Alan Govenar Read online

  In the Hopkins family everyone played some kind of music or sang. Gabriel even recalled Sam playing the pump organ when he came by the church, though he didn’t remember him singing church songs. Yet Sam said that he not only played the pump organ but also that he participated in church services. “I come up in Sunday school too. I played organ in Sunday school, and I played piano in Sunday school. It was fine…. I opened up the church [service] with the piano…. They didn’t teach me them songs. They made ‘em up. Fact of the business, they sing ‘em. I played ‘em…. All they do is give me the tune…. But you see I wouldn’t be singing, I just be playing it. When my chorus come in, I just play it.”

  Sam said that he learned to play the piano by sounding out the notes on that pump organ in church. “My piano playin’ … just come into life after I got out of church playing them songs about ‘Jesus Will You Come by Here’ [“Now Is the Needy Time”] and ‘Just Like You Treated Your … By the Water’ and all them songs…. Piano, you got to kinda thump it. But organ you pump it.”30

  Sam learned to play the guitar as a child by watching his older brothers John Henry and Joel, as well as other musicians in his community. His mother’s cousin, Tucker Jordan, played the fiddle, and his wife was a guitarist, and they often played together at house parties and square dances. Albert Holley was a blues musician Sam remembered singing a song to his mother: “I heard him play, he was sitting on the foot of the bed. He was saying, ‘Baby, come sit down on my knee. I got something to tell you that keeps on worrying me.’ And he was saying that to Mama. I just listened. I just picked up on what he was saying. The song appealed to me and made me feel good…. So that give me some ideas how to sing too.”31

  The first guitar Sam played belonged to his older brother, Joel, though he said he’d also made his own instrument out of a cigar box and screen wire.32 One day, when he was playing Joel’s instrument, Sam got caught, but Joel was impressed with his ability to play. Sam recalled, “I was too little to chop cotton. They come out the field and I was pickin’ the guitar one day—[Joel] give me that guitar…. They come in for dinner, and I’m sittin’ down with that guitar across my lap pickin’ it, and he wanted to know what I was doin’ with his guitar. I told him I was pickin’ it. He told me, ‘Let me see what you do.’ And I went on and played songs better than him. He said, ‘You can have that [guitar]. I’ll get me another one.’”33

  Sam learned the guitar quickly, and when he was still only eight years old, he met the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was playing at the annual meeting of the General Baptist Association of Churches, commonly referred to as “the Association,” in Buffalo, Texas, about sixteen miles northwest of Centerville. In attendance at the Association were people from the surrounding communities, who brought their children each day for about a week for worship and fellowship. “That’s where all the delegates, preachers—they’d get there and they’d have a wonderful time,” Sam said. “Well, they’d have church in the tabernacle. And they’d sell sody water out on the grounds.”34

  Ray Dawkins recalled that his father, Ike Dawkins, was on the board of the Association, and that in addition to “preaching and singing three times a day,” there were barbecues and social events. One of the primary goals of the annual meeting, Dawkins says, was to raise money for Mary Allen College, which was founded in 1886 on ten acres of land in Crockett, Texas, as a two-year school. It was originally known as Mary Allen Seminary and was established for the education of black women by the Presbyterian Board of Missions for Freedmen. “So every year they’d have the Association in Buffalo, and they’d have different singers and performers. I don’t know how many years Blind Lemon played there.”35

