Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  In the end, Logan recognized that Lightnin’s strength was not in the background accompaniment. “You just have Lightnin’ singing the song and you have him playing his guitar licks. He was an unorthodox singer, but musician-wise on the guitar, he played some licks that made all of the white groups buy his stuff…. So, every little band out there probably bought Lightnin’ Hopkins just to hear his licks, which were simple, but they made a lot of sense in his music.”44

  Ultimately Lightnin’ was not a big seller for Jewel, but Logan worked hard on sales and promotion. “I pretty much did everything,” Logan says, “I’d even call the mom and pop shops and say, ‘Man, I got a great new blues.’ It wouldn’t be big orders, but it’d be small ones. That’s the kind of artist Lightnin’ was.”45

  During the summer of 1969, Lightnin’ began to venture out and travel to festivals and cities where he had never been before. On August 3, at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival in Michigan, Dan Morgenstern described Lightnin’s performance as “anything but eclectic. His style both vocally and on guitar, his demeanor, and his material (though he also dips into the traditional well) are genuinely original, and he was a joy to behold. Sharp from dark glasses to yellow shoes, he seemed determined to have a good time and take the audience with him. ‘It’s good out here in the prairie like this,’ he told them, launching into ‘Mojo Hand.’ Among the things that followed in a set that seemed to end too soon (Lightnin’ knows how to pace himself), the standouts were ‘Don’t Wanna Be Baptized’ and a long anecdote about a girl who stole his brand new Cadillac.”46

  Backstage at the Ann Arbor Blues Festival, writer and photographer Dick Waterman recalled that Son House’s wife Evie approached him and asked, “Dick, do you know that Lightning Hopkins man?” Waterman was in a way shocked by the question; Evie was known to go to church three or four times a week and read the Bible at home. But she genuinely wanted to meet Lightnin’, who was “holding court … with processed hair and sunglasses, he was dressed in a shark-skin suit and held a cigar in one hand and a plastic cup of whiskey in the other.” And when introduced to Evie, Lightnin’ dropped his cigar and “drew her to his side and looked up at her: ‘Hello, sweet thing,’ he whispered. ‘What’s a young girl like you doing here all alone?’” Evie, Waterman wrote, “put her hand to her face and started to giggle,” and after a few minutes came over to him and said, “That Lightning, he sure does say some pretty things to the ladies.”47

  Waterman had known Lightnin’ for a number of years, and sometimes took him to festivals and concert dates. On one road trip going to a gig in Santa Monica, Lightnin’ pointed to a liquor store in front of them. Waterman dutifully stopped the car, but when he asked for some money, Lightnin’ replied, “Aw, now Dick, I ain’t got nothing but a hundred dollar bill.” Waterman replied, “They’ll change it,” and Lightnin’ countered, “Dick, now you take a look at how Lightning is dressed tonight. Ain’t I looking sharp?” Hopkins was wearing a “white suit, black shirt with a bolo tie, and black and white saddle shoes.” Then Lightnin’ stroked himself from his ribs down to his knee, and said, “They goin’ to give me some big mess of dirty one dollar bills and five dollar bills…. See how smooth ol’ Lightning is lookin’? I can’t be having it, Dick. I can’t let them give me some big ball of dirty money because it would just mess up my line.” Waterman looked at Lightnin’ with amazement and went in and bought “the damn bottle again.”48

  From Ann Arbor, Hopkins went to the Blossom Music Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he appeared on a bill with B. B. King and the Staple Singers on August 8, and was featured at the Chicago Blues Festival on August 30. In the fall, he played dates mostly around Houston before going back out to the West Coast, where he recorded in Berkeley on December 8, and appeared at the Ash Grove from Christmas Day to January 4, 1970, on a program that included Firesign Theatre as well as Taj Mahal on New Year’s Eve.

