Alan Govenar
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Blank and Gerson spent six weeks shooting the documentary during the spring of 1967. He lived on the floor of a hippie crash pad in Houston, but the filming proceeded very slowly. The shooting ratio was six or eight to one, and it just took a long time to get the footage they needed. During the making of the film, Blank says he “was amazed by Lightnin’. He had kind of an otherworldly quality about him. He was a shaman of some sort. He could know what people were thinking. He could read into the way people walked, or just their body language. He could talk on about this person or that person and make up stories about their lives.”10
Blank recalls how Lightnin’ told so many stories during the filming that not all of them could be recorded. For example, when Lightnin’ showed his ankle scars and talked about the chain gang, he or “someone close to him” explained that he had been put in jail because “he had an affair with a white woman,” but there are no other interviews that confirm this as ever actually having occurred. In another story he told Blank, he said that he had once been a “cop,” as evidenced by the long aerial in the back of his car that was pulled over and tied down from the front. “It’s a long aerial,” Blank remembers Lightnin’ telling him, “that the cops used to use in the days of radio communication. You had to have a tall aerial like that to receive such a signal. He had such a radio and he liked to keep the antenna on his car to remind people and him that he used to be a cop.”11
Whether or not all of Lightnin’s stories were true was in a sense irrelevant, Blank says. “He had a take on life and things that was always enchanting, the way he saw the world. Like a pure poet, he was constantly being fed sensations and stimulations from the world around him that he poured through his sensitivity and it came out creative.” But Lightnin’ was impatient and impulsive: “There’s a lot of times when he used to get angry, especially when he was hitting the bottle too much. He drank constantly and started first thing in the morning…. He always had his little half-pint in his back pocket. And when he could get pretty mean, irascible, he would feel like he was being taken advantage of.”12 This was especially apparent at the end of the film where he looked disheveled. Apparently Antoinette’s cousin had been staying with them in their apartment and had forgotten to lock the door when he left. When Lightnin’ got home, he was furious; he had some valuable guitars in the apartment, which could have been stolen. He cussed out the cousin, and the cousin took offense, and they “had some words and Lightnin’ threatened to shoot him, and the cousin packed a loaded gun and threatened to shoot Lightnin’.” And when Blank showed up to film Lightnin’ that night, he told him the story and said that “his wife Antoinette had gotten so mad at him for badmouthing her cousin that she went home to her mother. And that’s the occasion at the end of the film where his hair’s messed up, singing a song … the closing song for the film. It was that night, and he was drunk and angry…. Lightnin’ had a long 38 revolver tucked in the front of his pants the whole time he’s singing that song, it’s stuck inside his belt.”
Months later, however, Blank had a rough-cut of the film and wanted to show it to Lightnin’ to see how he responded. “And he liked everything,” Blank said, “but the scene that I described before where he was improvising a song on film right before our eyes…. He had his hair messed up. And when I finished showing him the film, he said that I had to take out that scene because his hair was messed up. He didn’t like the way he looked. And I tried to tell him that it was an important scene, maybe one of the best scenes in the whole film, and he said he wanted it out. I had to struggle with his wishes and with my gut feeling that this song needed to be in the film. And then finally, I decided to go with it and finish the film with the scene with his hair messed up. And when I finally showed him [the completed documentary] I dreaded to see his reaction to the film with that scene still in there. And I showed it to him, and when it got to the part with Billy Bizor, who has a scene early in the film where he plays on the harmonica and sings and cries into a pillow, Lightnin’ got very moved, said, ‘Oh, there’s Billy,’ because Billy had died since the filming … and he was so happy to see Billy Bizor alive on the screen that he totally overlooked the scene at the end with his hair messed up.”13
The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins is not a documentary in a conventional sense, and as such it has been both praised and criticized. The viewer learns few specifics, but instead is left with an impression of Lightnin’ as a rural blues singer, when in fact he had been living in Houston for more than twenty years. The film opens with a shot of farmland and cows before the camera shifts to Lightnin’, blues singer Mance Lipscomb, and harmonica player Billy Bizor, playing together on a dirt road. The scene is intercut with shots of chickens and a rooster, and there is little sense of the urban world of Houston and the Third Ward neighborhood where Lightnin’ lived and worked. Most of the film was shot in Centerville and is structured as a kind of homecoming, where Lightnin’ jokes around with people in town, rambles on about his life and music, and wanders off by himself to an empty, weather-beaten church in the middle of a field. The only recognizable Houston scenes, aside from his apartment, are some of the facades of small businesses, from the office of the NAACP in the Third Ward to Wesley & West Beauty Salon and Leroy’s Tavern in the Fifth Ward and a rodeo at the Diamond L Ranch on South Main Street on the outskirts of the city. But there is no indication of the relationship of these places to the freeways that divide the black neighborhoods from the skyscrapers downtown.