  While Blind Lemon had only recorded two Christian songs for Paramount under the pseudonym Deacon L. J. Bates, anecdotal evidence suggests that he was, in fact, well known for his capacity to sing both blues and religious music.36 “That was one thing about Lemon,” Wortham postmaster Uel L. Davis told a Waco Tribune-Herald reporter. “He’d be singing in church one day, singing at a house of ill repute the next.”37 Sam didn’t say what song Jefferson was playing when he approached him, but he did emphasize its significance: “I run up on Blind Lemon Jefferson. He had a crowd of peoples around him. And I was standing there looking at him play, and I went to playing my guitar, just what he was playing. So he say, ‘Who is that playing that guitar?’ So, they say, ‘Oh, that’s just a little boy here knocking on that guitar.’ He say, ‘No, he playing that guitar.’ Say, ‘Where he at? Come here, boy.’ And I went on over there where he was, and he was feeling for me. And I was so low, he reached out, say, ‘This here was picking that guitar?’ Say, ‘Yeah.’ So, he say, ‘Do that again.’ So, I did a little note again, same one he done. He say, ‘Well, that’s my note.’ He say, ‘Boy, you keep that up, you gonna be a good guitar player.’ So, he went on and then commenced to playing, so I went to playing right on with him. So, I was so little and low, the peoples couldn’t see me. And we were standing by a truck. They put me up on top of the truck, and Blind Lemon was standing down by the truck, and me and him, man, we carried it on. And the excitement was me, because I was so little. And I was just picking what he was. I wasn’t singing, but I was playing what he was playing. That’s right.”38

  Sometimes when Sam told the story, he said that Blind Lemon was displeased when he heard him play and shouted, “You got to play it right!” But when he realized the musician was only eight years old, he hoisted the child onto the truck and let him play. In another version, Sam said the meeting occurred in 1925, which would have made him about thirteen years old, not eight. It’s likely that Sam had his dates mixed up, but the fact that he had met Blind Lemon was important to him. By linking himself to Blind Lemon, who was the most successful male blues singer to record in the 1920s, Sam was able to elevate his own stature and lay a cornerstone in the myth he was creating for himself.39

  Interestingly enough, Sam said that by the time he met Blind Lemon, his brother Joel had already left home and was staying with the Jefferson family. “That was in Mexia, Wortham, Waxahatchie, Buffalo, and another little old place I can’t ‘call the name. Blind Lemon Jefferson played at those places. He had a brother named Marcella Jefferson, George Jefferson, and the old lady … well, they used to dance and play.”40

  In researching Blind Lemon’s life and career, there are no other accounts of either Marcella or George Jefferson. Nevertheless, Sam claimed that after meeting Jefferson he left home and did his best to follow him, going from town to town in East Texas. “People would see me ‘cause I traveled when I was young with a guitar all over them areas,” Sam said, “Buffalo, Oakwood, Palestine, Ben Hur, and all. Mama didn’t think nothing about it. She just know it was all right ‘cause I taken care of my mama all my life. From a kid up I taken care of Lady Frances. I buried her. Out of all the kids she had, I’m the one.”

  What is clear is that Sam wanted to find a way out of the sharecropper life. “It wasn’t nothing on the end of the hoe handle for me,” Sam said. “Choppin’ cotton for six bits a day. Plowin’ the mules … that wasn’t in store for me. I went on with what the good lord gave me.”41 Once on his own, Hopkins’s musical skills evolved rapidly. As a child, he saw the influence that both the preacher and the blues singer could have. “You go to church,” Sam said, “and a real preacher is really preaching the Bible to you, he’s honest to God trying to get you to understand these things. That’s just the same as singing the blues. The blues is the same thing. When they get up there and put their whole soul in there and feel it, it’s just like a preacher.”42 And for Sam, the blues singer had as much power as the preacher in people’s lives. “Course I’m like a preacher,” he claimed, “I got to keep hearing that ‘Amen!’ from my congregation just the same as a preacher.”43

  It was not uncommon for blues singers to compare themselves to preachers, though Sam rarely played religious songs. In fact, the only spiritual he ever recorded as a solo artist was identified as “Needed Time�
�� on RPM.44 The actual title is “Now Is the Needy Time,” and had been recorded by the Wiseman Sextet for Victor in 1923 (unissued) and later by two other artists in 1928 and 1930, though it’s likely that the spiritual was traditional and predates any recordings. Sam did not record another spiritual until the 1960s, when he teamed up with Barbara Dane on “Jesus, Won’t You Come by Here” (which was actually “Now Is the Needy Time” under a different title) and with Big Joe Williams and Brownie McGhee on “I’ve Been ‘Buked (and Scorned).” In other recordings, such as “Prayin’ Ground Blues,” “Devil Is Watching You,” “Sinner’s Prayer,” and “I’m Gonna Build Me a Heaven of My Own,” there are passing references to religion, but the songs are not spirituals.45

