Alan Govenar Read online

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Govenar, Alan B., 1952–

  Lightnin’ Hopkins : his life and blues / Alan Govenar.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-55652-962-7 (hardcover)

  1. Hopkins, Lightnin’, 1912-1982. 2. Blues musicians—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  ML420.H6357G68 2010

  781.643092—dc22

  [B]

  2009048798

  Interior design: Jonathan Hahn

  © 2010 by Alan Govenar All rights reserved

  Published by Chicago Review Press, Incorporated

  814 North Franklin Street

  Chicago, Illinois 60610

  ISBN 978-1-55652-962-7

  Printed in the United States of America

  5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1 Early Years

  2 Travels with Texas Alexander

  3 The Move to Houston

  4 Rediscovery

  5 The Blues Revival Heats Up

  6 The Touring Intensifies

  7 Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale

  8 An Expanding Audience

  9 The Last Decade

  Discography

  Endnotes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  Writing this book spread over more than fifteen years. While there were days and months that I set the manuscript aside, I knew I’d come back to it and complete what I had set out to do. The amount of inaccurate information on Lightnin’ Hopkins made me especially vigilant, and numerous people helped me through the arduous process of establishing a cohesive biography.

  Andrew Brown propelled my work forward by sharing his voluminous research and then reading and critiquing several drafts of the manuscript. Chris Strachwitz of Arhoolie Records made available his archive and record collection, and my frequent conversations with him clarified many inconsistencies. Jane Phillips, whom I first talked to more than a decade ago, made valuable suggestions as she shared her memories of Lightnin’ during the 1960s. David Benson openly discussed Lightnin’s day-to-day life during his last years. Paul Oliver and Pat Mullen aided me in contextualizing the cross-cultural appeal of Lightnin’s blues. Laurent Danchin translated various articles published in French and engaged me in a dialogue I had not foreseen.

  I am also grateful to Les Blank of Flower Films, Jeff Place of the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, John Wheat of the Center for American History at the University of Texas, Dan Morgenstern of the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Bill Belmont of Prestige Music Archives/Concord Music Group, and many others who offered their assistance, including Sam Charters, Mack McCormick, Paul Oliver, Roger Armstrong, Barbara Dane, David Evans, Kip Lornell, John Broven, Ed Pearl, Bernie Pearl, Carroll Peery, Bruce Bromberg, Paul Drummond, Jay Brakefield, Stan Lewis, Don Logan, Joe Kessler, Eric Davis, Eric LeBlanc, Andre Hobus, Krista Balatony, Ray Dawkins, Clyde Langford, Alan Hatchett, Francis Hofstein, Norbert Hess, and Alan Balfour.

  My wife, Kaleta Doolin, and my children, Breea and Alex, were a constant source of encouragement as my efforts moved forward, bringing a counterpoint to my work that has enriched my life.

  Introduction

  I been making up songs all my life. I could get out among people ‘cause this here’s a gift … to me. An old lady told me, “Son, your mother had music in her heart when she was carrying you.” You know what that mean, don’t you? When I come into this world I was doin’ this.1

  Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins, at the time of his death in 1982, may have been the most frequently recorded blues artist in history. He was a singular voice in the history of the Texas blues, exemplifying its country roots but at the same time reflecting its urban directions in the years after World War II. His music epitomized the hardships and aspirations of his own generation of African Americans, but it was also emblematic of the folk revival and its profound impact upon a white audience.

  What distinguished Lightnin’ Hopkins was his virtuosity as a performer. He soaked up what was around him and put it all into his blues. He rambled on about anything that came into his mind: chuckholes in the road, gossip on the street, his rheumatism, his women, and the good times and bad men he met along the way. In his songs he could be irascible, but in the next verse he might be self-effacing. He prided himself on his individuality, even if it meant he was full of inconsistencies. He often poured out his feelings in his songs with a heart-wrenching pathos, but it could be hard to tell if he was truly sincere. He peppered his lyrics with few actual details about his own life, but he was at once raw, mocking, extroverted, sarcastic, and deadly serious. Most of the time, Lightnin’ appeared to trust no one, yet he knew how to endear himself to his audience. While he voiced the hardships, yearnings, and foibles of African Americans in the gritty bump and grind of the juke joints of Third Ward Houston, he could be cocky and brash in his performances for white crowds at the Matrix in San Francisco, or at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, or a concert hall in Europe, where he was in complete control and was adored.

