Lightnin’, however, didn’t stay in that hotel very long. Hentoff reported that he moved into the apartment of Martha Ledbetter, the widow of Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, and that “was one warm place in the city.” How Lightnin’ met Martha is unclear, though it’s possible that she attended the Carnegie Hall concert. Leadbelly had performed on different occasions with Pete Seeger as part of hootenannies and labor union rallies. In any event, according to David Benson, who traveled as a road manager for Lightnin’ in the 1970s, Martha Ledbetter gave Lightnin’ a ring that he showed off to people he met—“A gold ring with a black face with a gold S on it. He wore it all the time.”67 After 1947, Lightnin’ was far better known among black audiences than Leadbelly ever was.
Lightnin’ had now firmly established himself on the folk and blues revival scene, but to say that he had been “rediscovered,” as John S. Wilson did in the New York Times in 1959, is misleading. His career was continuous, and to some extent he straddled both white and black audiences, though his popularity ebbed and swelled on the Billboard and Cashbox jukebox and retail charts. He may have stopped recording between 1954 and 1959, but his music was not only available, it was also re-packaged and promoted during those years. Herald issued 45 rpm singles of Lightnin’s recordings every year from 1955 to 1960, and the Mesners produced a compilation of Aladdin singles intended for the growing LP market on the Score label in 1958.68 However, for the Score LP, called Lightnin’ Hopkins Strums the Blues, their marketing strategy catered to the folk audience. The unsigned liner notes on the back of the LP reads: “Lightnin’ Hopkins is a true folk singer. His songs are the heart of the South, the very essence of his people, their joys, their triumphs, their difficulties, their oppression. But Lightnin’s music too, like that of every great artist, has a universal quality…. Like all great folk artists … Hopkins improvises easily…. All turn his talent into a quick, fluent, outpouring of feeling.”69 Twelve years earlier, in 1946, many of the songs—like the hit “Katie Mae Blues”—on this LP were released for the “race” market, but with the burgeoning folk revival, the Mesners recognized a new opportunity.
In 1960, Herald also compiled twelve of Lightnin’s recordings from 1954, which had been released only as singles over the years, and issued them on an LP titled Lightnin’ and the Blues, though rather than trying to appeal to the folk audience, “J.S.” in the liner notes tried to exploit Lightnin’s mystique by stating that “nothing much is known about Sam Hopkins, and he is not one to venture any information…. The session and two bottles of gin were finished and Lightnin’ just shuffled away counting his money. We have not seen or heard from him since, but every time the phone rings we somehow hope we’ll hear his voice sayin’, ‘Man, I wrote a mess o’ new tunes for you.’”70
The response to Lightnin’ and the Blues among jazz and blues purists was negative. In the Saturday Review, critic (and coauthor of the book Jazzmen) Charles Edward Smith wrote: “No doubt he could do something with the electric guitar; he uses one here sometimes with deftness, though the overall impression is one of blatant sound. This impression is reinforced by added bass and drums and a souped-up juke box sound, leaving little room to hear what Lightnin’ could do, assuming he wanted to.”71
Also in 1960, Bobby Shad decided to issue recordings he made with Lightnin’ during the period from 1951 to 1953 on the Time label, including two of his biggest hits, “Hello Central” and “Coffee Blues.” But Shad decided to take a much more intellectual approach to contextualizing Hopkins’s music and was able to get Nat Hentoff, who was then coeditor of the Jazz Review, to write the liner notes. The LP, taking its title from Sam Charters’s book The Country Blues, is called Lightning Hopkins: Last of the Great Blues Singers. Shad, like the Mesners, was trying to capitalize on the new folk market and wanted to appeal to a young white audience looking to understand the blues.
