Alan Govenar Read online

  In his song “Deceitful Blues” he sang, “I’m gonna trade this Lincoln, get me a Cadillac eight.” In these 1934 recordings, Texas Alexander was trying to keep up with the times, most significantly by adding a small jazz combo, but in the end, his efforts were in vain: his lyrics and singing remained as rural as before. In “Blues in My Mind” the lyrics had more conventional, and even sentimental lines, such as “I’m crying, with tears in my eyes.” But he still retained his irreverent edge in “Polo Blues,” in which he sang:

  You can hand me my pistol, shotgun and some shells

  I’m gonna kill my woman, send the poor gal to hell

  You can get your milk from a polo [an animal that had had its horns removed], cream from a jersey cow

  Your pigment from your pig, and your bacon from a no-good sow

  In “Prairie Dog Hole” he took pride in his irreligious life: “Lord, My Father, Lord Thy Kingdom come/Send me back my baby and my will be done,” and then declared, “I went to church and the people called on me to pray/I set down on my knees and forgot just what to say.”10

  According to Sam, some time in 1934, probably after Texas Alexander’s second session for the Vocalion label in Fort Worth, they made it to Houston to audition for a radio station. They were joined by harmonica player Billy Bizor, another of Sam’s purported cousins, but it’s unclear whether or not they were actually given a radio spot. “First time into Houston,” Sam said, “I just went to

  Houston because I heard the name of Houston, and what a town it was…. Texas

  and I worked on West Dallas Street [in the thriving Fourth Ward]…. Texas an’ I’d work up and down the street, him and me.”11 The city piqued his interest, but he didn’t go back for nearly five years. At this point in his life, Sam wasn’t ready to leave the country. Life was tough in Leon County, but he knew his way around. “Big cities,” he said, “I hadn’t been used to ‘em. I’d been used to little three or four stores, and they call it Centerville and Leona.”12

  By the late 1930s, Hopkins and Texas Alexander had gone their separate ways. Sam was in and out of jail. He was still hell-bent on pursuing his own music career, though working the juke joints wasn’t easy. He ended up getting in fights over booze, women, and gambling that got him arrested and sent back to the chain gang. “I was getting cooped up and knocked around pretty good,” Sam said, “I always somehow or another, I’d be lucky and manage to get out. And one time, I run away.”

  Sam made his way to Mississippi. “I went to Clarksdale. That’s right, hoboing with one dime in my pocket.”13 The details of what happened next are not entirely clear. In Clarksdale, Sam recalled that he met up with his “wife” and her brother, though it’s unknown whether or not it was the same wife [Elamer] he had left in Texas. But he didn’t stay in Clarksdale very long. He found a job “picking up those pecans. They was getting nice money … dollar and a half a hundred [pounds].” When he wasn’t gathering pecans, he went off to a place called the Bullpen near the place where his “wife” and her brother were living. The Bullpen was, Sam said, “a hobo jungle…. It was under a shed, like…. So, I’d go down there. They’d gamble and pick guitars and drink. They had plenty to drink. So, I’d go down and play that guitar for them and make me three or four dollars and sometimes [get] women, twelve, fifteen of them. I done good … [and] walked away.”

  When Sam got back to Texas, he wanted to see his mother, but he was only in Centerville for a short time. He continued to ramble around. “I caught a freight train in Crockett going to Palestine, Texas,” Sam said, “but I had a little weak string on my guitar around my neck, and that wind hit that guitar, and I ain’t seen that guitar since. But that’s the only time I got a freight train; that’s right. I taken my sister with me. She was sitting up there with me when that guitar said, ‘Whoop!’ Gone, man. I ain’t joking.”14

  Frank Robinson recalls meeting Hopkins when he came to his hometown of Crockett, Texas around 1935. “My uncle [Clyde Robinson] was running around with him,” Robinson says, “and he had a daughter, which is Anna Mae Box [who lived in Crockett]. We grew up together, and he would always come and visit. My uncle, he couldn’t play, but he loved guitar music, so whenever a guitar picker would come to town, he would always bring them by the house. My family loved to hear guitar music, and I grew up knowing him…. Well, they drank and gambled together, but my uncle, he couldn’t play. He could sing, but he couldn’t play at all.”15

  Robinson recalled that Hopkins had a deep voice and that “he was real friendly, but he liked to drink, and when he’d get to drinking, well, he was quite outspoken…. But other than that, he was really nice. Me and him, we talked. He said never a hard word to me the whole time I knowed him. And I looked up to him just like I did my daddy and my uncle, surely.”

  In 1939, when Robinson’s family went to Arizona to pick cotton, Hopkins went along, but he didn’t spend much time picking cotton. “He liked to gamble,” Robinson remembers. “Gambling was legal at that time, out there, and they would all go gambling. We’d peep at them and go on about our business. And at last one day, we didn’t see Sam no more.”