  Lightnin’s down-home blues did not adhere strictly to a traditional, three-line, AAB verse form, but rather he improvised a form that suited the song he was singing or composing on the spot and expressed what he was feeling at that moment. If Lightnin’ held a line for one or two extra beats, if he abbreviated the musical time between lines, or if he lost his place during an instrumental riff, he was never fazed. But this is what made it so difficult for bassists and drummers to play with him, and his timing got more erratic as the years went by. He wasn’t schooled in the complex harmonic structures and precision of rhythm and blues, but instead stayed with a basic three-chord (tonic, subdominant, dominant) guitar pattern to accompany his vocal phrasing. In doing so, his vocal lines did not always agree metrically with his guitar lines. But for Lightnin’ the basis of his songs was rarely structure. It was the essence of the blues that he was after. “I come along, long about the time that the people first put the blues on this earth for the people to go by,” Lightnin’ said. “Well, I’m one in the number and the rest of them is dead and gone. I got in that number at a young age … and I just keeps it up ‘cause the blues is something that the people can’t get rid of. And if you ever have the blues, remember what I tell you. You’ll always hear this in your heart: That’s the blues.”2

  Lightnin’ played both acoustic and electric guitars and was steeped in the Texas country blues tradition. From Blind Lemon Jefferson and Alger “Texas” Alexander, Lightnin’ absorbed stylistic and repertoire elements that included a melismatic singing style rooted in the field holler, mixing long-held notes with loose, almost conversational phrasing.3 Musically, “Short Haired Woman,” which Lightnin’ recorded for the first time around May 1947, established the signature sound that he used in just about every song, whether it was a fast instrumental boogie/shuffle or a slow blues. In his guitar playing Lightnin’ had an open and fluid style with his right hand, using a thumb pick and his index finger. He kept his right hand loose so he could move from playing sharp notes near the bridge to playing wider open chords up near the fingerboard.

  Lightnin’ usually tuned his guitar in the key of E, though not necessarily to a concert pitch. He utilized what ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons has called “that turnaround…. It’s a signature lick…. He’d come down from the B chord and roll across the top three strings in the last two bars. He’d pull off those strings to get a staccato effect, first hitting the little open E string then the 3rd fret on the B string and the 4th fret of the G string. He would then resolve on the
V chord after doing his roll. It’s a way to immediately identify a Lightnin’ Hopkins tune.”4

  Lightnin’ was tremendously appealing for aspiring blues guitarists to emulate because his signature turnaround was relatively easy to learn, but it was extremely hard to replicate his sound because of his distinctive held notes, pauses, string bending, and shortened and lengthened measures. Sometimes, as bluesman Michael “Hawkeye” Herman points out, Lightnin’ “played it in triplets, sometimes as a quarter note, sometimes as an eighth note…. He knew how to play the same lick/riff forward, backward, from the middle to the front, from the middle to the back, from the back to the front … each effort creating a completely huge guitar vocabulary.”5 Ultimately, it didn’t matter what kind of guitar he was playing, acoustic or electric. “He just had this feel,” guitarist and luthier Sam Swank maintains, echoing the sentiments of so many Lightnin’ devotees. “There aren’t that many blues guitar players in the world that when you drop the needle on the record, anybody who’s anybody knows who that is. Lightnin’ Hopkins is one of those guitar players.”6

  Most people thought Lightnin’ was making up the words to his songs as he went along, and that his lyrics were completely original. But he was actually doing something more amazing and subtle. He was instantly accessing hundreds of floating lyrics from his memory and inserting them when and where they seemed appropriate. Many blues singers did this to a certain extent, but Lightnin’s ability seemed to exceed all of his peers. His capacity for improvisation was uncanny, and regardless of the source of his lyrics, he was able to make each of his songs his own by performing them in his inimitable voice and his signature guitar style.