  On January 27, 1970, Lightnin’ was in a bad car wreck; the car in which he was a passenger was nearly totaled and he injured his neck. He was driving back from Austin or Dallas, and the person at the wheel didn’t see a barricade in front of him and drove off the road. Lightnin’ cracked a vertebrae in his neck and was lucky he wasn’t paralyzed, but he had to wear a neck brace for some time that restricted his traveling.49 In June, however, he did go to California, playing at Lincoln School Auditorium with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Sandy Bull in San Francisco, and then went back to the Ash Grove, June 18 to 28. “He started coming back whenever he wanted to or whenever I wanted him to,” Ed Pearl says. “One of us would call the other. I didn’t work with anyone. There were no agents. When Lightnin’ came to the Ash Grove, he just introduced a whole new aspect of the blues, and people flocked to it. And he just set a standard and kept on top of it. His draw was as big as Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. But to the Ash Grove crowd, Lightnin’ was there a lot and was never second to anyone.”50

  While Lightnin’ was in Los Angeles, Pearl took care of him. Pearl had an apartment across the street from the Ash Grove where Lightnin’ sometimes stayed, but on other occasions, he’d go to a hotel or visit with his or Antoinette’s relatives. “My impression was that they [Lightnin’ and Antoinette] were married,” Pearl says. “I enjoyed being with Antoinette. She was shy, nice, gentle, and he treated her beautifully. And we’d have different social interactions. We had dinner together, and sometimes just sat around and talked.”51

  The subjects of conversation varied, from Lightnin’s gigs and his travels, and once in a while they even talked about politics. “He knew his limitations,” Pearl said, “and he was happy to be part of his community, but he knew there was a bigger world out there. He thought people should be equal and he thought, you know, poor people should have more. And everyone is a child of God. He was against the Vietnam war.”52

  Bernie Pearl, Ed’s brother, also got to know Lightnin’ when he came to the Ash Grove. “He was charming, but he was also dramatic,” Bernie says. “He was immaculate…. He had sharp creases, he had patent leather shoes. He had bling on his fingers. He had that gold tooth. He had sunglasses, he had that hat. He had that towel around his neck…. And his words, you really had to listen to it. To me, he was charismatic. And he could play the guitar like hell…. He fit less into the idea of what a folk performer was, to my thinking. It was more theatrical; it was not phony. His gestures, how he would be expressive with the guitar, with his hands on and off, and the way he would explain things to people in that deep baritone, very Southern humor, kind of like he knew he was coming from a place different than the audience that was there.”53

  Bernie was then a student at UCLA and had a varied schedule, making it possible for him to meet Lightnin’ when he got to Los Angeles. Lightnin’ usually came on a Greyhound bus, and Bernie would take him from the station to wherever he wanted to go. “Always see him with half a pint of Gordon’s gin,” Bernie says, “That was his drink, and we’d sit down and talk, and I’d drive him around to see family around here.”54

  Once, Bernie and two of his friends, David Cohen and Barry Hansen (who later became known as Dr. Demento), made arrangements with Lightnin’ for a formal guitar lesson. “We each paid him twenty dollars,” Bernie says, “and he actually showed us this is this. He told us what the riffs were. Of course, we were looking mostly at the left hand, and not at the right. David was a much quicker study, and he got the thing immediately, and I had just spent years figuring this stuff out, and then realized how crucial the right hand was in getting the sound and the feel. But it was this is this lick, and I suppose we asked questions, like could you slow it down? He was not practiced in giving lessons.”55

  Bernie liked hanging around Lightnin’, and one night Lightnin’ asked if he wanted to join him on stage at the Ash Grove. “I really kind of attached myself to Lightnin’,” Bernie says. “I never demanded to play, but he asked me to come and play with him, which I did regularly throughout his tenure at the Ash Grove. What I played was back up. I never played a solo. I was th
ere to support him. What I learned to do was play what he played on the treble. I learned to play an octave lower on the bass, and I would hit chords with him. He changed chords when he wanted to, and his measures never had to complete their full four counts. There was a basic coffee house thing that he did. He repeated a lot of the same material. Mostly he played in E. Typically, the B7, following the turnaround would be in some form abbreviated. It would not be a complete B7 chord. Just E, but not the standard E, A7, and B7 chords. I love the songs he played in A, 10 or 20 percent of the time, E was most of the time.”

