Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  Phelan noted that Hopkins, when he wasn’t performing, was a “quiet, self-contained man with deep-seated dignity,” but that he could also be “pensive, remote, reluctantly responsive, even after his regular breakfast of two bottles of beer, which are always supported during the day with similar sustenance.” By most accounts, Hopkins often appeared on stage with a flask of gin, which he liked to pull out of his pocket and take a sip from in between songs. Kyla Bynum described Lightnin’ as a “lush,” and said that on the day of his performance at the Alley Theatre, “somebody had to stay with him all day and keep him sober or he wouldn’t show up for the show. Ed Badeaux [a folk revival singer who worked for Folkways] might have helped us out with that because it was a matter of just sort of babysitting him, talking to him, keeping him happy until the eight o’clock show time came…. It was well known he had a real drinking problem as we say these days.”35

  When Phelan followed Lightnin’ into the “magic milieu of one of his dance halls [in Houston’s Third Ward] where he is surrounded by a crush of intense and voluble admirers,” she observed that he rejected an acoustic guitar in favor of an electrically amplified instrument, ignoring “the expressed objections of McCormick and other purists. Lightning makes his point about needing amplification: ‘It gets so noisy, my sound is taken away from me. I can’t hear myself.’”

  Apparently McCormick never mentioned Charters to Phelan, because neither Charters nor his recordings for Folkways are discussed in the article. McCormick, as Lightnin’s new manager, was interested in getting his own publicity, and was careful about what he told Phelan. But McCormick also promoted himself by announcing his own recordings and the discography he was compiling, adding that he had received a letter from Harold Leventhal, the impresario and manager of the folk revival group the Weavers, who was interested in possibly bringing Lightnin’ to New York to perform at Town Hall or Carnegie Hall. 36 Overall McCormick wanted to emphasize and secure his role in Lightnin’s “rediscovery.”

  Despite the fact that Lightnin’ lived in a segregated, urban neighborhood in Houston and had pursued a commercial career for more than a decade, McCormick focused on his rural and oral culture roots as the basis for his authenticity. In keeping with John Lomax Sr.’s pastoral ideal of black folk singers, McCormick believed that Lightnin’ was a “genuine folk artist,” whose “roots are not the motley impressions of phonograph records but the distinct heritage of his birthplace.”37 For McCormick, Hopkins was a “strangely innocent man, isolated and oblivious to much of contemporary life, and ignorant in some astounding ways.”38 In his liner notes and articles, McCormick liked to quote Hopkins’s stories of cotton picking, singing in church, and playing blues in East Texas to bolster his argument that “beneath the sharp urban manners,” Lightnin’ was “pure country” and that East Texas “is a magic spring from which the great blues minstrels have flowed in an unbroken line.”

  Folklorist Patrick Mullen suggests that while the dichotomy that McCormick set up between the modern world of recordings and other technological developments on one side and the traditional oral world of the isolated, rural folk community on the other was widely accepted by folklorists and folk revivalists of that period, it was ultimately flawed. Mullen maintains that “the traditional and the modern, oral and media transmission, are not isolated entities, they have always interacted with one another because tradition is a concept of the past that is always constructed in the present.”39 Lightnin’ may have personally interacted with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander, for example, but he also heard their recordings and the recordings of others like John Lee Hooker, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Big Joe Williams, and others who were performing rhythm and blues and had nationally known commercial hits.

  McCormick, as historian Benjamin Filene points out, was one of several mid-century researchers who responded to “what they perceived as bourgeois culture’s corrupt materialisms and constraining standards of propriety,” and depicted “bluesmen as the embodiments of an anti-modern ethos.”40 Even Charters, in his book The Country Blues published in November 1959, had a highly romanticized view of African American blues singers and described Hopkins as “one of the last of his kind, a lonely, bitter man who brings to the blues the intensity and pain of hours in the hot sun, scraping at the earth, singing to make the hours pass. The blues will go on, but the country blues … will pass with men like this thin, intense singer from Centerville, Texas.”41 McCormick, writing in Jazz Journal, reiterated this perspective, but even went further in his portrayal of Hopkins as a counterpoint to what Filene has called “the emptiness of contemporary society.” Hopkins, McCormick wrote, “is a fascinatingly complete man: even the least of his routine actions seem in tune with the earthy cynicism that characterizes his songs. A man with a tribal sense of belonging to his culture, he is outside the modern dilemma.”42

