Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  Cullum, in her interview with Leadbitter and Skoog, was adamant about the fact that she had discovered Hopkins in the Third Ward, though she never said how much he was paid. When they got to Los Angeles, Eddie Mesner decided to record eight sides in a session on November 9, 1946, four that featured Hopkins on vocals, and four with Smith. While they were in the studio, according to Cullum, one of the producers, presumably Eddie Mesner, dubbed Hopkins “Lightnin’” and Smith “Thunder.”27

  Years later, Lightnin’ told different naming stories. To Dallas Morning News columnist Frank Tolbert, he maintained that “Blind Lemon said [in the 1920s] when I played and sang I electrified people. He was the one that started calling me Lightnin’.”28 But in the 1970s he told drummer Doyle Bramhall that he got his nickname when he was sitting on his porch and “got hit by lightning.”29 In many ways, how Lightnin’ recounted his life paralleled his approach to his music. He was free form, at once confiding, endearing, and deceiving, saying and singing whatever he felt. He was a man of the moment, and by changing his story or improvising a new verse or line to an old song, he was able to take control of his own destiny and to engage the listener with details no one else had ever heard.

  For Lightnin’s first release on Aladdin 165, he played guitar accompaniment for Thunder Smith, who sang “West Coast Blues” and “Can’t Do Like You Used To.” Aladdin 166 was attributed to only Thunder Smith, and for Aladdin 167 Lightnin’ accompanied himself on guitar and sang “Katie Mae Blues” and “Mean Old Twister.” On Aladdin 168, Lightnin’ sang “Rocky Mountain Blues” and “I Feel So Bad.” For this session Lightnin’ played acoustic guitar, which he would record with only a few more times until 1959.

  Of these recordings, “Katie Mae Blues” was one of Lightnin’s favorites, and he performed it often. Katie Mae was one of Lightnin’s “wives,” and while he extols her virtues when he sings, “Yeah, you know Katie Mae is a good girl, folks, and she don’t run around at night,” he admits that even though, “she walks like she got oil wells in her backyard,” she isn’t quite as good as what people think: “Yeah, you know some folks say she must be a Cadillac, but I say she must be a T-Model Ford / Yeah, you know she got the shape all right, but she can’t carry no heavy load.” The mixing of metaphors related to oil, cars, and sexual innuendo was traditional in blues, and in this song, Lightnin’ seized the opportunity to give the lyrics his own twist by establishing a solid call and response with the guitar, accompanied by Smith on piano and an unidentified drummer. Smith’s barrelhouse sound, however, is almost incompatible with Lightnin’s country flair, and it’s not surprising in future recordings that the piano is rarely ever used as accompaniment to his guitar, though he sometimes liked to have a bass and drums. Lightnin’ was not a finger-style guitarist like Mance Lipscomb and other country bluesmen. He tried to play bass and melody runs simultaneously with a thumb pick and a finger pick on some recordings in the 1960s, but nearly everything he played was single-string guitar style, without a slide, whether he was using an acoustic or electric instrument.

  It’s difficult to say how well the first Aladdin records sold, since nothing from the session ever charted. But the fact that Lightnin’ was not invited back to record for nearly a year is a good indicator that they didn’t do very well. By contrast, Amos Milburn was back in the studio after only three months. Still, when Lightnin’ returned to Texas he was proud of what he had accomplished, and he went back to Centerville as soon as he could to tell his mother and friends that his records were going to be issued soon. Ray Dawkins recalled, “We was there at Jack Marshall’s farm. Everybody wanted to hear him play. And he told us about how he made up that song ‘Rocky Mountain’ after he saw someone being buried when they were passing through West Texas. And he told us how it was going to be hitting the deck in the next two weeks, how they were putting it out and how he had finally made it.”30

  After Hopkins and Smith returned to Houston, they essentially parted ways. “Lightnin’ never tied himself down too long with anybody,” Brown says. “He was kind of freelance.”31 Brown got to know Hopkins at Lola Cullum’s house in the Third Ward. “I remember when he started doing tunes [after his first session],” he says. “I remember the times we’d be sitting there in her den, and Lightnin’ would be going through some of the things that she and Lightnin’ put together.”32 Cullum helped Lightnin’ write out his songs and corrected his bad pronunciation of words that she transcribed.

