Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  Undoubtedly, Lightnin’s heavy drinking and gambling impeded his ability to keep up with his business affairs, and even when Harold and Benson worked to manage his interests, he did not always follow their advice. Harold recalled, for example, that Lightnin’ liked to buy a new used car every Labor Day because the banks were closed and it was impossible to check his credit rating. Lightnin’ would keep the car for as long as he could without making payments, knowing that it would in time be repossessed.6

  By the time Benson met Lightnin’, he wasn’t performing very much locally around the Third Ward. “He was playing college gigs and predominantly young, white nightclubs. And he would say, sometimes, off the mike … it was my job to really be that buffer between him and club owners, at places like Liberty Hall in Houston, because it was a pretty alienating environment for him in comparison to what he had come up in and what he was used to—and what he preferred.”7

  Benson liked socializing with Lightnin’, but getting to know him on a personal level was a gradual process. “He would reveal himself in pieces to me,” Benson says. “What you didn’t see [for example] is that he was a tremendous tap dancer and buck dancer. I mean, beyond, a Sammy Davis Jr. type dancer. But he would only do it behind closed doors. And I never knew it, and then, one day, all of a sudden, we were sitting in the dressing room passing time, and he got up and he just started dancing.”8

  Benson traveled with Lightnin’ as often as was possible, even after he graduated from the University of Houston and enrolled in a PhD program at Michigan State University in East Lansing. He continued to work with Harold, who tried to coordinate Lightnin’s performance dates with Benson’s vacations and days off. One time Lightnin’ was invited to perform at the student coffee house at Michigan State and Benson made arrangements for Lightnin’ to stay with him. Benson cooked for him and helped him get around. “Lightnin’ had very particular dietary tastes,” Benson says, “and being a student, I made some kind of chicken stew.” And when Benson came back to Houston on vacation, Antoinette wanted the recipe because Lightnin’ had told her how good his cooking was. Antoinette, Benson recalls, did most of the cooking for Lightnin’, and it wasn’t long before they all became close friends. Lightnin’ called Benson “Babe,” and often referred to him as Antoinette’s boy, and Antoinette treated him like a son, though in fact she was still living with her own children and husband in the Fifth Ward. “She had two separate lives, and I never met her other family,” Benson said, “except for her daughter, who sometimes came over to Lightnin’s. But Antoinette never spent the night at Lightnin’s apartment in the Third Ward. She’d stock the refrigerator with food for Lightnin’ and for me. His favorite food was chicken and dumplings, and so was mine.”9

  The Houston city directories indicated that Lightnin’ lived by himself in unit 14 at 3124 Gray Street in 1967 and 1968, but shared a residence with Antoinette from 1969 on. While it is clear that Lightnin’ and Antoinette were never married, there is a Houston court record dated November 19, 1973, granting a divorce to Antoinette Stout Charles from Leonard Charles. However, Benson could not confirm whether or not this was the same Antoinette. When he was with Lightnin’, there was never any discussion of divorce, though it was clear that Antoinette had a family in the Fifth Ward.

  Benson sometimes spent the night in a guest room at Lightnin’s, though when he finally moved back to Houston after finishing his doctorate in social work, he got his own place. “Lightnin’ pretty much seemed like an uncle to me,” Benson says, and “Miss Nette would say, ‘Oh, that’s such a nice boy, Lightnin’.’ And she kind of became my play mother…. And every time he would play, I would go with him; he always wanted somebody to drive his car for him, so I’d drive for him. And he started trusting me to collect the money. I became kind of the enforcer, so to speak. He’d always say, ‘Anything that have to do with business,’ he’d say, ‘go talk to David.’”10