  Sam, like so many blues singers, believed that “when you born in this world, you born with the blues. Upset is the blues. Worry is the blues. The blues come by what you love…. You have the blues by anything. You can have a car and wake up in the morning and have a flat. You get to walking and nobody helps you; you ain’t got nothing like the blues. You gonna walk until you find somebody who says they’ll try to help you. Trouble is the blues. You can have the blues about being broke, about your girl being gone. You can have the blues so many different ways till it’s hard to explain. But whenever you get a sad feeling, you can tell the whole rotten world you got nothing but the blues.”46

  Sam often bragged that he started writing his songs at an early age: “I been making up songs all my life, ever since I was eight years old when I got out on my own.”47 He never identified any songs he wrote at that age, but he did have a gargantuan memory.

  Lightnin’ said that the first time he got paid for performing was when he had just turned fourteen years old, and he met up with Jabo Bucks about two miles from the Association grounds in Buffalo. Bucks was a fiddler who agreed to go with him into town and play for tips in front of a cafe, and they were soon invited inside. From Buffalo, he and Bucks headed on to the nearby towns of Oakwood and Jewett, stopping when and wherever they could to play for pocket change.

  People in the black parts of town in the rural areas of East and Central Texas responded well to Lightnin’s guitar picking and singing. But if he got the chance, he said, he “would go around to the white people’s houses,” where they might invite him inside to play the piano for them and pay him ten or fifteen cents, or even a quarter. 48 While the laws of separate accommodation in Leon County were viciously enforced, black musicians were sometimes welcomed into the homes of white families to entertain them, a tradition that dated back to the years of slavery. The History of Leon County, Texas, mentioned a group called the Serenaders, usually consisting of a fiddler, guitar player, and mandolin player, who walked through the streets of Centerville. “About the first Serenader I heard,” one unnamed resident recalled, “was Rob Dunbar, a left-handed Negro fiddler and a guitar accompanist [who] came to our house about Christmas time, and that was the sweetest music I had ever heard.”49

  Mabel Milton, who grew up in Centerville, remembered that Lightnin’ also liked to visit the homes of the black families he knew. “Sometimes he play just walkin’ around, come to your house, and if you got him, he played for tips. He’d have his guitar with him. He just sit and talk, swap stories, tell jokes, maybe play a couple of songs, and folks give him a glass of lemonade, or a tea cake. He wouldn’t stay too long, two or three hours, and then he go on some place else. He was neat dresser, keep his hair lookin’ pretty all the time. Nice and clean.”50

  Sam did the best he could to avoid working in the fields. With the little money he made from tips, he was able to support himself and help his mother, but he also got deeper into gambling. And it wasn’t long before he got himself into trouble: “I been on a chain gang four times. I was bridge gang. I wore ball and chain. That was in my young days. I used to didn’t stand no cheatin’. You ever heard ‘My baby don’t stand no cheatin’?’ I ain’t lying. That done growed up in me.”

  No records have ever been found of exactly what crimes Hopkins committed to lead to him being sentenced to a chain gang. He did say, “The first time I went to jail … me and my little cousin and a guy got into it. Fact of the business, the man was older than we was, and he just thought he was going to knock us boys around. My cousin had a razor in his pocket and I hit the guy, and he had my cousin choking him, and I said, ‘Cut him.’ And he kind of slice him in the sides. Man, I tell you, that was a full Sunday.” Sam and his cousin left the man bleeding and took off, but they didn’t go very far. They were able to get work “choppin’ cotton” about twenty miles away. About a week later, they were arrested in the “cotton patch,” and brought to jail, but they stayed only one night because Sam’s brother Joel paid “the fine.” From then on, Sam said people called him “Jailbird” because he continued to get into trouble. “I went crazy,” he said, “Jail didn’t mean nothing to me then. You could put me in there every day.” But Sam knew, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t run from the law. “If I do something,” he said, “I go give up. Because that learnt me a lesson. Don’t. Never know that you did something and try to run away from it. It may be twenty years [for them] to get you, and then it’s worse. So, just go on and give up.”51

