Alan Govenar

by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life;Blues

  “One time I was driving Lightnin’ to play at the Little Theatre in Carmel, California and I stopped at my mother’s house. She actually cooked a chicken for us—although she was not known to cook much at all! My sister Frances—who was working in Germany when I went with Lightnin’ with the AFBF in ‘64—remembered meeting us back stage in Frankfurt and when I introduced her to Lightnin’—he at once told her how our mother cooked a chicken for us when he played in Carmel!

  “But by the 1970s, I didn’t see Lightnin’ as often. He became so busy and played extended gigs at bigger venues, like the Fillmore. And by then, he had recorded tons of stuff. The last time I saw him was in San Francisco a year before he died. He played so good—that electric box sounded like those sides he did for Herald—some of my favorites.”92

  Strachwitz felt that Antoinette had essentially saved Lightnin’s life, and in his condolence letter to her, he wrote: “I … want to let you know how he admired and loved you…. He would always tell me how you got him off the wine and really saved him—I am sure Sam would have left us much earlier if you had not been with him over the years—but you had a strong influence on him in many ways.”93

  In assessing Lightnin’s legacy, it is difficult to come to a definitive conclusion. John Corry, writing in the New York Times in 1980, wrote that “Sam ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins … may just possibly be the single greatest influence upon rock guitarists,” though this was clearly an overstatement.94 It’s not to say that he didn’t have an impact upon many blues and blues/folk/rock musicians. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Anson Funderburgh, and Billy Gibbons, among other white blues rockers, as well as singer/songwriters Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, John David Bartlett, and Bernie Pearl, have certainly acknowledged his influence, as did his cousin Albert Collins, Juke Boy Bonner, Johnny Copeland, Joe Hughes, Texas Johnny Brown, and Freddie King.

  Moreover, Lightnin’ influenced blues players in not only Southern states, such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but in other regions of the country and abroad. In Baton Rouge, for example, Lightnin’ Slim (a.k.a. Otis Hicks) even appeared to have taken his nickname from Hopkins. Lightnin’ was an effective songwriter, who had a fairly simple guitar style that could be readily grasped and imitated by beginning blues guitarists.95

  “A lot of times you have people,” Benson remarked, “especially white musicians, who have used Lightnin’ as a way to push their own career. Everybody can go back and say Lightnin’ influenced them, and say ‘I played with Lightnin’ Hopkins,’ but Lightnin’ was the kind of guy who let anybody come up on the stage, not that they could stay now, because if they couldn’t play, or they pissed him off, he’d chase them off the stage as quick as he would let them on. So anybody could come to any show, and say, ‘Lightnin’, can I play with you tonight?’ And he’d say, ‘C’mon, get on up there.’ So when people come back and say, ‘I played with Lightnin’ Hopkins,’ they weren’t necessarily the people who were steady. For example, Rusty [Hill], a red-headed guy, was a bass player Lightnin’ preferred cause Rusty had a family. He would drive his own car to wherever Lightnin’ went, and Lightnin’ liked Rusty. So he would always get me to go find Rusty to play. Tommy Shannon, who played with Stevie Ray, was another one he liked. He played with Lightnin’ all the time. So he would tell me to find Tommy to play bass. Lightnin’ thought of Stevie [Ray Vaughan] the way he thought of all these other guys. And he knew Jimmie [Vaughan] before he knew Stevie because we played at the Texas Chitlin’ Cook-off at Manor Downs in Austin with the Thunderbirds. They were all just young. Lightnin’ didn’t care too much for young guys, period. He thought they were pretty much full of shit like he had been at that age. And then, by them being young white guys, he didn’t really trust them as such. He thought they were good bands, but they were white kids mimicking something. It was rarefied. It was imitation.”96

  Lightnin’ understood his importance as a bluesman, though he was sometimes prone to gross exaggeration. During the shooting of The Blues According to Lightinin Hopkins, he stated that not only had he “learned B. B. King the notes that he make. He learned them off Po’ Lightnin’,” but that “the last of the blues is left here and the ones that’s trying to do it right now they … after Po’ Lightnin’ Hopkins.”97 A decade later, Lightnin’ reiterated this point in an interview in the New York Times and maintained that “the last of the blues is almost gone … and the ones who doin’ it now got to either get a record or sit ‘round me and learn my songs, ‘cause that all they can go by.”98

  Throughout his career, Lightnin’ mythologized himself, especially when he began to have a white audience, in part because he wanted to impress his listeners with the vast scope of his experience, but also due to the fact that certain myths were nurtured and fueled by collectors and the media. The perpetuation of misinformation as it relates to Lightnin’s life underscores the complexities and difficulties in separating the myth from the man. On one hand, Lightnin’ wanted to please those around him, whether his family, girlfriends, wives, friends, or record producers or blues fans, but at the root, he was a survivor. If survival meant leaving town, violating a contract, or not showing up for a gig, he did what he needed to do. “He didn’t really care,” Harold recalled. “He’d always say, ‘Let him sue me, Doc.’”99

  He often referred to himself as “Po’ Lightnin’” in his songs to elicit sympathy as he carried on in a talking blues about anything that came into his mind. But he wasn’t just speaking for himself. He was every man who had suffered and struggled and fought to make a living and to find some joy in the midst of the hardships of daily life. The songs he wrote gave voice to the swirling emotions of the world around him, the fears, anxieties, and aspirations of his generation of American Americans. He soaked up what was around him, whether it was what people said or what he heard, and he put it all into his blues. The lyrics spoke with a raw honesty and a bitter irony about the foibles of everyday life, but imbedded in the words there was at times a humor and genuine compassion for what he knew his listeners might be faced with and going through.

