Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  In April, Lightnin’ traveled to Chicago, where Willie Dixon had helped to arrange some dates for him. Dixon and Hopkins had become friends during the American Folk Blues Festival tour. “Dixon was a great diplomat,” Strachwitz says. “He always talking…. He helped Lippmann and Rau get all these musicians for the festival tour. And when Lightnin’ came to Chicago, he would have arranged for him to stay some place, or maybe with him.”42

  Lightnin’ stayed in Chicago and played Western Hall on April 17, Peppers Lounge on April 18, and then went to Gary, Indiana, before returning to Western Hall on April 24 and 25, and a club in Joliet, Illinois, on April 26. While he was playing largely for white audiences in other cities, all of his Chicago dates were in black venues, except for perhaps the booking in Joliet. “The black world still loved him,” Strachwitz recalls. “The black world finally met him. He had never gone anywhere, because he didn’t travel in those days [in the 1950s]. He was a country boy, and when he was in the big city, he found his way around there by knowing these people, you know, that came from the country.”43

  In July, Strachwitz took Lightnin’ to the Newport Folk Festival, which by then was well known for presenting legendary blues singers from around the country, including Reverend Gary Davis, Brownie McGhee, Sonny Terry, Mississippi John Hurt, John Lee Hooker, Fred McDowell, Sleepy John Estes, Son House, and Skip James, among others.44 Strachwitz was excited to bring Lightnin’ to Newport, but it was more chaotic than he had expected. “I remember staying in this dormitory, kind of a bunk house,” Strachwitz recalled, “it was like army barracks, and we were sleeping in these double bunks. Anyway, I was driving around, and Lightnin’ said, ‘I got to get something to drink,’ and so he got his little gin and I decided to get some plum brandy. I got fuckin’ drunk on that shit, and the next day, I remember, they all left, Dixon and everybody. ‘We got to go to work. C’mon, Chris.’ I said, ‘Man, I can’t get out of bed,’ and I just laid there sick as a dog. And I remember them coming back. Willie Dixon said, ‘Chris, you missed a big fight’ [he used to be a boxer]. Oh, man, this guy [Alan] Lomax, him and this Dylan manager [Albert Grossman], they got into a fistfight. Dylan had plugged in [July 25, 1965], and Mr. Lomax didn’t like it. Grossman had said, ‘No, that boy stays plugged in.’ I forget exactly what they said, but he said they had an all-out fight there. God, I felt so bad missing that fight. That was my entire memory of the festival.”45

  On stage, Lightnin’—who appeared July 24, the day before Dylan—played an amplified acoustic guitar and was backed by drummer Sam Lay on four of eleven songs.46 Lay, who toured with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, remembered that Hopkins had already heard of him, and “they [the festival organizers] knew I was capable of following any kind of traditional blues like that, that is my kind of music. And he stated that he’d never heard a drummer could play like that, and follow his timing and all. It was just that simple to me. That type of stuff I’ve heard so much on recordings and things. There really wasn’t any time [for rehearsing], but neither of us needed rehearsing with the other one. He knew what he was going to do, and I knew what to do with what he was doing.”

  Near the end of Lightnin’s set, Willie Dixon came up on stage and jammed with him and Lay. “Willie came up to bandstand and played bass,” Lay says, “and there was no stumbling around.” The response to Lightnin’ was enthusiastic, and his set was tight and dynamic, as evidenced by the recordings that were finally released on the Vanguard label in 2002.47 About Lay, Strachwitz commented, “He was a real pro. To him, Lightnin’ was a real, individualistic guy, but he knew what to do. It was a black community thing.”48 Lay knew how to follow Lightnin’s lead. He was more familiar with his music than most sidemen. Lay, like Hopkins, had southern roots. He had come to Chicago in 1960 with Little Walter, and decided to stay.