The English blues writer Mike Leadbitter happened to be in Houston at the time of the filming and wrote vividly about his impressions. He appeared for a second in the film, sitting behind Lightnin’ at the rodeo, and recalled: “We pulled in to the rodeo, which was an exclusively Negro affair, and were pleased to see the imposing figure of John Lomax Jr., standing by the arena. Clutching beer cans we climbed up to the very familiar sight of Lightnin’ sitting behind dark glasses high in the stands. After much hand shaking and cries of recognition, we sat to watch the show and talk. I was introduced to Skipper and Les, the Flower Films men, who were busy shooting the rodeo and Lightnin’ from every conceivable position…. To a lad from Sussex, the whole scene was almost too fascinating to keep up with. I have a vivid recollection of a thrown rider lying in a wheelbarrow with a broken ankle, a game of Georgia Skin behind the toilets, endless cans of beer being passed around and the steady stream of jive between Lightnin’ and just about everyone.”14
Particularly striking in The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins is the cinematography and the roving camera that provides a visual bed for Lightnin’s stories and excerpts from his songs that are performed by him, accompanied by Bizor, and in one scene by rub board player Cleveland Chenier. The blues is rough and headstrong, and some of the most powerful moments are intercut with wild harmonica solos by Billy Bizor, who, at one point, breaks down and falls to his knees. As Roger Greenspun pointed out in his review of the film in the New York Times, “Hopkins himself controls the film’s moods. Not so much in his exposition of the meaning of the blues as in what he makes of them when he sings and plays his guitar. In this he is very fine—with wit, virtuosity, and the immersion in his medium that is a music maker’s true exemplary magic.”15 While The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins is in the end a romanticized portrait, it is at once poetic and poignant, which is remarkable, given the experience Blank and Gerson had with Lightnin’ in the making of the film.
Soon after Blank and Gerson completed production of the film, the Houston Chronicle published the longest article about Lightnin’ to run in a local paper in his lifetime. Titled “The Day Lightnin’ Hopkins Went Home” and featured as the cover story of the Chronicle Sunday magazine on July 30, 1967, writer Jeff Millar, after recounting an overview of Lightnin’s career, commented: “An astounding number of people in Houston, Hopkins’ adopted city, haven’t the slightest idea who he is or why we’re devoting a considerable amount of energy to telling you about him. It’s one of the quiet ironies of
Hopkins’ life that he’s uncelebrated, except by a few, in his hometown [Houston] and rather a famous person in areas of the West Coast and in New York City. His celebrity is such that a team of California filmmakers, Les Blank and Skip Gerson, followed him around for a couple of weeks during the spring.” While Millar pointed out the irony of Lightnin’s “uncelebrated” life in Houston, Leadbitter had a completely different perception and wrote that in the Third Ward, Lightnin’ “called himself ‘The King of Dowling Street’ and got away with it.”16
In 1969, Blank finished a short sequel to The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins titled The Sun’s Gonna Shine, which combines some of the same footage with new material, featuring the young Wendell Anderson to recreate Lightnin’s decision at age eight to stop chopping cotton and start singing for a living. Years later, Blank also edited together his outtakes into a short piece, in which Lightnin’ sings a version of “Mr. Charlie, Your Rollin’ Mill is Burnin’ Down.”