  In contrast to Lightnin’s coffee house style, Ed Pearl recalls, was the way he played in black clubs. Ed had never really understood the difference until Lightnin’ asked him if he would drive him to a gig in South Central after the Ash Grove closed. “We went there,” Pearl recalls, “and the place was full with people waiting to see Lightnin’. And he had played the Ash Grove so many times, but the electricity, what he was playing for the people there [for a black audience], was something different. He would make a gesture, or he would say five words and the audience would respond in a way that I didn’t understand. But what I realized very quickly once he started was that he was expressing things in ways they may not have been able to express. He evoked deep feelings in every person there. Most of the people were middle-aged and had moved to Los Angeles from the South. He was somebody who spoke for them, and also was one of them.”56

  Lightnin’ liked working in Los Angeles. He had his black friends and his white friends, and to some extent, they mixed. In fact, Ed Pearl said that when Lightnin’ wasn’t working, he’d sometimes come to the Ash Grove just to hear some of the other styles of music. “He had a broad view. Lightnin’ liked Bill Monroe. He came in to see Bill’s show. He came in to see Doc Watson’s show.”

  Over the years, Lightnin’ wrote several songs about California. In “California Showers,” he identified with the plight of the farm worker:

  Tell me why do it rain, why it storm in California all the time

  I don’t want the rain, but you still have plenty sunshine

  You know it keeps on rainin’, you know this poor man can’t make no time (x2)

  You know if I can’t go to my job, how I’m gonna feed this family of mine?

  In “Burnin’ in L.A.” he sang about the devastation of the fire in Los Angeles and the plea of one girl who wanted to get away:

  You know a little sixteen-year-old girl come to me talked and said

  Lightnin’, would you take me for your souvenir?

  You know they had a big fire down in L.A.

  All them buildings is burnin’ down

  Lightnin’ returned to Los Angeles often between 1965 and 1973, when the Ash Grove closed, though Ed and Bernie Pearl continued to see Lightnin’ whenever they got a chance. Bernie even traveled to Houston to visit with Lightnin’ and Antoinette. “I took a Greyhound to Navasota,” Bernie says, “I spent Christmas with Mance [Lipscomb], and stayed three or four days and then I took the bus to Houston. And when I got off the bus in Houston, I hailed a cab and there was a black woman cab driver. And I gave her the address, she said, ‘No, you don’t want to go there.’ I said, ‘Yes I do.’ ‘Oh, yeah that’s in the Third Ward.’ ‘I’m gonna see Lightnin’ Hopkins,’ and she just about flipped out. ‘You’re going to see Lightnin’ Hopkins.’ So she delivered me there and got an autograph from him.”57

  Over the years, Bernie became close friends with both Lightnin’ and Antoinette, and one time, he traveled with them to the Bay Area. But when they got to Berkeley, there were no rooms left in the motel. “Antoinette was with him,” Bernie says, “and I didn’t have a place to stay. So they invited me. They said, ‘Well, come stay in our room,’ … and the three of us ended sleeping in the same bed because there was no couch, and they didn’t want me to sleep on the floor. And needless to say, it was a very warm and generous thing…. It kind of shows the nature of the friendship.”58

  In the mid-1970s, Bernie played backup for Lightnin’ when he appeared at the Lighthouse in Hermosa Beach. For Bernie, Lightnin’ was a mentor who taught him not only how to play some of his licks on the guitar, but who also helped him to define himself. “There was one point where I might have been with his family and I might have been acting white or nervous. And he looked at me and said, ‘Be yourself.’ And I’ve taken that to be the watchword of how I approach this music. It was like boing somebody dropped a life message on me.”59

  The Ash Grove had been an anchor for Lightnin’ on the West Coast. It was a base from which he could plan other gigs, both in Southern California and the Bay Area, where Strachwitz was eager to record him and help him find jobs. Ed Pearl would book Lightnin’ whenever he wanted, and the combination of family and friends made Los Angeles one of his favorite destinations, even as he began to get offers for larger concerts as a headliner. Lightnin’ was loyal to Pearl and to Strachwitz because they treated him well and paid fairly.

  In 1972, Lightnin’ received his one and only Grammy nomination for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording for Lightnin’ Strikes, a reissue on the Tradition/Everest label of his 1965 album of the same title for Verve-Folkways. Muddy Waters, however, won the award for his LP The London Muddy Waters Session.60 Even though Lightnin’ didn’t win, interest in his music continued to swell, and whether or not he played electric or acoustic guitar became irrelevant. However, it became more difficult for him to assess the opportunities that were presented to him and to organize the logistics of touring. Dr. Harold worked with him to manage his contracts, but only on a volunteer basis, and he didn’t really have the time to go out on the road with him. After Lightnin’s car wreck, he became more cautious about whom he traveled with, but he was still drinking heavily. As time went on, his needs intensified; the invitations to play festivals and concert dates had never been greater.