  Lightnin’s music accentuated the social injustices and intense emotions that informed the civil rights era, although Lightnin’ himself was not known to participate in rallies or marches. Few of his songs were topical in nature, although “Slavery” and “Tim Moore’s Farm” were protest songs, and he did sing about World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Principally, Lightnin’ voiced the yearnings and adversities of African Americans who moved away from the sharecropper farms and boll weevil-ravaged cotton fields of East and Central Texas to Houston’s Third Ward. But by the late 1960s, when his audience had become predominantly white, it was difficult for him to gauge what his white listeners were feeling. They didn’t whoop and holler and call out to him in the way people in a juke joint in the Third Ward might have done. White listeners may have misunderstood some of the metaphors and subtlety in his songs, and perhaps missed the innuendos and humor, though they were nevertheless captivated by his on-stage presence—his spiffy suits, polished shoes, gold-capped teeth, and Ray-Ban sunglasses.

  When asked why he wore sunglasses all the time, he simply said, “I’m a hidin’ man. I been hidin’ all my life.” He sometimes said he wore sunglasses because of a “lazy eye,” but he told others that bright lights bothered him. However, he knew that sunglasses made him cool; other musicians tried to copy his style, but he had essentially defined the look. “They taken my habit to try to take my stuff,” Lightnin’ maintained, “and ain’t but one thing they can do and that is wear shades. Because they can’t do what I do. They tries … all these cats here be hip by Lightnin’ Hopkins.”100

  When Hopkins would say, “Lightnin’ change when Lightnin’ change,” he was not only telling his sidemen they needed to be ready, he was expressing exactly who he was. In performance, he had a general sense of where he wanted to go, but didn’t know exactly how he was going to get there until he started into a song. At its best, his blues were a seamless di
alogue between words and guitar, a largely improvised conversation not only between him and his instrument, but also between him and those who were listening. It’s difficult to tell which lyrics are his, and which are from other sources, but in performance it didn’t seem to matter.

  Lightnin’ did not want to be told what to do; he spoke his mind through his music. Lightnin’ worked when and where he wanted to, and as he gained a white audience, the interest in his music among younger African Americans declined. Nevertheless, his concerts at college campuses were attended widely and introduced young audiences to down-home blues, which evoked a sense of the place that African Americans carried with them as they migrated away from country to the city, looking for new opportunities and a better way of life. As Chris Strachwitz has pointed out, even though Lightnin’ spent most of his adult life in Houston, he remained “a real country man.”

  Sam Charters described Lightnin’ as “the last singer in the grand style. He sang with sweep and imagination, using his voice to reach out and touch someone who listened to him.”101 For filmmaker Les Blank, Lightnin’ was “clown and oracle, wit and scoundrel. Like Shakespeare, he had an understanding of all people and all their feelings. Whether he was singing other people’s songs, or as it more often happened, making a song up as he played, Lightnin’ Hopkins was a man of all colors and classes, and of all times. He was an eloquent spokesman for the human soul which dwells in us all.”102

  While it is tempting to romanticize Lightnin’ as a bluesman, one must not lose sight of the extent to which he was plagued by his own personal problems. He drank too much and was ostensibly an alcoholic, who in “Watch Yourself” sang: “I got to get drunk every day to please my mind.” But according to Carroll Peery and others, he was never a sloppy drunk. “He didn’t lose control of himself when he was drinking,” Peery said, “because he didn’t drink that heavily at any one time. But he drank pretty constantly. When I first met him he was drinking gin and then when we got a little bit of money, he switched to more expensive types of alcohol. He always drank whiskey [Canadian Club], but he started drinking it more consistently after he became more secure economically.”103

  As much as Lightnin’s creativity may have declined in his later years when he was paid more for playing less and often repeating himself, or re-recording old songs, he was nonetheless a professional who was at any moment capable of a great performance that could surprise and wow even the most jaded. Lightnin’, like his contemporaries Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, was an entertainer with an uncanny sense of drama. His movements on stage were measured; he knew he was a “star” for the people who bought the tickets and packed the clubs and festivals where he was often a headliner, and he played what they wanted to hear. Even when he was sloppy, or maybe had too much to drink, he was still worth seeing, especially if one had never seen him before. Everyone who came into contact with Lightnin’ Hopkins remembered him. His presence was indelible and imbued those around him with a mix of emotions, from admiration to disdain. While he was generally respected for his blues, his personality was often inscrutable.