  Certainly McCormick was aware that racism and discrimination in Houston were rampant. While the white liberal-minded audience at the Alley Theatre appreciated Lightnin’, the reality of life in Houston during the 1950s imposed definite limitations. Isabelle Ganz, a classically trained mezzo-soprano, composer, conductor, and teacher who moved to Houston after living in New York City and was active in the Houston Folk Group, says that the hootenannies in Houston emulated those in New York City, and tried to be as inclusive as possible. “I got interested in folk music singing union songs in high school,” she recalls, and as she got older she started listening to Pete Seeger and going to folk shows in New York. But in Houston, she says, “it was different because it was strictly segregated. Blacks and whites did not mix. I was shocked by the colored-only water fountains in Foley’s department store, and in other places around town. I’d never seen anything like it.”43 Kyla Bynum concurs: “Houston was pure McCarthyism. Absolute bigotry. Houston was a god-awful place.”44

  The NAACP had been fighting for decades in Houston against racism and discrimination against African Americans. By 1945 it was looking for a plaintiff to challenge Texas’s segregated university system and targeted the policy that excluded blacks from the University of Texas law school. The resulting case of Sweatt v. Painter was finally resolved in 1950 when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of the plaintiff, Heman Sweatt.45 While this was a landmark decision, the dismantling of the Jim Crow system in Houston proceeded slowly. In the 1950s and 1960s African Americans there fought hard in the courts to gain the right to sit on juries, to eliminate segregation in housing and education, and to obtain equal pay for equal work and equal access to social services and public transportation. In 1958, Hattie Mae White won a seat on the Houston School Board and became the first African American elected to public office in Texas since Reconstruction. White, in a coordinated effort with the NAACP and African American community leaders, mounted a sustained effort to force members of the school board to implement court-ordered desegregation.

  Opposition persisted, however, and racial tensions intensified. In March 1960, four masked white youths followed Felton Turner, an unemployed awning installer who had participated in a sit-in with Texas Southern University students, and abducted him at gunpoint as he walked through the Heights section of the city. They took him to a deserted wooded area not far from downtown Houston and strung him up in a tree, beat him with chains, and carved two sets of KKK initials on his abdomen with a pocket knife.46

  In an article in the Houston Post on April 24, 1960, columnist Jim Mousner noted that “the city’s Negro population is increasing at the rate of 3 percent a year from immigration—mostly from East Texas, Louisiana, and Arkansas…. More than half of Houston’s Negro population lives in three sections of the city, the Fourth Ward, the oldest Negro area, located west of downtown; the Fifth Ward in the north part of town; and the Third Ward, south of the downtown area.”47 Of these, Mousner noted that the Fourth Ward, “the poorest of the three areas economically, is touched by every segment of the city’s freeway system, making it a highly un
stable place to live.” The Third Ward, Mousner observed, was the middle-class residential area for Houston’s African American population and afforded a “more desirable environment except in the north portion [where Lightnin’ lived] where a heavy traffic flow and a 65 per cent increase in small businesses in the last decade have contributed to instability.” Moreover, statistics gathered by Dr. Henry Allen Bullock, director of graduate research at Texas Southern University, showed that “these blighted areas with their decaying buildings, unsanitary living conditions and drab atmosphere produce a high mortality rate, crime and juvenile delinquency. Most of Houston’s homicides, two-thirds of which involve Negroes, occur in or near these areas.” But “profound changes,” Mousner maintained, were being made, as Carter Wesley, an attorney and publisher of the African American newspaper the Houston Informer pointed out: “Ten years ago we couldn’t have had a headline about a Negro woman being elected to the school board. Mrs. White was not elected by Negroes but all of the Houston community. The Negro has won the right to serve on juries. The Negro has won a Supreme Court decision on schools…. Changes are going on but we need a new approach.”