Hentoff quoted heavily from McCormick’s article on Hopkins in the Jazz Review, in which he explained: “The essence of Lightning’s art is a specialized form of autobiography…. A line can have the blunt stab of T. S. Elliot [as McCormick pointed out] … ‘you ever see a one-eyed woman cry.’”72 But to McCormick’s assessment of Hopkins, Hentoff added, “It’s not all tragedy though. Lightning continues the blues tradition using irony as a weapon of survival as well as getting whatever peace of mind is possible under the circumstances…. In addition to the warm but cutting quality of his voice … is the extent to which he talk-sings his music. The result is the impression of completely spontaneous autobiography—a man talking about what he feels so that the natural phrasing of his speech blends easily and flowingly into his singing.”73 Then, in describing Lightnin’ performance style, Hentoff quoted from the Belgian critic Yannick Bruynoghe, who wrote that Hopkins’s guitar playing “is adapted to his speech as intimately as a second voice would be…. When he starts a chorus one can never tell where he’s aiming, how the phrases will be developed, and what sudden and abrupt changes he may introduce and bring to their logical conclusion.”74
The growing interest in Lightnin’s music made him reassess his attitude toward traveling. He liked playing for white audiences because he was getting paid more than he ever could in the Third Ward. Lomax Jr. had set a high standard for what Lightnin’ began to expect. He wanted someone to make his airplane arrangements, carry his guitar and suitcase, get him checked into the hotel, take him to the gig, take him back to the hotel, and make sure he had the beer and booze that he wanted. When he played the white club dates, there were always young, white guitar players, among others, who wanted to follow him around, buy him drinks, and provide for his needs and wishes.
As much as McCormick wanted to manage his career, Lighntin’ often resisted. However, on May 19, 1961, Lightnin’ signed a contract with Prestige, negotiated by McCormick, for “a minimum of 10 LPs,” for which he was to be paid an advance of five hundred dollars for each album and a royalty of twenty cents “per doubled faced 12” LP record.” In this agreement Lightnin’ also appointed McCormick, “according to the terms of a pre-existing agreement … as his sole authorized agent … to collect and receive all monies due him.”75
On July 26, 1961, Lightnin’ recorded a solo LP for Prestige/Bluesville, titled Blues in My Bottle and produced by the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein and McCormick at ACA Studios in Houston. Surprisingly the guitar is poorly recorded, but Lightnin’ seemed completely at ease in the studio, judging from the way he was joking around at the session in his version of Stick McGhee’s 1949 R & B hit “Drinkin’ Wine Spodee-O-Dee,” calling out the names of his friends who were there: “Why if you a got a nickel, Mary, I got a dime/ ‘Nette [Antoinette], let’s get together, Mack, and bring a little wine.” In “Buddy Brown’s Blues,” he ended with an old melody he learned from Texas Alexander, and in “DC-7” he sang about the crash of a Braniff Airline DC-7 that exploded in the air above his mother’s home in Centerville in 1959.
I want to tell you the first time I taken a notion
To let the airplane take me off this earth (x2)
Look like the first time I begin to ride that DC-7
I remember the first day I was birthed
This particular plane crash haunted Lightnin’, especially since his mother and others he knew in Centerville were witnesses to the disaster. According to Joe Kessler, who years later acquired three of Lightnin’s guitars, Antoinette said that Lightnin’ kept a mental record of airplane disasters. “If someone asked him to travel somewhere,” Kessler says, “he often refused by saying on such and such a day, airline ‘x’ crashed.”76
Carroll Peery, an African American who managed the kitchen and bar at the Ash Grove in the early 1960s, recalls that Lightnin’ talked often about how much he hated flying. “He only flew if he had to,” Peery says, “and then he’d have to get drunk to do that. He liked to take the train. I met him at the train station several times. I was kind of amazed about how little, or how small his suitcases were, because he really packed a lot in them.
”77
Peery and Lightnin’ became good friends at the Ash Grove and spent a lot of time together not only in Los Angeles, but also in the Bay Area, where Peery later moved to work at the Cabale. “The more we talked the more we saw how much we had common ground,” Peery says. “He was an extremely complicated man. He had very little formal education, but he had what they call ‘mother wit’ to a great degree. I remember laughing a lot. He could really turn a phrase.”78
One night, when Lightnin’ wasn’t working, Peery told him he wanted to take him to a quiet place, where everything would be relaxed so he could enjoy his time off. But as it turned out, the evening was anything but relaxed: “I took him to this coffee house called the Xanadu and … there was a big fight…. I was trying to keep everybody away from Lightnin’ and his guitar and so on.