  As often as Hopkins expressed his disdain for the law, the time he spent “chained up” forced him to control his temper. He once spent two hundred days on a bridge gang, toiling from dawn to dusk on bridge construction and repair and chained to a post every night in his bed.52 Another time, after getting into a fight in Grapeland, he was sentenced to time on a Houston County road crew. He somehow managed to escape but was picked up in Leon County and returned to the chain gang.53 Sam knew that he had to change his ways. “Mess with me a little bit,” he said, “I’d start me a little fight in a minute. So they was throwing a rope on me and puttin’ me in the joint and going on. I had to calm down. Wearing that ball and chain ain’t no good.”54

  Sam’s time in jail and on the chain gang became fodder for the songs he later performed. He recorded the first, “Jail House Blues,” in 1949:

  Well, I wouldn’t mind staying in jail

  But I’ve gotta stay there so long

  Thirty days in jail

  With my back turned to the wall

  This rendition of “Jail House Blues” borrowed heavily from Bessie Smith’s 1923 song of the same title, and while Sam made it sound as if it conveyed his personal experience, only the final verse appeared to be his own:

  Hey, mister jailer

  Will you please sir bring me the key

  I just want you to open the door

  ‘Cause this ain’t no place for me

  Sam’s song “I Worked Down on the Chain Gang” was more of a talking blues, in which he recounted his experience with a ball and chain around his leg and emphasized the cold indifference of the guards: “I said, ‘Please don’t drive me too hard, I’m an old man.’/ They say, ‘We don’t pay no attention to the age.’” But he concluded by falling back on the refrain to “Jail House Blues” and reiterated his plea: “I says I just want you to open the door/ ‘Cause this ain’t no place for me.”

  For a man who claimed to be in and out of jail a lot during the 1930s, Sam sang remarkably few, if any, original lyrics about his incarceration. Songs about prison experiences or run-ins with the law were fairly common in prewar blues, and were means for blues singers to present themselves as victims. While Sam may have exaggerated his jail time, he did indeed have tangible proof of his experiences, and when he started touring to festivals, folk clubs, and the white college circuit, he liked to show off the scars around his ankles.55 Back stage, he sometimes rolled up his pant leg and asked whomever he was talking to if they knew what those scars were from. Ultimately, what we know about Sam’s jail and chain-gang time is limited by what he decided to tell about those experiences, which actually isn’t very much. However, the large blank spots in his biography from 1930 to 1946 suggest the possibility of more jail time than Sam would later care to admit in the very
selective interviews he gave. One has to wonder what got Sam sentenced to two hundred days on a bridge gang. Clearly he had a vicious temper and was prone to violence and aggravated assault during this period of his life, though it would not have taken much to land him in jail. Even a rather minor crime could have gotten a harsh sentence from a racist judge, and many completely innocent blacks served long sentences for things they didn’t do.

  In his songs and in interviews, Sam usually shifted the focus from the crime to the punishment. He realized that it was in his best interest to portray himself as a victim who was able to triumph over his adversity. For example, in discussing one of his chain gang experiences, he began by asking, “You drive up around Crockett on them roads?” He then elaborated, “Well, I built roads by myself with a chain locked around this ankle. See the scar there, festering and scabby, ain’t it? Back in ‘37 or so. That judge came and says to turn me loose after I’d sung him a song about ‘How bad and how sad to be a fool.’”56 Here, Sam was in effect demonstrating his ability to adapt the Leadbelly prison release legend to his own purpose, as had Texas Alexander before him.57 Jail and the chain gang were integral to the persona he wanted to project and to the myth he built for himself. Hardship and suffering engaged the listener, and the ironic humor with which he articulated his plight in his lyrics boosted his stature as a man of words. Certainly, Sam did his best to stay out of jail, but the hardheaded recklessness that got him there also energized his music.

  Perhaps Sam’s physical appearance played a role in the way he presented himself. He was of average height, but he was frail and skinny and could have easily been overcome in a fistfight. Maybe he adopted his knife-and gun-toting persona as a defense mechanism and as a means to establish that he could take care of himself if he needed to in the rough and violent worlds of the juke joints that were the lifeblood of his music.