  Where Sam went after leaving Arizona is uncertain, but it’s likely that he went back to Texas to stay with his mother in Centerville and play on the street for tips and in little joints and cafes. He may have gone looking for Texas Alexander, but around 1939, Texas Alexander got into trouble. According to bluesman Frankie Lee Sims, Texas Alexander committed a double murder and was sentenced to prison. Pianist Buster Pickens maintained that Texas Alexander served time in the Ramsey State Farm around 1942. However, there are no prison records to substantiate either Sims’s or Pickens’s claims.

  Guitarist Lowell Fulson said Texas Alexander had told him that he had been sentenced to life in Huntsville Penitentiary, but said that he was only incarcerated “three months and twenty-one days” because “he sung his way out of there. They run him off, telling him, ‘Come back down here again, and we’ll kill you.’ He said what happened was that they couldn’t stop him singing. He sang that old mourning-type stuff. Nobody wanted to be in the place where he was. He just got next to them all, so they let him go. They run him out of there.”16

  Fulson maintained that he met up with Texas Alexander in 1939: “I worked in a string band for a while in Ada, Oklahoma—Dan Wright and his string band. I couldn’t get the blues feel for the type of music they were playing. So Texas Alexander came through there, and he wanted a guitar player. So he heard me…. I went on a trip with him to Texas. First, we started out in Western Oklahoma and played Saturday night fish fries and whatever else they had going on. They’d cut the nickelodeon [jukebox] if they thought you sounded pretty good. They let you play there, and they passed the hat around, take up a little collection.”17

  Texas Alexander insisted that he had been in prison twice, once with a sentence of ten years on Ramsey Farm for murder or attempted murder “over some woman,” and then a second time, for singing the “obscene” song “Boar Hog Blues.” However, no prison records have survived to establish that Alexander was ever in prison. In fact, he may never have served prison time, but told people that to establish a badass credibility that even Sam found appealing.

  Sam never talked much about Texas Alexander’s crimes, or how long or where he was in jail, though he did confirm that he was punished for singing “Boar Hog Blues.” However, when Mack McCormick asked him if they put Alexander in prison, Sam was vague: “Well, I don’t know. That’s what they tell me.”18

  Texas Alexander made a huge impression on Sam, even though in the overall scope of Alexander’s career, Sam was a relatively minor accompanist. The peak of his popularity was probably between 1927 and 1929, but he continued to have a following that extended into Oklahoma and was concentrated in the small towns of East and Central Texas and the segregated wards of Houston. Alexander never exuded optimism in his songs. His music was always more unsettling than it was entertaining, and while he dwelled heavily upon the difficulties he
claimed to have experienced, his actual biography remains inscrutable. Whether or not Texas Alexander was forthright in his songs wasn’t important. His lyrics had a resonance that moved those who identified with the hard luck and bad times that he sang about, and from Alexander, Sam learned that it wasn’t necessarily the truth of the song that mattered so much as the emotions it evoked.

  Hopkins’s rambling vocal style is heavily indebted to Alexander, but Sam seemed to know few of his songs, at least the ones he recorded. Texas Alexander may have discouraged him or warned him not to imitate him, but then again, Sam may simply not have liked his songs, or perhaps was only interested in certain lines. As Sam matured as a singer and guitarist, the recordings of Big Bill Broonzy, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red, among other popular blues artists, figured more heavily in his development. To Sam, Texas Alexander’s music probably seemed dated, and he wanted to keep up with his peers whom he heard on jukeboxes. Yet, on a personal level, Sam admired Texas Alexander, who demonstrated what success as a bluesman might bring—booze, women, and even a Cadillac car—but also made explicit the perils of a self-destructive life.

  3

  The Move to Houston

  With the growth of Houston as an oil-rich shipping port and industrial center, the African American population increased rapidly to meet the needs of an expanding work force. By 1920 there were an estimated 35,000 African Americans in Houston, and by 1940 the number had swelled to roughly 86,000 out of a total population of 384,000. In 1945 the Port of Houston was the fourth busiest in the United States, and by 1948, it was second only to New York in overall tonnage. While Houston embraced and promoted a Western image for itself (replete with rodeos and cowboy culture), it was very much a Southern city during the first half of the twentieth century, with everything that entailed, even as the burgeoning oil industry supplanted the cotton economy that had helped Houston flourish. The sharecropping system of the surrounding rural areas was collapsing as African Americans moved to the city looking for jobs and a better way of life. Houston’s black community was spread across principally the Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards. While the ward system of government was dissolved by the City of Houston in the early 1900s, the names remained, and as the city evolved over the years, so did the geographical boundaries of the neighborhoods they defined.

