Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  After a couple of songs, Lightnin’ thought he was done. “I had not only asked Lightnin’ to play the acoustic guitar,” Charters remembers, “but I was consistently asking him to play the old songs. This was new to him, and with that I could only give him three hundred dollars [the equivalent of about $2,100 today] to make a record, and the fact that I was doing an LP was just not in his comprehension. He was used to doing two songs for two hundred dollars, and I kept asking for more songs … but then I started asking him about people like Blind Lemon and he became interested. It was the first time anyone had ever asked him about these things. So he really went back into his memory. So finally we got what I thought was an extraordinary session. I did it all with a hand-held microphone. I could do the vocal and move it down to get the guitar solos, and keep him from popping the mike as he always did and could get a sense of balance. And as an old folkie myself, I kept insisting that he tune the guitar…. But we did have two or three hours of quiet time, and concentration.”16

  The session was over by about four o’clock in the afternoon. Charters paid Lightnin’ the agreed-upon three hundred dollars in cash, and Hopkins signed a simple release. A hand-written memo by Charters to Asch described the difficulties he encountered: “This was a hard, mean session; so I had to be content with what I could get. ‘Lightning’ is used to much more than $300 for 9 tunes and he’s worth more than $300 for 9 tunes to a house like Atlantic or Riverside. To us, he’s worth $300. But it was a long, rough afternoon. I got him because I thought he could do us some good. I’m sorry I couldn’t get more or that I couldn’t have had some selection. For sure, we’ll never get him again at this price.”17 Lightnin’ consented to the recordings because he needed the cash. At that point in his life, given the opportunity to make money from his music, he couldn’t refuse, but he could hold back.

  Lightnin’s recordings for Charters were a mix of a few up-tempo boogies—“She’s Mine,” “Come Go With Me,” and “Fan It”—and covers of tunes he’d already recorded earlier in his career, like “Bad Luck and Trouble,” “Tell Me Baby,” “Penitentiary Blues” (“Groesbeck Blues”), and the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (“One Kind Favor”). One track is an excerpt from Charters’s interview with him, called “Reminiscences of Blind Lemon,” in which Lightnin’ talked about hearing Jefferson for the first time, meeting him, and playing with him in Buffalo, Texas.

  Overall, the guitar playing is solid but rough and is evidence that Lightnin’ had not played an acoustic instrument in some time. The lyrics reiterated Hopkins’s established themes of unrequited love and how hard work and tough times were at the root of his blues. In “Goin’ Back to Florida,” one of his most poignant lyrics evoked the futility of the plight of the sharecropper:

  I was gettin’ forty cents a hundred, pickin’ for me and wife too

  When I learned my lesson, you don’t know what I had to do

  And I couldn’t do nothin’, whoa, man, keep that sack on the scale

  Charters was looking for Lightnin’s songs that evoked his rural past and what he perceived as the core of his country blues. But when Charters returned to McCormick’s house and played the recordings he had made earlier that day, McCormick was disappointed. “He just thought it was terrible,” Charters says. “He really said, ‘It doesn’t sound like Leadbelly.’”18

  Soon after completing his recordings, Charters sent Strachwitz a postcard saying, “I found Lightnin’ Hopkins; he lives in Houston, Texas. A guy named Mack McCormick is trying to be his agent. Here’s Mack’s address.” Strachwitz quickly contacted McCormick and made plans to visit Houston in the summer. “That was like the Holy Grail to me,” Strachwitz recalls. “Nobody knew where Lightnin’ was or even if he was still alive.” 19

  Once Charters left Houston, McCormick went and recorded Hopkins himself. Although he didn’t admit it at the time, the recordings that Charters played for McCormick must have given him a different perspective on Lightnin’. Like Charters, McCormick felt that Lightnin’s commercial recordings obscured his “true identity” as a bluesman. Both McCormick and Charters wanted to record Lightnin’s “old” songs, the ones that he remembered from his early years growing up in Leon County. These songs, McCormick and Charters believed, were the wellspring of the blues form.