  Through his songs, he led young and old alike into his past, but could push them back in an instant with a terse phrase or a swipe of his hand. In performance, the audience hung on to every word, from the moment he stepped onto the stage and tipped his hat to the instant when he picked up a guitar and began to play. And when he reared back and muttered a few words, or pulled out a flask of whiskey to take a long sip, no one was impatient. During his last years just about everyone who came to see him knew his songs, but they also knew what they were about to hear would take shape as it was performed. He rarely sang a song the same way twice, and the structure of his songs was often sprawling and rough. If the lyrics were ragged and the metaphors skewed, it rarely mattered; for his devotees, his blues were pure, and he was an oracle.

  In the end, regardless of the myths, and the inevitable mix of fact and fiction, Lightnin’ was happy that his music had reached such a wide audience. “I don’t think in his younger days,” Benson said, “he even imagined that there would be so many young people, so many white people, who would have such a genuine appreciation of his sound. He thought it was naive, but it was genuine. By the end of his life, his music had become sonorous, more than it was an exemplification of a particular social context. It became almost nostalgic, even as it related to the suffering. He knew that the people who bought his records and came to hear him play genuinely cared. They loved it, but it was artificial to the extent that it had been disconnected and removed from the reality that had generated it.”

  When asked once about what made him different than anyone else, Lightnin’ replied, “A bluesman is just different from any other man that walks this earth. The blues is something that is hard to get acquainted with. Just like death. The blues dwell with you everyday and everywhere.”104

  Discography

  Andrew Brown and Alan Balfour

  The first attempt at compiling a Lightnin’ Hopkins discography was made by the pioneering blues researcher Anthony Rotante in 1955 for Discophile magazine in England. Lightnin’s style of blues must have seemed archaic enough at the time for Rotante to feel safe in referring to the subject of his piece in the past tense, unaware that a folk-blues renaissance was just a few years away. After a brief period of inactivity, Lightnin’ began recording in earnest again, and (in Colin Escott’s memorable phrase) “the world would never again want for a Lightnin’ Hopkins record.” By the time of his final studio recording in 1974, he had long since become established as one of the most recorded blues singers of the postwar era.

  At the start of Lightnin’s career in 1946, recording sessions in the music industry usually followed a predictable pattern: musicians (often members of the musician’s union) would gather in a studio with a contracted artist and producer, and would, over the course of three hours or so, record two to eight masters. The musicians would get paid union fees for their work. If their contract called for it, the artist would repeat this scenario two or three times a year. Re-creating such sessions for a discography decades later can be challenging, but there was usually a logic that can be reconstructed without too much effort—particularly if session sheets and union files exist that can help identify dates, locations, and personnels.

  None of this applies to Lightnin’ Hopkins, who ignored exclusive contracts, did not join the musician’s union until the latter stage of his career, and would record as many songs per session as he could get paid for. Session sheets and company files no longer exist for the majority of his recording sessions—and probably, in many cases, never existed in the first place. The chaotic and confusing nature of his discography is testament to the idiosyncratic nature of both Lightnin’ and the small, independent producers who recorded him.

  How do you bring order out of chaos? We have taken a fresh approach that considers the nature of Lightnin’s recordings above the strict rules of discography, rules that sometimes don’t even apply to his sessions (and introduce confusion of their own). It is thus divided into two main parts: the years when Lightnin’ was a singles artist (1946–1954), and the period in which he was primarily an album artist (1959–1974). Within that scope, we have endeavored to make it as accurate and accessible as possible.

  Our methodology is as follows:

  Session dates. All sessions have been listed chronologically in the order in which they were recorded. Educated guesses and estimates are required for nearly everything Lightnin’ recorded before 1959, and quite a few dates in the 1960s are speculative as well. We have broken down the sessions to a suggested chronology, but it should be emphasized that the 1946 to 1954 period is only suggested. Some singles sessions in which we have listed two songs to have been recorded may have been longer, etc. More difficult questions about longer sessions (such as those for the Sittin’ In With and Herald labels) are addressed within the discography.

  Location. We have tried to establish the city and studio in which Lightnin’ ma
de each of his recordings. It’s well documented that the majority of them were recorded in Houston at Gold Star or ACA Studios. In other cases, we only know the city.

  Personnel. Precisely who plays on Lightnin’s recordings was largely pinned down by researchers in the 1960s. Some unknown musicians remain, however, and are unlikely to be identified at this point. We have corrected and updated the known personnel of earlier discographies as much as recent (and recently discovered) research allows. To cite one example: for the past forty years it has been written that Frankie Lee Sims plays slide guitar on Lightnin’s 1949 “Jail House Blues,” but we now know from the unpublished research of Laurence Schilthuis that the instrument heard on this session is a steel guitar, played by Harding “Hop” Wilson.

  For the album era, each session has been considered individually in relation to the album. Where an album was recorded over different sessions, and featured different personnel, we have either listed the collective personnel, or, when it made more sense, specified which song a particular musician was playing on.