and that maybe there were a few more whites than he’d imagined who relate to more of his hurting songs.”53 For the LP, Hopkins recorded seven guitar blues, and one on the piano, though at one point in the session for “Take It Easy,” he briefly played both piano and guitar while singing.

  In “Lightnin’s Piano Boogie,” he demonstrated his prowess as a pianist, playing a hard-driving instrumental, mixing tempos with a resolve and humor reminiscent of the barrelhouse sound he might have heard back in the 1930s. In “Mighty Crazy,” Lightnin’ struck a humorous chord. The song was up-tempo, combining a fast shuffle on his guitar with a foot-tapping rhythm and talking blues about the foibles of doing laundry, where each verse ends with the line: “It’s crazy to keep rubbin’ at that …” punctuated by a high-pitched, single-string run.

  Yeah … sister got a rub board, mother got a tub

  They gonna around doin’ the rub, the rub, ain’t they crazy

  Get up in the morning, take a little toddy

  Take in washin’ for each and everybody, ain’t they crazy

  Billboard heaped praise on the Lightnin’ in New York album, giving it a four-star rating for strong sales potential: “This is an in-depth musical portrait of Lightnin’ Hopkins, not as a popular blues singer, which he has been for many years, but as a serious singer of serious songs.”54

  After completing the Candid session, Lightnin’ went to Massachusetts to perform at a date booked by another folk revival promoter, Manny Greenhill, at the Agassi Theatre on the campus of Harvard University, where he appeared on a bill with Cisco Houston. Harold Leventhal had been in touch with Greenhill and helped to facilitate Hopkins’s work in the Boston area.55 The Harvard show was a joint presentation of Manny’s Folklore Productions and the student group Radcliffe Harvard Liberal Union, and was the beginning of an ongoing relationship with Greenhill, who managed and booked Lightnin’ until about 1966. “I couldn’t say how long my dad represented him,” Mitch Greenhill, Manny’s son, says. “I think it might be hard to pin down. My dad was always extremely loyal to the people he represented, and if they went off and found what seemed like a better deal and come back a couple of years later, he’d always take them back.”56

  Mitch recalls that when Hopkins came to Massachusetts, he stayed with him and his parents at their house in Dorchester. “My dad liked him more than my mom did,” Mitch says. “My mom found him kind of a prickly house guest, because one time she made him some eggs for breakfast, I guess they were scrambled eggs, and they were too soft or too hard, or something, and he spit them out all over a wall in the kitchen. It didn’t endear him to her.”57

  Then, when Mitch went to see Lightnin’ perform, it was not what he had expected. “He was such a showman,” Mitch says, “He had this big smile, and he would do what I would call gimmicky show things. One of the things that got me interested in traditional music was I wanted things to be more real. I kind of maybe expected him to show up in work clothes, or something like that. He was dapper and natty.” During intermission Mitch saw the singer/songwriter Eric von Schmidt, and when he started to tell him how he was surprised by Lightnin’s presence on stage, “Eric kind of wringed me out and said, ‘You’re missing the whole point. Listen closer to what he’s doing. It’s a very brave performance he’s putting on here.’ And I listened and he was right.”58 Lightnin’ was an entertainer, and he had learned how to engage a white audience.

  From his concert date at Agassi Theatre, Lightnin’ went back to New York City, where he met the African American producer Bobby Robinson of the Fire label. “Well, I looked him up,” Robinson told John Broven in an interview. “He was playing at a little club in the Village somewhere. I went out to the club. I asked him to record. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it, give me $400, I don’t want anything else in my life,’ he said. ‘It’s your record, you got it…. I don’t want no royalties, I don’t want nothing, it’s your record.’”59 Lightnin’ knew he was violating the contract McCormick had negotiated with Candid, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. Apparently Lightnin’ was never faithful to any contract, a fact that makes his later complaints about record companies extremely compromised.

  Robinson had a record shop in Harlem called Bobby’s Happy House, which he opened in 1946 at the corner of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 125th Street, and over the years he began to produce his own records. He established several different record labels, some in partnership with his brother: Red Robin Records (1952), Whirlin’ Disc Records (1956), Fury Records and Everlast Records (1957), Fire Records (1959), and Enjoy Records (1962). 60 By the time Robinson met Lightnin’, he had had considerable success with his recordings of Buster Brown, Wilbert Harrison, and Elmore James, among others.