  The 1960s were turbulent years, and while there weren’t riots in Houston, there were sit-ins and protest marches that confronted racism and discrimination.48 Desegregation in Houston proceeded slowly and came as a result of bitterly fought legal battles. Thurgood Marshall, Martin Luther King Jr., and other civil rights leaders came to the city and helped to propel civic change.

  In Lightin’ Hopkins’s blues, there were few direct references to social protest, though his “Tim Moore’s Farm” was a scathing indictment of plantation owner Tom Moore and his cruelty to sharecroppers. Throughout his career Lightnin’ largely stayed away from racial themes, which made his recording of “Tim Moore’s Farm” even more striking, considering it was released in 1949.

  While McCormick was impressed by Lightnin’s commercial recording of “Tim Moore’s Farm,” he wanted to probe deeper into Lightnin’s repertory in his own recordings to establish the roots of his blues. He carefully constructed field sessions that were relaxed and imposed no time limits. Lightnin’ was free to essentially do as he wished, talking and singing, so long as he played acoustic guitar and restrained from the rocking material he’d recorded for Herald. The resulting blues were both personal and reflective. McCormick’s recordings, when first released in 1960 (or late 1959) helped to establish Lightnin’s credibility as a living connection to the work songs that were a basis of country blues and to the music of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Texas Alexander, Leadbelly, and others. Though production values were low, and the overall sound quality was poor, given the technical limitations of the microphone and tape recorder that he used, McCormick was able to get Lightnin’ to open up and to perform some of the oldest songs that he remembered.

  In early 1960, Doug Dobell, who had a record shop in London and operated a small label, issued some of McCormick’s field recordings on the LP titled The Rooster Crowed in England.49 This may have been the first album from the McCormick sessions to hit the market—but only in the United Kingdom, as it probably coincided with the release of the LP Country Blues in the United States. The strongest selections on the The Rooster Crowed in England LP are the intensely autobiographical “Beggin’ Up and Down the Streets,” the highly emotive “Have You Ever Seen a One-Eyed Woman Cry?” and “Children’s Boogie,” about which McCormick wrote, “His imagination chuckles to itself.”50 In “Back to Arkansas,” Lightnin’ alluded to Ray Charles’s recent hit “What’d I Say,” and “Met the Blues on the Corner” and “Goin’ to Galveston” are sourced from a 1954 acetate that McCormick acquired from Bill Holford at ACA, and featured Lightnin’ on piano.

  One of the most talked-about songs on this LP was “Blues for Queen Elizabeth,” a rambling blues, which Lightnin’ actually introduced before he started singing. “This is a song I’m goin’ to make up for the Queen in England,” he said. “I think that it would be all right. My wife brought home a picture and she was very, very upset over it because she looked so good to her. She said she looked like a rose that just bloomed in May. So I got a little idea. And I’m makin’ this song for the Queen and her husband, which I don’t know. And I’m hopin’ some day I get to come over in England and play some blues for them.”

  Lightnin’s explanation of why he wrote the song seems contrived, and one has to wonder if he was prompted by McCormick. And when he finally got around to singing, the lyrics were disjointed.

  Whoa, you know the rooster crowed in England

  Man, they heard him way over in France

  You know, I’m prayin’ to the good Lord in heaven

  Oh Lord, please give these people a chance

  Finally, after a long interlude, with bluesy guitar runs answering each verse, Lightnin’ finally got back to the point of the song: “I’m gonna take my wife to England, tell me she was in Chicago a few days ago.” While Lightnin’s mixing of time periods between what is apparently a reference to World War II in France and the present of 1959 seemed random and disjointed, it was nonetheless representative of how he, and many other traditional singers, put together blues. As McCormick pointed out, “Many of his songs are spontaneous improvisations, made and forgotten in the time he takes to sing them,” and “Blues for Queen Elizabeth” was certainly one of those songs which, by the time he finishing singing it, barely made sense.51 Yet the song attracted immediate attention in the press. Phelan wrote in the Houston Post: “Lightning’s incredible spontaneity is equal to any occasion, it seems. Told that Queen Elizabeth II was in Chicago, the minstrel immediately composed ‘Blues for Queen Elizabeth,’ but when chided because he called the Queen of England ‘baby,’ Lightning flashed his gold teeth in a sheepish grin. ‘I wasn’t talking just to her,’ he said.”52