  Between February 16 and July 20, 1959, McCormick, somehow overcoming the difficulty Charters had encountered, recorded forty-six songs with Lightnin’ in six different informal sessions. In a discography by Strachwitz in Jazz Monthly, McCormick commented that the sessions were “held in either Lightnin’s bedroom or mine. No time limitations were imposed and selections range from one to six minutes in length, most averaging four or more. Many begin with Lightnin’s speaking some explanation or comment, talking himself into the song. He was encouraged to choose material he felt inclined toward…. His choice of material strides from unique impressions of jukebox records he’s vaguely heard to the intensely autobiographical narrative-blues.”20

  McCormick enjoyed corresponding with Strachwitz, and when Strachwitz got to Houston in June 1959, he took him to see Lightnin’ play. “I had taken a bus to Texas,” Strachwitz recalls, “and was staying at the YMCA when Mack took me to meet Po’ Lightnin’ that afternoon. Po’ Lightnin’ always lived in this boarding house; it had a room he rented.” For Strachwitz, Lightnin’ had “a neat existence; he didn’t give a shit about what was going to happen. If he needed a few dollars, he’d go play that night.”21

  Once Strachwitz heard Lightnin’ perform, he was even more entranced. “I remember very vividly us walking in there to Pop’s Place that night,” Strachwitz says. “It was a little tiny joint, and when we came in, Lightnin’ was standing to the left of the door about twenty feet away. He was just moaning some blues. He was playing a highly amplified electric guitar, with Spider [Joe “Spider” Kilpatrick] on drums…. Well, Lightnin’ was singing about how his shoulder was aching that day and how he hardly got to the job that night because of the water. It had been raining, and the rain covered the chuckholes in the road and his car would hit these holes, and he needed a BC pill [an over-the-counter medication for muscle pain]. But I thought he would be doing songs that he had recorded, but that wasn’t the case at all. What he was singing was a wonderful mishmash of totally improvised material and lines from his records. And since he’d seen us walking in, he suddenly pointed his long finger in our direction and sang, ‘Whoa, this man come all the way from California just to hear Po’ Lightnin’ sing,’ and then he went on singing to some gal who was standing in front of him. And he’d be hollering at her and I mean I had never seen anything like that. I was just in blues heaven. This was just ferocious, and the whole scene was something I had never really experienced before.” Strachwitz was from a “fairly upper-middle class” background in Europe and hearing Lightnin’ in what was ostensibly a low-income black neighborhood was illuminating: “To me, this was better than any books I could ever read, because it was right there, living.

  “One night, after he had finished a job, Lightnin’ said, ‘You guys, wanna come with me? Po’ Lightnin’s gonna wanna do some gambling.’ So we went to this house, totally dark. I forget which ward it was in and Po’ Lightnin’ banged on the door and sooner or later the lights went on inside. And this sleepy black man appeared at the door in a bathrobe. ‘What you all want?’

  “And Lightnin’ said, ‘Man, you know what I want.’

  “So, they sat down at a table and they played dice. And I thought the other man was half asleep, but as soon as Lightnin’ would roll those dice, this man’s eyes would just pop open and he would focus in on those dice and a couple of times Lightnin’ tried to grab them: ‘That’s me! That’s mine! I gots that.’

  “But his eyes were just on it. ‘You muthafucka, that ain’t yours!’

  “It was really something. The cockroaches were this big [three inches long] out there in Texas. I’d never seen creatures like that. They were wandering up and down plan
ks on the side of the room, and it was hot. You know, the only time you could ever live was in the nighttime. There was no air conditioning in many places. By then, I was staying at Mack’s place and he had a fan, and you went to sleep and you woke up feeling just as tired in the morning. It was humid! I had never experienced anything like it. But I thought this was just great and I decided at that time that I wanted to start—literally started a record label because I thought I wanted to capture Lightnin’ Hopkins in his beer joints. And a year later, that’s exactly what I did. That was the beginning of Arhoolie Records.”22

  While Strachwitz was enthusiastic about the raw power of Lightnin’s performance on electric guitar accompanied by bass and drums, that sound didn’t interest McCormick or Charters, who both knew that the folk revival audience wanted to hear the unaccompanied, unamplified solo blues. McCormick, of course, had seen Lightnin’ perform in the gritty juke joints of the Third Ward on numerous occasions, but Charters had not and had based his opinions about Lightnin’ largely on his interpretation of his records and his single meeting with him.