  Brown wasn’t sure if Lightnin’ could actually read or write, but it’s likely that he was mostly illiterate. Lightnin’ bragged that he left home at age eight, and there was never much indication of how much schooling he actually had. He was able to sign his name, as evidenced by some of the contracts he agreed to—though his distrust of contracts that persisted throughout his life no doubt related to the difficulty he had in understanding them. No contracts with

  Aladdin have ever been located; certainly Cullum was responsible for negotiating the terms.

  Years later Lightnin’ complained that Aladdin had cheated him, but he claimed that the label had also paid him one thousand dollars for his first session. We have no way of knowing how much or how little Lightnin’ actually got paid for these records, but generally Mesner was held in fairly high esteem by other musicians who recorded for him. About Mesner, Houston blues singer Peppermint Harris (a.k.a. Harrison D. Nelson) said, “It’s hard to describe my feelings for him. He was like a father or a brother. He was the most important man in my life as far as my career was concerned. He did more for me than anyone I’ve ever been associated with. He was beautiful to me. It’s like Ella Fitzgerald felt about Chick Webb. Eddie Mesner showed me the way. He paved the way for me. He was straight about everything. Including royalties. I had no problems. If I wanted a new car, Eddie Mesner got it for me. He did things for me, like the only reason I’m a BMI writer now is because of him…. The only regret I have about Eddie Mesner is that the man died.”33

  Lightnin’s interactions with Mesner and Aladdin were much more limited than Harris’s, but Hopkins was apparently looking for a better deal and a way to record closer to home, since he didn’t like traveling. He’d heard about Bill Quinn, possibly from Dowling Street record store owner Eddie Henry, who distributed Quinn’s early releases.

  With a background in radio and electronics, Bill Quinn moved to Houston in 1939 and started a repair shop called Quinn’s Radio Service. By the early 1940s he expanded his small business to establish the Quinn Recording Company, located at 3104 Telephone Road on Houston’s east side. He began producing radio commercials and jingles, but saw the potential for producing records, though the materials needed were scarce. “The war had made materials short,” Mack McCormick observed, “and the four major companies had a practical monopoly on the manufacturing process. The independent labels of that period came into existence because of people like Bill Quinn. He invented his own method of making records. Somehow, he bought or confiscated an old pressing machine. He’d been experimenting and thinking about the process for years before he actually did it. The precise material—that is, the biscuit that goes into the pressing machine—was an industry secret. They called it ‘shellac,’ which is a mixture of insect matter and other resins and fillers…. One of the solutions he tried was to melt down other people’s records. Eventually, he found an independent way to go from the studio to the warehouse—recording, mastering, electroplating, and pressing his own records, and so was free to put regional talent in record stores.”34

  Quinn soon joined forces with another radio repairman, Frank Sanborn, and a Houston-based hillbilly singer, Bennie Hess, and together, they founded the Gulf Record Company on July 14, 1944. But after a handful of releases, beginning around August 1945, including blues singers Jesse Lockett and Inez Newell (nothing by her was actually released, as far as we know), Quinn started his own label, which he called Gold Star, in the summer of 1946.35 His first release on Gold Star had the catalog number 1313, which was his address on Dumble Stre
et in Houston, and featured Harry Choates, whose song “Jole Blon” exceeded all expectations. “Jole Blon” was a traditional Cajun waltz that had been recorded before, but Choates’s version accelerated the tempo and added prominent piano. It became a giant hit because it was done in the contemporary Western swing style of Bob Wills and was sung in such a charismatic way that it was immediately accessible. Quinn was not prepared by the response he got from that record, and it went to #4 on the Billboard folk charts twice in 1947. That same year, Quinn, who imprinted his label with the slogan “King of the Hillbillies” under the name Gold Star, decided to branch out.