  Around the same time that Dobell released The Rooster Crowed in England, McCormick leased Diane Guggenheim (a.k.a. Diane Hamilton) and her Tradition label enough material for two Lightnin’ LPs that were released in late 1959 or early 1960: Country Blues, followed by Autobiography in Blues.53 Musically, the recordings that McCormick was producing did effectively document the breadth of Lightnin’s traditional repertoire on acoustic guitar, even if he was in fact re-recording some songs, like “Short Haired Woman,” that had already been commercially released. Lightnin’s versions of such songs as “See, See Rider,” “Bunion Stew,” “Hear My Black Dog Bark,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” evoke a bygone era.

  Country Blues received far greater attention than The Rooster Crowed in England had. About Country Blues, Robert Shelton wrote in the New York Times: “Despite a poor job of taping, it is a record of great interest. Although there are occasional flashes of wit, Hopkins’ mood here is generally more introverted and somber than it was on his Folkways release of a few months ago. One gets the feeling of listening to a sensitive man reflecting on a hard life with pathos, not sentimentalism, and meaning every word he says, an attribute rarely found in the rhythm and blues style.”54 Of particular interest to Shelton was the song “Go Down Ol’ Hannah,” in which Hopkins took a traditional work song and reshaped it into a blues.

  During McCormick’s 1959 field sessions with Lightnin’, in addition to collecting blues, he unexpectedly recorded one selection, “The Dirty Dozens,” that he felt at the time would “never be placed on the open market.”55 But McCormick ultimately changed his mind and entered into an agreement with Chris Strachwitz to release it in December 1963 on an LP titled The Unexpurgated Folk Songs of Men, for which he provided no artist credits because of the sala-ciousness of the lyrics.56 There was, however, a sixteen-page insert authored by McCormick, who wrote that the anthology was “an informal song-swapping session with a group of Texans, New Yorkers and Englishmen exchanging bawdy songs and lore.” McCormick traced the origins of the dozens in African American folklore as a cycle of ritual insults in which “the players strive to bury one another with vituperation. In the play, the opponent’s mothe
r is especially slandered and thus the male asserts himself through the rejection of the feminine and by the skill with which he manages the abuse. The appropriate reply is not to deny the assault, but to return even the greater evil-speaking hurled at the other person’s mother.”57 In Lightnin’s version of “The Dirty Dozens,” there is no verbal battle; it is instead a diatribe that strings together a series of insults that are at once vile and offensive:

  What the hell you trying to play the dozens with me?

  I don’t play the dozens with nobody.

  Now, hell, I don’t like the way you talkin’ no how.

  Talkin’ about my mama, your mammy, and all that kind of junk….

  You got a crooked ass hole, nigger, and you can’t shit straight….

  You old black son of a bitch, you were born with a rag in your ass …

  Your mama had the shingles around her bloody cock, you big black bastard, now get out of here!58

  Clearly it was impossible for McCormick to credit Lightnin’ as the singer of “The Dirty Dozens,” as it no doubt would have identified him as obscene and would have made it very difficult to get him booked in “respectable” venues. It remains one of Lightnin’s least-known recordings.

  McCormick was building a reputation for himself as a folklorist, and 1960 was a Watershed year. In addition to the release of his recordings of Hopkins, he issued a two-LP set A Treasury of Field Recordings, a compilation of blues, zydeco, country, and folk materials recorded from 1951 to 1960 by the Houston Folk Group.59 McCormick had made a majority of the recordings himself. At the same time that McCormick was working on these projects, he also sought to undermine Charters and create problems at Folkways.