And this one guy started cursing at Lightnin’. So I had to grab him and take him outside, and we got into a fight. And the guy had a knife and cut me, but I didn’t know it. He was a black guy. And Lightnin’ just sat there, and I’m really glad he did. But I didn’t know I had been cut until later when somebody asked, ‘Is that blood on the back of your pants?’ So I had to go to the emergency room and they fixed me up there. And when I came back, Lightnin’ says, ‘Little as you are, you don’t need but one ass hole.’ He could come up with things like that all the time.”79
On another occasion, Peery says he and Lightnin’ stayed up after hours with an Israeli dance group: “They were at UCLA, and Lightnin’ was at the Ash Grove. And so they thought, ‘Soon as we get off the show, we got to get over to the Ash Grove to see if we can see this guy,’ because they had all of his recordings back in Israel. So they came over there. I was just locking the Ash Grove up and me and Lightnin’ were the only two people there, and this huge limousine pulled up and all of these half-naked girls get out. I says to Lightnin’, ‘Do you think you might wanna give them a private concert?’ And he says, ‘Well, it looks like I ought to.’ So I took some wine and stuff from the cooler and we went across the street to where he was stayin’ at the time … and he sang and they danced all night long. Next thing you knew the sun was comin’ up.”80
Other than traveling to New York and California, most of Lightnin’s performance dates in 1961 were local and around Texas; he played the Rainbow Room and the Shriner’s Auditorium in Dallas, though he did go on the road with Clifton Chenier and his Zydeco band. Clifton was related to Antoinette, and Lightnin’ sometimes had Clifton’s brother Cleveland accompany him on rub board.
Back in Houston, Lightnin’ (with or without McCormick’s knowledge) made a largely acoustic folk-blues album that was issued the following year on Vee-Jay as Lightnin’ Strikes. It was an effective album, presenting some songs that he’d never recorded before, like the utterly rural “Coon Is Hard to Catch” and a rare nod to gospel music, “Devil Is Watching You.” The writer’s credit on all but two of the album’s songs went to Bill Quinn and Lola Cullum, who probably produced the album along with Houston country music kingpin H. W. “Pappy” Daily.81 (Daily released two of the songs as a single on his Dart label prior to the Vee-Jay album.) Andrew Brown speculates that both Quinn and Cullum “must have wanted to do something to re-establish themselves as Lightnin’s discoverers after he started to become famous again. Perhaps they both read articles or album liner notes that only mentioned Charters and McCormick and were miffed about not being credited for the major roles they played in Lightnin’s career. So they pooled their money together and paid him $100 a song, just like old times, and Lightnin’ did this for them as an expression of gratitude.” It was the last time Lightnin’ worked with Cullum, though he did apparently continue to have some contact with Quinn, whom Brown speculates probably engineered his Goin’ Away album in 1963.82
During the summer of 1961, Chris Strachwitz returned to Texas hoping to produce his own recordings, but it didn’t work out. “Well, I tried one night to record Lightnin’ [at a live club date],” Strachwitz says. “It was horrible sound…. The tape recorder was apparently overmodulating without indicating that this was happening. I used one of those little volume controls with two microphones, one for the singer and that electric guitar and the other for the drummer … but what I found out later was that the two microphones were out of phase with each other. That one night we tried to record Lightnin’, he got really pissed, ‘I gotta have my money, you know!’ Mack [McCormick] tried to explain to him that I had to see if this [the test recording] was any good or not, and Lightnin’ didn’t like that one bit. He said that anything he does is good. But he didn’t think about my being technically incompetent. You see, the previous guys he’d encountered, they all had good recording machines and they knew what the hell they were doing. I didn’t know nothing. So they almost started a fight outside this beer joint; I’ll never forget that. Mack and Lightnin’ were yelling at each other, and they were ready to punch each other in the nose, except there was both of us. So that didn’t really come about and then he left.”83
Frustrated, Strachwitz returned to California, and finally got the opportunity to record Hopkins in Berkeley on November 26, 1961, at Sierra Sound Lab. “He was already in California for a program,” Strachwitz recalls. “On October 20, Lightnin’ had appeared with Jack Elliott at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. While he may have gone back to Texas, it’s possible he stayed in California and went on to Oakland, where he had two cousins. He was probably booked at the Cabale.”84 The Cabale was opened in 1961 by Debbie Green and Rolf Cahn with the help of Bay Area “proto-hippie” Howard Ziehm. Green and Cahn had moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley a year earlier, but were both quite familiar with the Bay Area folk scene as performers and promoters. “It was a real hippie, folkie-dokie club,” Strachwitz says. “They were selling coffee and cookies. All these folkies would come by. Lightnin’ didn’t draw any huge crowd. He never said if he liked it or not. It was just part of the day.”