  If there were a dominant theme in his blues, it was the ever-changing and often-tumultuous relationships between men and women. Lightnin’ could turn the simplest phrase into sexual innuendo, and, just as easily, express the pain of being mistreated and the despair of being betrayed. He often bragged about his exploits with women in his songs, but other than identifying some names, he said little about his actual relationships. While he sang in the first-person, remarkably little of his repertoire was truly autobiographical.

  I saw Lightnin’ perform once at the Austin nightclub Castle Creek in 1974, and when he came on stage, I was drawn into his performance like everyone else. But he was so different from what I had expected from having listened to his records. Every gesture seemed so measured—the placement of the guitar, the positioning of his hat, the towel around his neck, the half pint of liquor that he pulled up to his lips, the big, gold-toothed grin, and the dark sunglasses that kept him a mystery. By the time the show was over, I wasn’t sure how to respond. Still, his presence was indelible, and in many ways my memory of that night, that image of Lightnin’ in the spotlight, made me want to know more. Lightnin’ was an enigma. He was both compelling and disturbing. To what extent did the white audience listening to him shape his performance, and how did it relate to his roots in East Texas? How would it have been different in a juke joint on a backcountry road or in a little dive in Houston?

  Years later, in the mid-1980s, Chris Strachwitz and Les Blank, two giants in the field of American roots music, talked to me at length about Lightnin’s importance as a bluesman and his significance in each of their lives. Chris, after hearing Lightnin’ in Houston, decided to start Arhoolie Records and he has since released hundreds of recordings of blues and American roots music; Les, after seeing Lightnin’ at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, was inspired to make his first full-length documentary film. And for both of them, Lightnin’s passing marked the end of an era. They recognized the need for a biography, but they weren’t going to do it themselves. Les offered me the use of his interviews and outtakes from his films The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins and The Sun’s Gonna Shine. Chris made himself available for countless conversations, sharing what he remembered and introducing me to people he thought I should interview.

  Initially I was reluctant to begin work on a biography. Dr. Cecil Harold, who was Lightnin’s manager for more than a decade, and Antoinette Charles, who was his long-time companion, refused to be interviewed. I called Dr. Harold on several occasions but was repeatedly rebuffed. The first time he asked me to make a financial offer and said that “Mrs. Hopkins” might accept ten thousand dollars, but he then recanted. The next year he told me that “Mrs. Hopkins isn’t doing any more interviews,” and two years later he reiterated that “Mrs. Hopkins isn’t interested.” Three years after that, he explained that “it’s too painful for Mrs. Hopkins,” and in my last attempt, he asked me to write a letter in which I explained that I was completing a biography of Lightnin’ Hopkins and asked what terms for a conversation and/or interview might be acceptable. A few weeks later, I received a hand-written reply that stated: “Mrs. Hopkins … declines further interviews. She wishes to simply say … no more reviews of life with Lightnin’.”7 Then it occurred to me that I needed to see Lightnin’s probated will, and when I finally got a copy it all began to make sense. Antoinette was never Mrs. Hopkins. She had an affair with him that lasted an estimated thirty-five years, and during much of that time she was married to someone else with whom she had children. What mattered most to Antoinette was her privacy.

  Finally, in 1995, after studying and writing about Texas blues for nearly two decades, I started talking to people in Centerville, Texas, where Lightnin’ grew up. I was trying to get a handle on how Lightnin’ was remembered where he grew up. At Ellis’s Drive-In on State Highway 7, near the intersection with U.S. Highway 75, eighty-three-year-old Estelle Sims leaned on the front counter with her elbows and smiled when asked about Lightnin’. The light from the street shone on her bristly white hair and the deep wrinkles of her face as she spoke in a solemn tone. “I remember hearing him play at a black-eyed pea festival not too far from here back in the thirties. He was good, but it’s been so long that I forget what it was that he actually played.” Then she looked up and pointed across the street. “I suspect that man over there might be able to tell you more. He’s a Hopkins.”