The difficulties that Blank and Gerson encountered struggling to film Lightnin’ were in part a result of the fact that in the mid-1960s his career was going full tilt. Lightnin’ could pick and choose what he wanted to do. When it came to recording and performing outside the Third Ward, he would only work if the money was right, and once he showed up, he was usually demanding. If there was a technical problem, or he rambled on too long during his performance, or he rerecorded one of his old songs, it didn’t matter to him, but it did apparently impact the labels that had been producing his albums.
In 1966 it does not appear that Lightnin’ was recorded at all, aside from the live recordings that Chris Strachwitz made with him at the Second Annual Berkeley Blues Festival on April 15. He didn’t have another session until December 18, 1967, and when Strachwitz recorded him at his apartment in Houston, he was completely engaged: “Lightnin’ didn’t want to go to a studio, and he asked me to bring my stuff to his place. By that time, I had a two-channel Magnacord tape recorder and two mikes, one for his voice and one on the guitar amp. I made some suggestions, especially about ‘Bud Russell Blues.’ I had a copy of Lowell Fulson’s recording of ‘Penitentiary Blues,’ but I wanted Lightnin’ to do something like that. I also wanted him to do ‘Tom Moore’ because I had heard all of these different versions of it with lots of verses, by him on Gold Star and by Mance Lipscomb and Marcellus Thomas, who had been Big Joe Williams’s chauffeur back in 1960. ‘Tom Moore’ was the last song. He was getting ready to quit. But overall, there were no hassles during the sessions. He was at home and had no audience to act for.”17
After the session was completed, Strachwitz took him outside and photographed him in front of Johnnie Lee’s grocery store. Overall, the session was a great success and produced some of Lightnin’s finest recordings on Arhoolie, including the haunting “Slavery,” which was his ultimate statement on race in America and was never recorded again. In “Slavery,” Hopkins attacked the deference forced upon African Americans:
Thousands years my people was a slave
When I was born they teach me this way
One thousand years my people was a slave
When I was born they teach me this a way
Tip your hat to the peoples, be careful about what you say
As Lightnin’ sang, the counterpoint between the guitar and lyrics intensified:
I’m gonna get me a shotgun
And I won’t be a slave no more
“Slavery” may be Lightnin’s most powerful song in that it expressed the frustration and anger that he and his generation of African Americans must have felt, given the conditions of racism and discrimination they were subjected to. In addition to “Slavery,” Lightnin’s new versions of “Tim Moore’s Farm” (called on this LP “Tom Moore Blues”) and “Penitentiary Blues” (titled here “Bud Russell Blues”) had a freshness that underscored their strength.
“Bud Russell Blues” was a talking blues about a legendary lawman who worked as a transfer agent for the Texas prison system for thirty-nine years, beginning in 1905, and was known for his roughness and cruelty. When Russell retired in 1944, the Dallas Morning News reported that he had delivered 115,000 persons to prisons around the state and had handled many noted Texas criminals, including Clyde and Buck Barrow and Raymond Hamilton: “He told tough guys, ‘You’re just forty years too late if you think you’re tougher than I am.’”18
In “Bud Russell Blues” Lightnin’s voice was filled with the disdain of a convict sentenced to a prison farm in 1910. “Sure is hot out here,” he began, punctuating his words with a piercing guitar run, “Bud Russell don’t care…. You know, Bud Russell drove them pretty women just like he did them ugly men.” And in the end, he pleaded, “Please take care of my wife and child, I may not turn back to my home life,” warning, “You know, the next time the boss man hits me I’m gonna give him a big surprise, And I ain’t jokin’ neither.”