  From Newport both Hopkins and Lay went to New York City, where Lightnin’ was booked solo at the Gaslight Cafe on August 4, 5, and 6, 1965, and Lay was appearing at the Village Gate. “We stayed in the same hotel,” Lay says. “It was the Hotel Albert. It wasn’t one of the big hotels. It was where a lot of us stayed. And went out in the daytime together, myself, him, and my wife. We’d go up me and him, and walk down through the park, Washington Square Park, down through the Village and go on to one of these places called Chicken in a Basket. We walk out there and get some chicken. He would pay for it.”49 After his gig, Lay would go over to the Gas Light to hang out with Hopkins. The Gaslight was a coffee house at 116 MacDougal Street, and Lightnin’ was on a bill that included the singer/songwriter Eric Andersen and the comedian Flip Wilson, and it was an easy walk from there to the hotel. The shows at the Gaslight were much like those at the Village Gate, and often featured an unexpected mix of performers, who alternated sets.

  Lightnin’s travel schedule was intense; the offers were too good to turn down, and during the summer of 1965 he was in and out of California. On October 4 and 5, the Verve label, in association with Folkways, recorded him in Los Angeles for an LP called Lightnin’ Strikes.50 The sessions were tough, but Lightnin’ was actually to record three albums worth of material. The sidemen, Jimmy Bond on bass and Earl Palmer on drums, had some trouble keeping up with him, and the producers decided to overdub Don Crawford on harmonica to fill out the sound on yet another version of “Mojo Hand,” as well as on “Little Wail,” “Hurricane Betsy,” and “Shake Yourself.” Overall, the production was sloppy, and when Lightnin’ Strikes was released a year later, it mistakenly had a photograph of Reverend Gary Davis on the cover on the first pressing.

  Lightnin’ wasn’t picky about his recordings. He accepted every opportunity that came his way, and when he was approached by Stan Lewis of the Jewel label, he was ready to go. Lewis, based in Shreveport, had been one of the biggest distributors of R & B records in the South since the 1940s and had started Jewel Records in 1963. He recorded such artists as John Fred and His Playboy Band, John Lee Hooker, Justin Wilson, Memphis Slim, and Little Johnny Taylor for Jewel and two subsidiary labels, Paula and Ronn. Bill Holford had told Lewis about Lightnin’ when he was recording Justin Wilson for him at his studio. “Bill said Lightnin’ came in there all the time,” Lewis recalled, “and asked me if I would like to do a session on him. I said, ‘Yeah.’”51 Lightnin’ was easy to work with: “He insisted being paid a flat fee at the date. In cash. He wouldn’t work any other way. He wouldn’t take a contract and didn’t want royalties. He’d say, ‘You pay me right now, and I’ll do one take.’”52

  The first Jewel session included Elmore Nixon on piano and two unidentified sidemen on drums and bass. At one point, Lightnin’ stopped in the middle of a song, Lewis says, and scolded the drummer, “‘If you don’t get that beat right, I’m gonna fire your ass.’ But he never did that.”53 It isn’t clear where this session actually occurred, though it may have been at Robin Hood Brians’s studio in Tyler, Texas, where Lewis claimed years later to have recorded Lightnin’. The engineer’s voice heard on the Westside reissue of this album is definitely not Bill Holford in Houston.

  A song that Lewis called “Fishing Clothes” was actually a misnomer because he misunderstood the line “ain’t got sufficient clothes.” The tune was hardly a blues at all and had a country tempo, refashioning the melody of “Midnight Special,” though some of the lyrics draw from the traditional “Doggone My Good Luck Soul.” Lightnin’ twisted the core lyric and sang, “Dog gone my bad luck soul, this old world down here is a big bad luck to me.” In many ways, the song typified the problems with the recordings. Lightnin’ was doing whatever he wanted, and his accompanists could barely keep up.