  The discs that Quinn produced were uneven and ranged from unlistenable to passable, but he was not deterred. Even Billboard magazine, as early as April 1944, had observed, “It is generally agreed that the public is not too particular about quality—either in the record (durability, etc.) or in the production. The indies say that a hot tune and a good ork [orchestra] will sell that are not the gems of perfection.” Quinn’s quality steadily improved, and by 1949 he was pressing good-sounding records on high-quality vinyl.

  Lightnin’s debut release on the Gold Star label ushered in a new sound for him and simultaneously helped lead the direction that country blues would take after World War II. In a significant departure from his Aladdin session, his guitar was now amplified—a novelty that Quinn seized upon by printing ELECTRIC GUITAR in bold capital letters on the label, hoping it would catch the fleeting attention of retailers and jukebox operators. Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup had enjoyed some recent country blues hits featuring electric guitar, but his popularity was fading. Muddy Waters had cut an amplified session for Columbia in 1946, but it was left unissued, and he was still months away from recording his debut for Aristocrat Records. John Lee Hooker would not put out his first record for another year and a half. The country-born bluesman with an electric guitar, still finding his way during these immediate postwar years, was about to blend the old with the new into an alchemy that would force the record industry—and eventually the world—to take notice.36

  The record Lightnin’ made was “Short Haired Woman” backed with (b/w) “Big Mama Jump,” for which Quinn gave the catalog number 3131, reversing the numbers 1313. “Short Haired Woman” immediately staked a presence on the jukebox with its unexpectedly bold and direct opening riff—barely amplified by modern standards, but commanding enough at the time when heard through large jukebox speakers. It was basically the same riff he had used on “Rocky Mountain Blues” and “Katie Mae Blues,” and had probably been playing for years. But amplification and the absence of a distracting piano now brought it starkly into focus.

  Lightnin’ cut his usual twelve-to-sixteen bar introduction in half so he could declare:

  I don’t want no woman if her hair ain’t no longer’n mine (x2)

  Yes, you know she ain’t no good for nothin’ but trouble

  That keep you buying rats all the time

  As a white producer with little familiarity with African American slang or diction, Quinn had no idea what Lightnin’ was singing about, but black record buyers immediately appreciated the sly humor and directness of “Short Haired Woman”: a vain woman, familiar in the black community and a subject of its ridicule, she was liable to spend so much time and money forcing her man to purchase “rats” (artificial hair pieces) and wigs as to make her essentially “nothin’ but trouble.”

  “Few people outside (Lightnin’s) race … readily grasp the song’s deep significance for Negroes,” McCormick wrote years later. “A glance at the popular Negro magazines advertising hair straighteners, hair grease, wigs, rats, hair pads, and so on, gives some idea of the energy devoted to overcoming the characteristics of short, kinky hair … the pampering attention to hair becomes a ritual in which the men are inevitably caught up and yet manage to regard with disdain. It is a touchy subject, and Lightnin’s song has become, for the race itself, the classic comment. The private humor and mockery of ‘Short Haired Woman’ speaks to the Negro as intimately as does ‘Go Down Moses.’”37

  “Short Haired Woman” must have been a strong regional seller. The Bihari brothers at Modern Records (who had helped make “Jole Blon” a national hit) were quick to reissue it through their better distribution network, but it didn’t make the Billboard “race” charts (a catchall for African American recordings) on either label. It certainly sold well enough to convince Quinn that he could tap into the market for blues, and while the record was still hot, he started what he called his new 600 series that would be devoted to black music (separate numerical series for different genres—and races—being a then-common habit of the record business). He immediately called Lightnin’ back into the studio to record a couple follow-ups: “Shining Moon” and “Mercy.” Lightnin’ was soon selling enough records to establish a flat fee for the songs he recorded for Quinn, either seventy-five or one hundred dollars (the equivalent value of about seven to eight hundred dollars today), setting a precedent that continued into the late 1960s. The fee was based on expected jukebox and retail sales alone. Neither he nor Quinn had any understanding of the importance of copyrighting a song, which would damage both of them financially. But for the time being, it secured financial independence and local fame for Lightnin’.