  Even though they often traveled together, Lightnin’ was still his own man, and if he wanted to play a gig and Benson was not available, he’d find someone else to drive him. During the 1970s, Lightnin’s recording tapered off. The market was saturated with his records, but people still wanted to see him perform live. He toured less but got paid more. In 1972 he played club dates in Chicago, as well as a benefit sponsored by the River City Blues Project at Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans. In 1973 he was booked for a five-night gig at the Egress Nightclub in Vancouver from February 19 to 23, then he jetted off to Carnegie Hall for a concert on March 4 that also featured Bonnie Raitt and Muddy Waters. And in the fall he taped a television special for broadcast on Channel 31 in New York City. “Everywhere Lightnin’ went,” Benson says, “people crowded in to see him. How much money he was making at this point is difficult to say, but it was definitely a lot more than he had ever earned before.” According to Harold, his minimum fee for a club date was six hundred dollars for two forty-five-minute sets, though for concerts in bigger venues, he asked for more and usually got it.11

  Sam Charters returned to Houston in 1974 to record Lightnin’ for Volume 12 of the Legacy of the Blues series he was producing for the Sonet label in Stockholm, and found that Lightnin’s musicianship had declined. “His singing and guitarwork was more sloppy,” Charters says. “I did the best I could. I knew … it was not going to add one iota to what had been done, or hadn’t been done over and over again.”

  Given the dispute of money and royalties surrounding Charters’s first recording for Folkways in 1959, Lightnin’ was suspicious, even though he had dealt with Charters since then when he was working with Prestige/Bluesville in the 1960s. To make matters worse, Harold was extremely difficult. “He started with the point of view that I was a white motherfucker,” Charters says, “that I was going to rip off every black man that I met…. And how much money was I going to pay? I will temper my language, but he insisted, because of his distrust for whites, that he had to be paid in cash a five-thousand-dollar advance, but I wasn’t going to pay him until I did the recording. So as the session wore down in the studio we were using in the ghetto, we began to attract the usual people, and various gang members were hanging around outside. And I really had had enough, and as we were leaving, people were looking in the window, I said quite loudly, ‘Here’s the $5,000 you asked me for’ and I handed him the $5,000 in small bills. And he and Lightnin’ looked at each other; they weren’t sure how they were going to get out to the car with all this cash. Dr. Harold was a very trim, very well dressed dude. He enjoyed his role of giving people like me a hard time. And so to see him and Lightnin’ figuring out ways to hide the $5,000, stuffing it in their socks, literally, gave me a certain kind of pleasure.”12

  Charters and Lightnin’ had not communicated with each other in years, and the animosity during this session was a potent indicator of not only how their relationship had deteriorated but also how they both had changed since their first meeting in 1959. Charters had definitely grown more cynical, and Lightnin’s resentment toward him built on the antipathy he already felt toward Folkways and other record producers. However, the five-thousand-dollar advance that Charters paid for the Sonet recordings not only exceeded the rates for most blues artists at that time but was also a sum that the LP could never earn back. In the end, the Sonet album turned out poorly. The songs contained bits and pieces of previously recorded material that were rehashed haphazardly and never seemed to gel like the lyrics he improvised years earlier. Lightnin’ played an acoustic guitar with an electric pickup, and was accompanied by drums and bass. Lightnin’ did play slide guitar on “Please Help Poor Me” and “The Hearse is Backed Up to the Door,” demonstrating some versatility, but ultimately the songs themselves sound fragmented. When the album was released in 1975, it didn’t sell very well.13

  Despite Lightnin’s erratic performances, by the mid-1970s, he was a legend and he attracted a following. This audience likely knew relatively little about his early recordings or that his blues had become rote and predictable. Blues
had arrived and was covered heavily in the popular media. Aging bluesmen like Lightnin’, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters were more revered than ever. Benson says he even once saw the renowned French American art collector and philanthropist Dominique De Menil, who lived in Houston, come to Lightnin’s house. “We’d played the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival [1976] and the weather was bad, so we couldn’t get back to Houston until late. We were going to meet Mrs. De Menil and her daughter, Christophe, who was very fond of Lightnin’ and wanted to find a way to sponsor him through some kind of arts grant. Well, by the time we got back, Mrs. De Menil was sitting in the parking lot in front of Lightnin’s apartment building, waiting for him to come home. And he asked her to come inside, where she sat around awhile, and then said she was tired. He told her, said, ‘Well, you can use the extra bedroom,’ and she went in and took a nap. So, think about it, Dominique De Menil, the empress of art of Houston, in the Third Ward, sleeping in Lightnin’s bedroom.’”14