  Lewis described Hopkins as a “real humble, nice guy … a man of his own in the way he wanted to record and more or less, wanted to do his own thing.”54 Apparently Lewis didn’t know much about Lightnin’s earlier recordings, given the mish-mash of songs he produced, including yet another version of “Short-Haired Woman” that he called “Wig Wearing Woman.” The last verse of “Wig Wearing Woman,” however, was u
pdated with a strange, though disjointed, comment on topical events:

  She seed the Beatles, they liked to run her blind

  That the reason she keep on asking me for that little money of mine

  You know, I don’t want no woman I got to buy wigs all the time55

  In the end, the most successful single to be released from the first Jewel session was “(Letter to My) Back Door Friend,” which Lewis says sold “fairly well.” More interesting, however, is the Demon Music (Westside) reissue, which included a strong sense of what it must have been like trying to record Lightnin’ and included the banter between presumably Robin Hood Brians and Hopkins before the song was recorded. At the beginning of the track, Hopkins shouted, “What?” And the engineer replied, “I had to get out there and set your mike up on your guitar,” to which Lightnin’ answered, “Oh, you should have told me, man.” “Ah, you see we would have been able to get it straight,” the engineer said, “When you started playing, I thought you were just practicing. You never did stop,” to which Hopkins muttered, “But you come out here and set up ah … go ahead … I ain’t tell you nothin’ now. I’m gonna play it different all the way now.” “All right, it’s rollin’,” the engineer said, and Hopkins began playing.56 The song itself hung together musically, but the lyrics were highly repetitive.

  What you going to do with a married woman

  When she got a back door friend

  She prayin’ all the time for you to move out

  So her back door friend he can move in57

  Other tracks on the Jewel LP were more problematic. “Move on Out,” for example, was a weak revival of an instrumental he had recorded with much greater authority and drive during the Herald sessions.

  While Lightnin’s first Jewel session was at times messy, he may have been paid more than what he’d been getting from the folk revival labels. Lewis says that he gave Lightnin’ $2,500 for eight songs, a figure that seems unlikely given how much he was paid by others. At that point, Lewis was a relatively small independent producer, and was working to build his catalogue.

  In the fall of 1966, Prestige released Lightnin’s Soul Blues LP, which had been recorded more than a year earlier and showcased a more polished side of his music than what Lewis was able to record. On this LP, Lightnin’ sang a tribute to “The Howling Wolf’ and covered Big Bill Broonzy’s “Too Many Drivers,” but also performed one of his own more poignantly ironic songs, titled “I’m Going to Build Me a Heaven of My Own.” It began with a spoken word dedication to “the whole world” and “the womens especially” that was followed by a talking blues about how he was going to build a heaven of his own (albeit a small one) so that he could provide “all these loving womens” a place to live. But then he implied that he might not be able to follow through: “I ain’t gonna call myself Jesus, poor Lightnin’ ain’t gonna call himself God” and concluded with a plea: “If you’re J.C., baby, will you please give poor Lightnin’ the key? Mr. J.C., will you please help poor me?”58 In this song, Lightnin’ demonstrated his capacity to turn a phrase and improvise at will with his characteristic wry humor and pathos.

  For blues revivalists, the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, like that of his contemporaries, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, needed to be preserved and documented. In London, John Holt helped to found the Lightnin’ Hopkins Appreciation Society with “its aims to publish articles, photographs, etc. and to promote record sales.” In a letter to Folkways Records, dated June 13, 1965, Holt requested details concerning recording dates, personnel, localities, and matrix numbers for not only the first Folkways release, but “any other items released, and of any unissued materials.”59 Six months later, the newly formed Texas Blues Society published a special issue devoted to Hopkins with a discography compiled by Holt and essays by Frank Scott and Paul Oliver.

  Holt’s discography was the most thorough to date, and provided a detailed catalogue of about four hundred of Hopkins’s recordings. In so doing, Holt drew from Anthony Rotante’s groundbreaking work published in the December 1955 issue of Discophile, Serge Tonneau’s discography that appeared in the December 1964 French R & B Panorama, as well as the efforts of Simon Napier-Bell of the British Blues Unlimited magazine and numerous collectors, including Tony Russell and Mike Rowe, among others. While these discographies may not have directly benefited Hopkins, they did serve to boost record sales and fuel the interest of concert promoters who sought to book Lightnin’ for live shows.