When Strachwitz recorded Hopkins, he wanted him to play the instrument of his choice. “The whole business of electric and acoustic never entered my head. People played what they had…. If I thought about it, I wanted the electric sound that he had on those later records…. The stuff being played on the radio then [the early to mid-1950s] were the Mercury and Herald records, especially the Herald ones. They got the ferocious electric guitar, also the Decca—‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy New Year’—That’s just gorgeous stuff. So that’s what I wanted.”85
In his contract with Lightnin’, Strachwitz agreed to pay “the total of $400 (“$300 to be paid … at the time of the session—$100 to be paid to Mr. Harold Leventhal [who was then acting as Hopkins’s “super-agent” in association with McCormick and as the representative of the music publishing company Sanga Music] for commission earnings as an advance royalty of 5 percent of the retail price of the records if in the LP form, 1 cent per side in the case of 45s or similar
singles.”86
Lightnin’ came to the session prepared. “He had the numbers kind of figured out of what he wanted to do,” Strachwitz says, “But he really wasn’t into this idea of making albums at all. He was still on the trip of making a couple of songs now and then. And that’s how he would make all his singles down there [in Texas]. Because ideas would come to him, a few at a time.” Strachwitz asked him to play some of his “older stuff” because he knew that was easier for him, and he did manage to record him playing the piano singing “Jesus, Won’t You Come By Here” (“Needy Time”), an old religious song that Lightnin’ recorded several times under different titles.
While Strachwitz was certainly a part of the folk revival, he was still trying, at that time, to reach an African American audience. “I was trying to make those 45s for the black market. [The DJ] Rockin’ Lucky would actually play them on KSAN-AM [in San Francisco] at that time. And he had a record shop, and you had to give him a hundred free ones otherwise he wouldn’t play them, because he sold them in the store. I was all for it. That’s the way that stuff g
ot on the air. He was funny. He was from Orange, Texas, and he would have this little rap, ‘All right, baby, Come on, Say shake or break it. You want me to shake or break this damn thing.’” But after Lightnin’s first session, Strachwitz didn’t feel any of the songs were strong enough to stand alone as a single release. “I was working with the black distributor, Olin Harrison,” Strachwitz says. “He had the Acme Sales Company in San Francisco. It was difficult to get LPs distributed on the radio and the little mom and pop record shops. They wanted 45s with a big sound. That’s why I got the Bay Area drummer Victor Leonard for Lightnin’, but it wasn’t enough and I never released a 45 of any of those first recordings.”87
However, Strachwitz was not deterred in his efforts to reconnect Lightnin’ with a black audience. Lightnin’ had never had a black promoter in California, and Strachwitz wanted to get him booked into a couple of black venues: the Continental Club in West Oakland and the Savoy Club in North Richmond. Lightnin’ liked the idea of going to the Continental Club, and the people there definitely responded to his music. Many had bought his records, or heard them on jukeboxes in the 1950s. But after Lightnin’ got off stage, a well-known, local black R & B promoter approached Strachwitz, when Lightnin’ was in earshot, and said, “I could use that boy.” Lightnin’ recoiled. He left the club soon afterwards with Strachwitz, insulted that he was called a “boy” by the black promoter. When he went to play at the Savoy Club, he was even more warmly received; one woman going in the front door at the same time as him looked over and asked, “Are you the real Lightnin’ Hopkins?” And he replied, “You better believe it, baby.” Lightnin’s presence made people gravitate to him, though he could rebuff them in an instant. “He never seemed to lose his cool,” Strachwitz says, “and moving around the black world of the Bay Area, he was amused that he was still so well known. He’d been selling records for all these years. But no one had ever seen him, because he wouldn’t travel behind his records, and as much as he liked the black club scene, he was starting to realize he could make more money playing for white folkies.”88
Alan Govenar Page 16