  I thanked her and walked across the street, the July heat drawing a sticky asphalt smell from the pavement. Oland Hopkins was sitting in the shade of a post oak tree beside a rusty pick-up truck filled with hay and a few watermelons that he was casually trying to sell to passersby. As I got closer to him, he stood up abruptly and asked, “Can I help you, sir?”

  I explained that I was looking for information about Lightnin’ Hopkins, and he muttered, “I’m a distant relation of his, but I don’t know too much. I used to hear him play at church association picnics and suppers, but that’s about it. You ought to talk to J. D. Kelly. Now, he should be able to tell you more.”

  The pay phone next to Ellis’s Drive-In was hot and clammy. I dialed Kelly’s number quickly, and he answered after the second ring. Kelly had a hoarse but friendly voice and was eager to share what he knew. “That’s right,” he said, “I growed up with him. We just went from place to place to play all over this countryside. He had a guitar slung on his shoulder, and he picked and sang at ring-play parties. He was a playboy. All he wanted to do was pick.” He told me if I wanted to find out anything else, I should give Oscar Davis a call. He was a cousin of Lightnin’s and his last remaining kin in Centerville.

  Davis, however, was more suspicious than the other two. He stammered, “Who are you? And what do you want?” I tried to answer, but before I could finish my sentence, he grumbled, “Talk to my wife. I’m hard of hearing.” When his wife got on the telephone, she was even more suspicious than he had been. “Sure, I remember Lightnin’ Hopkins. What’s it to you? I remember Lightnin’ Hopkins. He come to our house. He was my husband’s first cousin, but I didn’t really know him. You need to talk to Oscar’s brother and he’s right here beside me, getting ready to go to Houston.” There was a short pause, and then the brother got on the phone and said, “I’m too young. I didn’t really know Lightnin’. Sorry, I can’t help you. Thank you and good-bye.”

  I
hung up and walked back to my car, and I saw Oland Hopkins was staring at me. “May I have your card?” he asked in amicable way, “I’d like to help you if I can. If I find out anything more, I’ll call you.” I handed him my card and told him he could call me collect if he wanted to, but I’ve never heard from him. At that point in 1995, it appeared all that remained of Lightnin’ in Centerville were spotty recollections. I decided to set the idea of writing a biography of Lightnin’ Hopkins aside, though I did continue to collect stories about him whenever I got the chance. I interviewed Paul Oliver, the British blues aficionado who had traveled to Houston to meet Hopkins with Chris Strachwitz in 1960, as well as Francis Hofstein, the French psychoanalyst who had met Lightnin’ when he appeared with the American Folk Blues Festival tour in Strasbourg in 1964. I spoke with John Jackson, the Piedmont bluesman who was at the Newport Folk Festival a year later when Lightnin’ performed.

  In 2002 the musician and impresario Pip Gillette called me and asked me if I wanted to give the keynote speech at the dedication of a Lightnin’ Hopkins memorial statue created by the sculptor Jim Jeffries. I agreed, and much to my surprise, more than three hundred people came to the event on Camp Street in Crockett, Texas, where Lightnin’ had performed in the 1930s and ‘40s. Pip introduced me to Lightnin’s daughter, Anna Mae Box, who lived in Crockett, and to Frank Robinson, who had played with Lightnin’ in the 1950s. I also had a chance to meet Wrecks Bell, who had played with Lightnin’ in the 1970s, and David Benson, who had been Lightnin’s traveling companion and road manager during the last decade of his life. Benson helped me to get a clearer sense of his personal life, especially as it related to his relationship with Antoinette and Dr. Harold during a period when he performed less, got paid more, and failed to produce any new recordings.