  McCormick, in addition to recording Lightnin’, started promoting him in Houston and elsewhere. By the late 1950s, McCormick had become the chairman of the Houston Folklore Group, and had helped to organize a program called Hootenanny at the Alley at the Alley Theater in Houston on July 20, 1959, that was modeled after the hootenannies that musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, and labor activist Pete Seeger and the impresario Harold Leventhal had organized for more than a decade in New York City.23 John Lomax Jr. performed on the same bill with Lightnin’, as well as with Howard Porper, Jim Lyday, Kyla Bynum, Jimmie Lee Grubbs, and Ed Badeaux, who were all folk revivalists. For the hootenanny, they each took turns singing traditional ballads and songs like “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Midnight Special,” and “Wayfaring Stranger,” accompanying themselves on guitar, autoharp, and banjo, interspersed with a choreographed script on folk music narrated by Ben Ramey. They were all active on the Houston folk scene, frequenting the Jewish Community Center when it was located at Hermann Park, and later, in the 1960s, the Jester (a small club off Westheimer), both of which featured local and nationally touring folk revival acts.

  Bynum was a classically trained violist who performed with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, but was an active participant in the Houston Folklore Group. Her father played guitar and banjo and taught her traditional music as a child. “When I got to Houston from Oklahoma,” Bynum says, “my husband, Jim Lyday, and I went to the Unitarian Church and they had a program on folk songs that was presented by the Houston Folk Group [in the mid-1950s]. And we got involved. Jim was a banjo player. He worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. And I had studied the songs of Appalachia, the ballads collected by Cecil Sharp. I’d been singing ballads for a long time. I sang for the Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club.”24

  Bynum didn’t know McCormick, though she did have a vivid memory of the event. “This was the old Alley [on Berry Street, not the current theatre in downtown Houston],” Bynum says. “It used to be a barrel factory, and there were four entrances, four ways to come in. It was theater-in-the-round; people were all around you. We had to use their set that had been built for a production of The Iceman Cometh and we couldn’t change anything. So we just had our hootenanny on top of The Iceman Cometh set. We all came in with our guitars and banjos strapped to our shoulders, singing, ‘Father and I went down to camp …’ Lightnin’ Hopkins came out later.”25

  McCormick introduced Lightnin’ to the Alley audience, but didn’t know what to expect. “I was apprehensive,” McCormick wrote, “because I knew the audience had come to hear the familiar ballads and songs popularized by book-trained singers. Here, in its habitat, there has never been any interest in the blues.”26 Clearly McCormick was expressing his feelings about the local folk crowd vis-à-vis local blues, even though Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry were by then relatively well known among folk revival audiences across the country and abroad. In Houston, McCormick understood the limitations of his audience.

  For Lightnin’, the Alley Theatre hootenanny was a completely new experience. While he had recorded for white producers, he had never performed for a predominantly white audience in a formal concert. “Yet,” McCormick remembered, “within seconds of the time he came out to prop his foot by me and begin ‘That Mean Old Twister,’ he’d begun to steal the show. By the time he sang [the verse] ‘the shack where I was living really rocked but it never fell’ the audience was hanging on every nuance of his voice. When his face stretched in pain, the guitar ringing bitterly, as he cried, ‘Lord! … turn your twister the other way!’ the theater filled with the taut gasp of an audience caught and held in the grasp of a single man.”27 McCormick said that he encouraged Lightnin’ to re-create the way he played on the streets of the Third Ward.28 The two-hundred-seat theatre was sold out, and when Lightnin’ sang John Lee Hooker’s “Hobo Blues,” the audience went quiet out of respect for the performance.29 But Lightnin’ was confused, and at one point in the middle of a song, McCormick recalled that Lightnin’ said, “‘Well, a preacher don’t get no amen in this corner,’ meaning people are clapping, but they’re not saying anything during the song.”30 Lightnin’ didn’t hear any of the banter he was accustomed to when he played in the little joints in the Third Ward, which may have made it more difficult for him to improvise, as so much of the improvisation in blues stems from a call-and-response exchange with the listener. In the case of Lightnin’s performance of “Hobo Blues,” there was, however, an added level of irony, in that it was probably the same song he had recorded as “Freight Train Blues” for Sittin’ In With in 1951, but also represented some stagecraft on the part of McCormick to have him sing a song that implied he was a hobo who rides trains, when in fact he only once rode a train as a hobo, decades before.