  When Robinson brought Lightnin’ into the studio, he recorded him solo, but he wasn’t sure what to do next. He felt he needed to have a band sound to make the recordings more commercial, but he knew Lightnin’ was “so unorthodox, you never knew which way he was gonna go.” So he decided to bring in a drummer named Delmar Donnell, who “was one of those little local guys” and wasn’t a professional. In the studio Robinson told Donnell, “Listen, all I want you to do, wherever this guy goes you follow … just keep the beat going and follow whatever he does.” And once the session was underway, Donnell “got the feel of it, he put a book on his drums for a muffled sound and played with the brushes.” Lightnin’ sat down, Robinson said, “cigar stuck in his mouth, crossed his legs, and I set a mike on his acoustic guitar and another mike for him to sing. I sat him on a tall stool so that his vocal mike was above the other one. We didn’t have an amplifier so I had to set the mike at an angle right near the box, that way we could divide it with the drums, and we ran it down and I put it out, it was like an instant [hit] record.”61 By the time they were done, Lightnin’ had recorded enough material for an LP, which Robinson called Mojo Hand after the title song, though the album was not released until after the single “Mojo Hand” scored big in the marketplace, charting in Cashbox magazine’s “Top 50 in R&B Locations” for five weeks.62 While the “Mojo Hand” single didn’t make the Billboard charts, it was a “Pick Hit” and did get a positive review: “Hopkins is at his very best with these two monumental efforts. Top side [“Mojo Hand”] is up-tempo blues—a story of women, love and superstition. Flip [“Glory Be”] is a slow dirge-like blues also spotlighting drums and the singer’s own guitar. Two great sides.”63

  Strachwitz recalls that when McCormick found out about the session with Bobby Robinson, he was furious, even more so after “Mojo Hand” became a hit when it was released as a single in 1961. “Mack called,” Strachwitz says, “and he asked me, ‘Chris, do you have any idea how and where that was made?’ And I told him, ‘That’s a New York label. Bobby Robinson runs that,’ And so, he finally confronted Lightnin’, ‘When did you … I hear you recorded for …’ And Lightnin’ said, ‘Well, lookie here, I needed to make me some money, and this boy come up and said, ‘We’ll make you some records.’”

  Lightnin’s “Mojo Hand” built on the success of Muddy Waters’s cover of the song “I’ve Got My Mojo Working,” written by Preston Foster, though it also may have taken its inspiration from the numerous blues songs that had used the line “I’m going to Louisiana to get me a Mojo hand.” These include Ida Cox’s “Mojo Hand Blues” (1927), Texas Alexander’s “Tell Me Woman Blues” (1928), Little Hat Jones’s “Two Strings Blues” (1929), Tampa Red’s “Anna Lou Blues” (1940), Muddy Waters’s “Louisiana Blues” (1950), and Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues” (1953). Mojo hand refers to a magical charm used in hoodoo, but also to sexual potency. According to Strachwitz, “Lightnin’ apparently believed it. His ‘wife’ [Antoinette] was a Creole from southwest Louisiana and was probably very aware of those cultural traditions.”64 However, prior
to “Mojo Hand,” Lightnin’ had only recorded one song on the subject, “Black Cat Bone.”

  Lightnin’ had made a name for himself in New York, and judging from the response to “Mojo Hand,” he still had an audience among urban blacks to whom Robinson’s Fire label was primarily marketed. But his appeal among the folk and blues revivalists was growing, and he was often featured with an eclectic mix of performing artists. On November 26, 1960, he appeared in a program called “Folk Songs, Country & Blues,” presented by Harold Leventhal, at the Ethical Society Auditorium. Leventhal advertised the show as Lightnin’s “Last Performance in New York,” but also included the New Lost City Ramblers with John Cohen, Mike Seeger, Tom Paley, Cisco Houston, and Zarefah Story.

  By the time Lightnin’ returned to Houston, he had spent about six weeks in New York City. How he traveled to and from New York is unknown, though Strachwitz speculates that he probably went by train or bus, because Lightnin’ hated to fly. However, Art D’Lugoff at the Village Gate remembers that he sometimes used to pick Lightnin’ up at the airport and take him to his hotel, but he wasn’t sure exactly when. Lightnin’ played the Village Gate numerous times during the 1960s because he was paid well and one gig led to another.65

  Lightnin’ had stayed in Harlem the first time he traveled to New York in 1951 to record for Bobby Shad’s Sittin’ In With label and had seemed to like it, not only because of the money he made there. In one of his interviews with McCormick, he said, “That time I went to New York to make records … I stayed across the street from where Count Basie was. Count Basie, Joe Turner, Preacher Williams, they was all there. I had me some fun dancing there two–three nights.” But when Lightnin’ got to New York City in 1960, the room that was booked for him was, according to Hentoff, in a “depressing, run-down Harlem hotel.” Hopkins asked to be moved and was taken to “an even grimmer, gloomier hotel in the Village.” Lightnin’ told Hentoff, “There’s no light down there,” and during his first morning in the room the darkness made it hard for him to wake up, and he was late for an appointment. “There’s no sun,” Hopkins said, “so I didn’t know what time it was. I just sat down on the bed and played my box a while.”66