  While many of Lightnin’s performances during the 1970s were uneven, he still had the capacity to be completely engaging. Robert Palmer, in his review in The New York Times of Lightnin’s show at the Palladium on May 13, 1977, wrote that even though Lightnin’ was on stage for a little over thirty minutes, he “turned in a superb performance.” Palmer commented that Hopkins’s lyrics were largely unoriginal, drawing from “the common pool of folk and commercial blues lyrics,” and that neither his singing nor his guitar playing was virtuosic. However, Palmer felt “putting over the blues has always been a matter of timing and timbre, and these Mr. Hopkins handles with the assurance of a master. He doubles rhythms back upon themselves, drops bars of music for dramatic emphasis, and draws a stinging, acerbic sound from his guitar which is the essence of the blues.” Moreover, Palmer praised Lightnin’s accompanists, Charles Calamese and Willie Smith, bassist and drummer with James Cotton’s band, who had probably never played with Hopkins before, but who “followed his deviations from formal symmetry with unerring accuracy.”15

  Lightnin’s reputation in New York was well established, and he could pretty much get booked there whenever he wanted. This was also true in California and in Texas, where he was now celebrated as a major figure in the history of the blues. In 1977, he was a headliner for the first Juneteenth Blues Festival, founded by local jazzman, educator, and promoter Lanny Steele.16 The Juneteenth Blues Festival provided Lightnin’ with the opportunity to not only play on the same stage as John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and the other giants of postwar country blues, but to interact with them backstage, to swap stories and joke around. In fact, he got to talk to Muddy Waters about his upcoming travel to Canada the following day. “So we were sitting around drinking champagne,” Benson recalls, “and Lightnin’ told Muddy, ‘We’re going to Montreal tomorrow.’ And Muddy says, ‘Doudou [Boicel], that’s the man you need to go see.’ So, the next day, we get ready to go to Montreal. We’re going through customs at Toronto, which Lightnin’ called ‘Doronto,’ and the man at the desk asks for our work visa. And out of the clear blue, and loud in the airport, Lightnin’ says, ‘Doudou, motherfucker, Doudou.’ And the guy says, ‘What?’ He says, ‘Doudou, goddamit, don’t you know Doudou?’ He says, ‘Everybody knows Doudou.’ Out of context. Everybody in the airport was looking. Needless to say, we were in customs three hours.”17

  Once they got to Montreal, they discovered that Doudou was in fact “a top-notch impresario in Canada,” and that he was more than generous. “He had a reputation for overpaying you,” Benson says. “If he made money that night, he’d give a $500 bonus or a $1,000 bonus. He always put us up in the best hotels. So all of the musicians really appreciated Doudou because the guy treated them so well.”18 In addition to presenting Lightnin’ at the Rising Sun Celebrity Jazz Club on June 23, 1977, Doudou recorded the performances, but they were not released until 1996.19

  Lightnin’ liked Canada, Benson says, especially Montreal, because there was “a French and Acadian influence…. So every time that Lightnin’ played ‘Mojo Hand’ with that kind of zydeco beat that he would do sometimes, they were lined around the block in thirty-below-zero weather.”

  When Benson and Lightnin’ traveled together, they generally shared the same room. “He didn’t want me to sleep any place else,” Benson says, “but he was an old man, and he’d wake my ass up, two or three times a night, man. He’d make noises and clear his throat. He’d ask, ‘You asleep, baby, you asleep?’ And I’d say, ‘Well, I was sleepin’ until you woke me up.’ And then we’d pick up guitars and he would think of some old song he hadn’t sung in a long time and he’d say he was going to sing it that night or something, and we’d sit there and we’d play guitars. And he would tell me stories about all these things that went down when he was a younger man. Tricks they would play on people and all kinds of stuff like that.”20