In contrast to the harshness of “Bud Russell Blues,” “Little Antoinette” was more sentimental as Lightnin’ expressed his deep affection for the woman he loved, but it was also tainted with a sense of remorse once she was gone from his bed.
You know, I looks over on the pillow where Little Antoinette used to lay
Felt on my pillow, yes pillow felt warm (x 2)
You know, you could tell by that dear friend
Poor Antoinette hadn’t been very long gone
She used to cook my breakfast, fix my table like it should 19
Carroll Peery, who had worked at the Cabale in Berkeley, recalls that when Lightnin’ stayed with him, he’d talk about his wife Antoinette, but then bring “dates” back to his apartment: “Lightnin’ liked his women, but he was cool. He never acted like low life. His style was if he met somebody, white or black, and he was attracted to her, he’d get to know her well before he’d bring her home. He was very careful; on one hand he totally understood white society, but on the other hand he was scared to death of it, especially when he was by himself. Antoinette didn’t travel much with him, but one time she showed up when he wasn’t expecting her. This was in 1967, after I had left the Cabale. I had arranged for him to perform at the Forum on Telegraph Avenue and the place was big and full of hippies and students who really liked folk and blues. So the darndest thing happened. He was on stage performing, and Antoinette walked through the door. Never gave him any warning. She wanted to catch him, and afterwards, they had a big flap about that, but when I saw it, I knew I better get a certain person [with whom Lightnin’ was having a little fling] out of there. Antoinette and Lightnin’ were shouting. But he didn’t shout very much. She was doing most of the shouting. And he was criticizing her for showing up. Usually Antoinette was very careful with what she said and did. But there was a lot of fire in that woman.”20
At some point in 1968, Dr. Cecil Harold, an African American surgeon in Houston (who retired in 1994), started to act as Lightnin’s manager. Harold, who was considerably younger than Lightnin’, said he started to work with Hopkins because Lightnin’ needed help. Having listened to his music for years, Harold wanted to meet Hopkins, and in 1967, he saw that Lightnin’ was playing at the Jewish Community Center and went to see him. The two men met and talked and struck up a friendship.21 About a year later, Lightnin’ told Harold that he was getting ripped off by the people who were booking and recording him and that he needed help in keeping up with his scheduled dates. “He never was completely sure where he was supposed to play,” Harold said. “He’d tell someone he was to play at this place Saturday, and then he might tell someone else the same thing. I just organized things for him, took his calls and made sure he got a fair deal. I never got any money out of it. I did it because I loved his music and him.”22 The extent to which Harold was involved with Lightnin’s bookings is unclear. As many have observed, Lightnin’ was his own man, and as he became more well known, he was able to do essentially whatever he wanted and get paid. Still he often needed help in getting what was promised to him, and Harold was invaluable in his role a
s a buffer and manager of his business affairs.
During the first four months of 1968, Lightnin’ had five sessions in rapid succession, but none compared to the intensity and focus of his Texas Blues Man album on Arhoolie. On January 3 and 4, Lightnin’ recorded one of the strangest albums of his career that was given the pretentiously psychedelic title Free Form Patterns for the local International Artists label at the old Gold Star studios in Houston. For the session Lightnin’ was accompanied by his longtime friend, Billy Bizor, on harmonica, as well as by Duke Davis on bass and Danny Thomas on drums, who were both members of the psychedelic rock band The 13th Floor Elevators. Overall, the recordings were raggedy and mixed badly: “Fox Chase” had a pop country beat with Billy Bizor on harmonica and vocals performing a sloppy version of a traditional tune; “Give Me Time to Think” had a fuller R & B sound; “Mr. Charlie” rehashed old material and rambled on. “Mini Skirt” was a humorous commentary on 1960s fashion, but the mixing muddies the song; when the piano comes in, it drowns out all the other instruments.