  9

  The Last Decade

  In Houston, the Third Ward of the 1970s was in many ways more dangerous than it was in the 1940s or ‘50s, when the neighborhood was flourishing and Dowling Street was a main thoroughfare of African American life and culture. During the years of desegregation and integration, many of the black-owned businesses in the Third Ward closed or moved, and the problems of drugs and violence were exacerbated by urban decay and neglect. In music, the Third Ward had gone from the jazz-oriented big bands of Milton Larkin, I. H. Smalley, Conrad Johnson, and the rhythm and blues of the Duke/Peacock era to the popular soul/funk of the TSU Tornados, Oscar Perry, and John Roberts and the Hurricanes. Archie Bell and the Drells had a #1 hit with “Tighten Up” in 1968 and continued to have a strong presence in the Houston scene of the 1970s. Guitar-based blues in Houston was declining. Young African Americans were after a sound that reflected the world in which they were coming of age and most were not interested in down-home blues.

  In this context, though Lightnin’ may still have been known among older African Americans in his community of the Third Ward, he had become a legend for white blues and rock audiences. He rarely played in the bars and nightclubs in the Third Ward anymore, and even he viewed his neighborhood as threatening. Lightnin’ always carried a loaded gun and had been known to drive around with a shotgun on the back seat of his car. He lived in a culture of violence, where he knew people who had been killed, beginning at an early age when he learned about the murder of his father. And as he got older, there were others. According to McCormick, Buster Pickens, who had accompanied Lightnin’ on piano, was “senselessly shot to death in a West Dallas Street bar on November 24, 1964.”1 Moreover, Leadbitter wrote that Thunder Smith had been “murdered in 1965 after a drunken argument.”2

  David Benson, a twenty-three-year-old African American from the small town of Waycross, Georgia, met Lightnin’ in the fall of 1970 while he was a student at the University of Houston. A classmate, Alfie Naifeh, who was then accompanying Lightnin’ as a drummer on some local gigs, asked him if he wanted to go over to Lightnin’s apartment on Gray Street. Benson had
played alto saxophone when he was younger and had grown up playing the blues: “So I knew about these old bluesmen already, though I had never known a bluesman. I knew the validity and the history of that music because my uncles lived in that world.”3

  Going into Lightnin’s apartment for the first time, Benson felt that he “was walking into the presence of greatness.” He wanted to get to know Lightnin’ and went to visit him as often as he could. He also got to know Antoinette, because they were often together. “I had been around older people as a younger boy,” Benson says, “so I knew how to say, ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ and ‘No, Ma’am,’ and keep my mouth shut and be properly respectful and polite and that’s how I got in there.”4

  In time Benson met Dr. Harold, who realized that Benson could help Lightnin’ in ways that he could not. Dr. Harold began asking him to drive for Lightnin’ and to accompany him as a kind of road manager, ensuring that he was paid properly and that his lodging and per diem needs were adequately met. Benson respected Dr. Harold and worked in coordination with him to manage Lightnin’s business dealings. “From the start,” Benson says, “we were part of that shifting of gears in Lightnin’s career…. He considered me and considered Dr. Harold … to be intelligent African American men that he could trust and depend on to change that whole exploitative sort of cycle that he had been in for so long.”5

  While there is little question that Lightnin’ had been manipulated and exploited by various club owners, promoters, and record producers both white and black over the course of his career, this was not uniformly true. Arhoolie and Prestige/Bluesville had been paying advances and royalties with timely statements since the early 1960s. In other instances, where no royalties were paid and the fees may have seemed low, Lightnin’ consented to the terms when he wanted the money. To simply say, for example, that white producer Bobby Shad and black producer Bobby Robinson exploited him is not fair to them; they paid Lightnin’ the flat fee that he asked for, and while they knew that he might eventually earn royalties, Lightnin’ insisted on getting paid in full up front. Moreover, Lightnin’s flagrant disregard for the “exclusive” contracts he signed, his propensity for recording the same song for different labels, and his reluctance to record more than one take of any given song made him difficult to work with, though from his point of view he likely felt that he was getting back at those who were already taking advantage of him.