  The general disarray of his contracts and the lack of a royalty structure, other than with Prestige and Arhoolie, were complicated further by the fact that he sold most of his songs outright, and thus was not entitled to any royalties. Lightnin’s approach hadn’t changed since the start of his career; in other words, since he received one hundred dollars a song from Bill Quinn, he used that as his fee whenever making new albums. Lightnin’s newest records on Prestige, Jewel, and Arhoolie were competing with reissues on labels like Imperial and Time that were packaged like they were new (but were in fact just re-releases of 1947—1953 material, often with reverb added to make them sound more modern). Essentially, Lightnin’s style hadn’t changed, so many buyers probably thought they were indeed new albums by him.

  Paul Oliver, in his essay in Holt’s compilation, made clear that even though Lightnin’ was by then “known throughout the United States and in Europe, too,” what mattered most to him was Dowling Street and the grid of narrow streets that spoke out from it: “He lives himself in a pleasant house just off the street. It has a ubiquitous wooden porch but the roof that shades it is supported by brick piers…. Lightnin’ sits out on the porch most of the time, talking with friends who gather around him or sit on the steps…. The clubs where Lightnin’ plays are small places, ‘juke joints,’ hardly advertising their character from outside…. They are wooden frame affairs, white painted once and furnished with metal chairs and tables … the clubs are noisy, the crowd comes and goes, sits and talks and drinks…. Every so often a few couples get up to dance, and many men dance alone to the music.”60 It was in this environment that Lightnin’ honed his skills and to which, as Oliver suggested, he “thankfully returns” when he has finished a tour. While Oliver made it sound like it was the music that kept Lightnin’ going back to the Third Ward, at this time in his life, the allure of Houston likely stemmed more from his affair with Antoinette Charles, who had occasionally traveled with him. McCormick had written in the notes to the Smokes Like Lightnin’ LP that he believed their relationship may have started as early as 1948, but the details are sketchy and the extent to which they were spending time together at this point remains in question.

  By 1965 the quality of Lightnin’s life had improved, and as much as he balked at traveling, he flourished on the festival and concert circuit. While there are few records of how much he was actually paid, he seemed to be doing well, relatively speaking. His promoters took care of him, finding him a decent place to stay, driving him around, and getting him food and booze when he wanted them. And when he got back to Houston, he loved to cruise the streets of the Third Ward in his black-and-white Dodge, making his rounds, shouting out to his friends, and sitting in for a card game or rambling into a back alley to shoot dice.

  Yet even though he had more cash to throw around, he still complained about being broke much of the time. Mansel Rubinstein, who operated Mansel’s Loan Office on Dowling Street, saw Lightnin’ often during the 1960s and says, “When he’d get back from out of town, he liked to get out there and play cards and gamble and drink, and when he needed quick money he’d come see me. He’d pawn one of his guitars, and I give him a short-term loan, of maybe fifty or a hundred dollars, and then when he needed the guitar, he come back and pay off the loan plus the interest, which back then was probably about 10 percent.” Mansel had grown up in the Third Ward, and operated his pawnshop and loan office in the back of Rubenstein’s Dry Goods, one of his father’s three stores on Dowling Street.61 Rubenstein says that Lightnin’ came to his fath
er’s store often, not just to shop or pawn his guitar, but to talk, and they eventually became friends. “Lightnin’ trusted me, but he wanted me to travel with him and help manage his affairs, but I didn’t want to. I also had a small record label, called Whiz Records, but I never recorded Lightnin’. But if he was doing something locally, I might go with him to be sure he got his money.”

  As much as Lightnin’ was earning more than he ever had before, he spent his money fast. His habits and vices hadn’t changed. He was still a voracious gambler who was known to lose huge sums in a single game. And he was a heavy drinker, though Strachwitz says Lightnin’ once told him that “Antoinette had saved his life” by getting him off the rotgut wine that had “nearly killed him” in the 1950s. “He may have switched to gin,” Strachwitz says, “but he still liked to drink.”62

  The house where Lightnin’ Hopkins’ stayed when visiting his mother in the early 1950s, Centerville, Texas.

  PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN GOVENAR

  Leon County Courthouse, Centerville, Texas, 2008.