  The record probably set another, less creditable, precedent in Lightnin’s career as well: his refusal to honor exclusive contracts may have started here. No paperwork remains to prove what kind of contract, if any, he had signed with Aladdin the previous November, but it would have been highly unusual if the Mesners had given him anything less than the industry standard, one-to-two-year exclusive contract. His Gold Star session, probably occurring around May 1947, would have been in blatant violation of such an agreement. Eddie Mesner, shocked to find a contracted artist of his with a regional hit on a different label, moved swiftly into action, demanding that Lightnin’ return to Los Angeles immediately to rerecord both sides of the Gold Star single for Aladdin. Which is why, on August 15, 1947, Lightnin’ found himself back in California, covering his own record as closely as possible for Aladdin.38

  When the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), beginning on December 31, 1947, barred its member musicians from making recordings until a settlement concerning rights and payments could be hammered out with the recording industry, Lightnin’s ability to record was not impeded. It has often been assumed that sessions dating from 1948, like those Lightnin’ recorded that year, must have been bootleg sessions. But there was no union that Lightnin’ could have joined at that time, even if he’d wanted to. The Houston local was largely comprised of classical and orchestral musicians—white, well-connected professionals. But this actually worked to the advantage of the small independent labels like Gold Star, for they could pay blues and country musicians whatever they could afford—usually pocket change—rather than the AFM standard scale of $82.50 for leaders and $41.25 for sidemen.39

  Ultimately, the ban on recording union musicians benefited Lightnin’ and over the course of several days in February 1948, he made more than a dozen sides for Aladdin, including an update of Sonny Boy Williamson’s 1937 hit “Sugar Mama.” He also recorded “Shotgun Blues,” which became one of his biggest hits when it was released two years later. “Howling Wolf Blues,” a version of J. T. “Funny Paper” Smith’s 1931 “Howling Wolf Blues Part 3”; “Moonrise Blues”; and “Abilene” were also recorded. And Hopkins came up with “Whiskey Headed Woman,” which was a spoof on “Short Haired Woman”:

  Didn’t want no

  woman I have to buy liquor for all the time

  Yes, every time you see her

  She lit up like a Nehi sign

  Only one or two singles from Hopkins’s February 1948 session were actually released in 1948 and had little impact upon Quinn, who continued to record Lightnin’ because “Short Haired Woman” had sold so well on Gold Star. Lightnin’ was starting to make real money from his music. On May 7, 1948, he signed an “Option on Contract for Unique Service
s” with Quinn’s Gold Star label that referenced an earlier contract (now lost) that was due to end on May 21. This contract could have been with Aladdin, but it’s more likely that it had been with Quinn (who recorded “Short Haired Woman” in spring 1947). In either event, upon signing the new agreement with Quinn, Lightnin’ was paid $150, to “perform and make recordings … as stipulated in the regular artist’s contract,” which gave Quinn “sole and exclusive” rights. Apparently, Lightnin’s contract with Aladdin had already expired, as Aladdin never challenged Quinn and there are no records of lawsuits ever being filed. Aladdin did, however, continue to release Lightnin’s records into the early 1950s.

  After Lightnin’s last recording for Aladdin on February 25, 1948, Quinn produced as many records with him as he could. However, unbeknownst to Quinn, Lightnin’ frequently claimed to have written songs that were in fact covers, such as “Baby, Please Don’t Go” by Big Joe Williams, who recorded it twice (1935 and 1945) prior to Lightnin’s Gold Star release.40

  Quinn never seemed to question the origins of Lightnin’s songs, but instead focused on producing the best possible recordings. According to Texas Johnny Brown, who went to a couple of sessions, “Quinn knew that studio A&R part. He didn’t have too many people working with him. Matter of fact, he did most of that set up part himself in his own place. Lightnin’ would sing a whole song with all sort of things without you ever knowing what the title of it was…. If he come up with a word that matched pretty good and it sound like he could do something with it, he’d start playing and make a song out of it. There was no reworking or rehearsing. Turn your machine on and let him go.”41 Lightnin’ played amplified guitar for all his sessions with Quinn, except on Gold Star 634—the guitar in both “Walking Blues” and “Lightnin’ Blues,” recorded in March 1948, sounds acoustic.