  The day after the Alley performance, two articles appeared in the Houston press, and were likely the first in a Houston paper to ever mention Lightnin’. Frank Stack of the Houston Post reported, “Lightning Hopkins, a Dowling Street Negro folksinger who makes up his own songs, in the grand old ballad tradition from his own experience, overshadowed everybody else on the program with an easy personable style.”31

  In the Houston Chronicle, Bill Byers was more evenhanded in his review, but he was especially moved by Lightnin’, who appeared on stage “with dark glasses, shined shoes to reflect his broad grin … to sing some folk songs of today’s woes and smiles. Unlike the others in the ‘Hootenanny’ program, Lightnin’ concentrated on his own anxieties in life—the trouble with a short-haired woman [“Short Haired Woman”] and the miseries of tornados [“That Mean Old Twister”] sweeping into East Texas. His personality electrified the overflow audience … which had thought it was going to hear only songs which detailed the bitter laughter and travail of the past. But Hopkins’s surprise was only one of the many given by members of the Houston Folklore Group.”32 Byers praised Ben Ramey, who narrated the evening program, “as a relaxed comfortable storyteller, with the authority of a friendly professor and the warmth of a good friend … introducing chapters from American history to be told in song.” Each of the performers received positive notice, as did the entire event: “The audience particularly enjoyed the times when it was asked to sing, and often joined in when Ramey least expected. It’s hoped it won’t be long before the Alley stages another ‘Hootenanny’ so more people can participate in the spirit and fun found in this one.”

  For his performance, the Folklore Group paid Hopkins twenty dollars, which was his share of the $425 box office take.33 While twenty dollars doesn’t seem like much pay, McCormick reassured him that he could make more money doing these type of shows. McCormick became the point person for queries about Hopkins and began negotiating performance dates on his behalf as his manager.

  In August 1959, Charters’s recordings of Lightnin’ were released on the Folkways label. In John S. Wilson’s three-column review in the New York Time
s, McCormick was never mentioned because, apparently, Charters did not talk about him in the interview, though he did acknowledge him in his liner notes to the LP. Wilson reported that Charters had “gained pre-eminence for his invaluable series of disks for the Folkways label called ‘The Music of New Orleans.’” In his praise of Charters’s recordings of Hopkins, Wilson wrote that they were “technically … the best of his disks and in some ways, one of his most important,” documenting “some stirring examples of undiluted, close-to-the-earth blues by an unusually talented and balanced singer.”34 However, Wilson’s article perpetuated a myth of “rediscovery” in the way he described how Charters “rescued from obscurity a singer who seemed to have committed professional suicide by trying to adapt to rock ‘n’ roll standards…. He attempted to shift his ground, and by changing from unamplified guitar to a clangorously amplified one and supplementing its heavy beat with a loud drum and bass … he not only failed to catch on in rock ‘n’ roll but also lost his blues following and soon dropped out of sight…. On the basis of these recordings, Mr. Hopkins must be counted as one of the best (possibly the best) of unalloyed country blues men still singing.” While Wilson’s review in the New York Times was a major boost to Lightnin’s career, it also demonstrated a gross misunderstanding of Lightnin’s work up to that point. Lightnin’, in his mid-1950s recordings, was not “trying to adapt to rock ‘n’ roll standards.” Blues was the lifeblood of rock ‘n’ roll, and Lightnin’ was trying to sustain his own popularity with black audiences.

  On the same day that Wilson’s article appeared in the New York Times—August 23, 1959—Charlotte Phelan published an article in the Houston Post that never mentioned Charters’s recordings. Aside from the fact that Phelan’s knowledge of Hopkins’s career prior to his involvement with McCormick was very limited, her interview with Lightnin’ was revealing. Lightnin’ told her that playing at the Alley was “wonderful,” and that he “wouldn’t mind doing that again. A lot of people see those faces, turn around, and go back. I just love people. I don’t care if it’s 50,000. I ain’t never scared, but I’m just kind of particular.”