  Sometimes, however, Lightnin’ and Benson would get into arguments with each other. Lightnin’ didn’t approve of Benson running around with girls he’d meet in the clubs, but that was what Benson looked forward to when they were traveling. “Me, being a young man … part and parcel of being in that business is to hook with somebody that night, mostly white girls. And he didn’t like for me to leave him. So, we would get into little spats, I’d collect the money, take care of business, leave the money with him, and take off with some little girl, and then he would get upset, because I wouldn’t come back. I might spend the night out.”21

  One time, in Montreal, Benson bought some yogurt and Lightnin’ said, “What in the fuck are you buying that shit for?” So, Benson put it in the refrigerator in the hotel room to save it for later, but then after the gig, he went out with “some little girl” and stayed too long. “I came back the next day, and he had eaten the yogurt…. And he’d started bitching, ‘You been gone and I had nothin’ to eat, and I had to eat that shit in the refrigerator.”22

  Sometimes, Lightnin’ would push Benson too far, and Benson would get angry, and then back off. “He’d say something like, ‘You eat too goddamn much. If I had a goddamn dog, it would be better than you, because at least I could feed the dog when I want to, but you gonna eat when you want to.’ And then the next day, he’d say, ‘I dreamed last night you and me had a fight,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, it wasn’t a dream. It was for real, and I kicked your ass.’ And then he’d back out and say, ‘Oh, baby, you know I’m just kidding.’”23

  Benson felt Lightnin’ became cantankerous because he didn’t like being away from Antoinette, and he wanted to be at home. But when he got home, Antoinette advised Benson to ‘give him a little room, and he’ll look for you again.’ She’d say, ‘Lightnin’s the kind of guy that if he wants you and needs you first, he’s going to treat you better than if he’s got you under his thumb.’”24

  Lightnin’s mood swings bothered Benson, but in part he attributed his behavior to his drinking. Lightnin’ often had a “nip” in the morning and continued drinking throughout the day, sipping Pearl beer, and consuming untold amounts of gin or whisky from his pocket flask. Whenever possible, Lightnin’ avoided driving and preferred to have Benson and others take him to and from his gigs. But on October 8, 1977, Lightnin’ was arrested for speeding, driving under the influence, and carrying a loaded gun in Centerville, Texas. “So, when his court date came up,” Benson says, “we went to this courthouse and it was a real throwback to the past. You could almost hear the ghosts of people [who] had gone through there and been tried. It was kind of an eerie thing. But everyone knew who he was of course, so the judge told him, ‘You had a weapon on you, from now on, leave your gun at home, and stop drinkin’,” and they gave him probation and we went on back to Houston.”25 Times had really changed; had Lightnin’ been arrested for the same offenses when he lived in Centerville in the 1930s, he would have been sentenced to a chain gang or prison.

  Whenever anyone mentioned going to Europe, Lightnin’ was skeptical, especially about the air travel. He preferred driving, but he liked the “idea of Europe
,” Benson says. “He liked the reception that he got, because there was a tremendous reception. But he always complained there wasn’t enough to eat.”

  Norbert Hess, a German blues aficionado and concert promoter, contacted Harold about organizing a European tour for Lightnin’ in the fall of 1977, but had some difficulty convincing him. However, when they agreed to pay him several thousand dollars, Lightnin’ finally agreed. Benson wasn’t able to go, but his friend Ron Wilson (the future Texas congressman) was available to travel with Lightnin’. They left Houston first for the Netherlands, where Lightnin’ appeared at the Rotterdam Jazz Festival on November 12. From there they went to the Dortmund Jazz Festival, headlined a concert in Berlin with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra and James Booker on the bill, and then traveled to Sweden, where he played four concerts at the Gothenburg University Students’ House.

  In Dortmund the concert was taped for television for a program called Homage à Lightnin’ Hopkins, and according to Hess, “Several modern jazz groups paid tribute to the old master. James Booker played a short solo set and backed Hopkins for three numbers. Hopkins was accompanied by George Green on drums and Ewald Warning on bass, two black musicians who lived in Munich and had only ever played modern jazz. They knew nothing about Lightnin’ Hopkins. So, as an homage, it was one of the worst concerts I’d ever attended. As road manager for Lightnin’, I must say I enjoyed him very much but he was hampered by the bass player and drummer, who didn’t really understand his blues.”26