  Racism was rampant in Houston. The separate-but-equal principle, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), legalized racial discrimination, and Houston, like other cities throughout Texas, passed Jim Crow laws that restricted African American access to public facilities and permeated every social, political, and economic institution in the city, including housing, education, and employment.

  On August 23, 1917, years of racial tension erupted in a deadly riot that was triggered by the arrest of a black soldier stationed at Camp Logan on the outskirts of the city, for interfering with the arrest of a black woman in the Fourth Ward. Though the soldier was released, rumors spread to Camp Logan that he had been executed, and more than one hundred black soldiers marched on the city in protest, killing sixteen whites, including five policemen. The consequences of the riot were severe; nineteen black soldiers were hanged and sixty-three received life sentences in federal prison, and the separation of blacks and whites across the city was strictly enforced and more carefully monitored.1

  Lower-, middle-, and upper-class African Americans lived and worked in close proximity to one another, but the level of education and income of the residents in the wards varied greatly. Articles in the Houston Informer, founded as the Texas Freeman in 1893 and still publishing today, attest to the diversity of life in the segregated wards, and point out the complexities of social, economic, political, and cultural growth among all sectors of the black population in which Sam Hopkins lived and worked.2

  The Fourth Ward, established as a freedman’s town after the Civil War, was the site of the first black church, high school, and medical facility in the city. As it grew, so did the degree of stratification within the community there. It developed its own musical identity early on. It was home to what was known as the Santa Fe Group, a loosely knit assemblage of blues pianists in the 1920s and ‘30s which included Robert Shaw, Black Boy Shine, Pinetop Burks, and Rob Cooper. Together and individually, these pianists frequented the roadhouses along the Santa Fe railroad that sold “chock” (bootleg liquor) and prostitution, playing a distinctive style of piano that combined elements of blues with the syncopation of ragtime.

  According to Shaw, there were so many blues pianists in Houston during this period that each neighborhood had its own particular style. In the Fifth Ward, the most well-known pianists and vocalists were members of the George W. Thomas family. The eldest child George Thomas Jr. was born about 1885, followed by his sister Beulah, better known as Sippie Wallace, and brother, Hersal. Their style of piano playing involved more fully developed bass patterns than those of the Santa Fe Group.3

  The Fifth Ward of Houston also had an area known as Frenchtown, where about five hundred blacks of French and Spanish descent migrated from Louisiana in 1922. As the population grew, the music performed there reflected both Creole and African American influences, not only in blues but in the emerging zydeco style. African American businesses, from restaurants, pharmacies, and doctors’ offices to undertakers, beauty parlors, and barbershops, flourished on Lyons Avenue and served the people who lived in the area, many of whom worked for the nearby Southern Pacific Railroad or on the Houston Ship Channel.

  During the 1930s, the acclaimed music program of Phillis Wheatley High School in the Fifth Ward vied with Jack Yates High School in the Third Ward for local recognition. Their marching bands were a breeding ground for aspiring musicians, and the competition between them reflected the breadth of the Houston blues and jazz scene. Student members of the marching bands played at football and basketball games, and orchestra students played at all school functions. On weekends, many of the school band directors performed around the city (and some, like Abner Jones, Sammy Harris, and later Conrad Johnson, led jazz orchestras). Student musicians were often featured at church socials and at events sponsored by civic organizations, such as Jack and Jill of America, and Links, and by the numerous sororities and fraternities in the African American community.

  By the late 1930s the Informer had started to use the phrase “Heavenly Houston” to describe the can-do attitude of the upwardly mobile African American population pulling out of the Great Depression. The Third Ward had the highest concentration of African Americans, and Dowling Street became the main street of black Houston. Lined with churches and African American owned businesses, it was the epicenter of community life. The opening of the El Dorado Ballroom on December 5, 1939, on the second floor of a Deco-style professional building at the corner of Elgin and Dowling Streets was a banner day for African Americans in Houston.4 C. A. Dupree, treasurer of the El Dorado Social Club and an employee of the very exclusive (white) River Oaks Country Club, was the driving force behind the building. The El Dorado Social Club was in existence for many years prior to the formation of the ballroom and lent it their name and support. The ballroom was comanaged by Dupree and his wife Anna and quickly became the showplace of the Third Ward, if not all of black Houston. “The El Dorado Ballroom made us feel like we were kings and queens,” blues vocalist Carolyn Blanchard recalled. “When you went there, from the moment you walked through the door, everything was taken care of. Anna and Mr. Dupree didn’t let you want for anything. They would get whatever you wanted for you. We always held our heads a little higher after leaving the El Dorado.”5

  Black social clubs and fraternal organizations dominated the El Dorado Ballroom, and the Houston Informer usually covered their festivities. On March 9, 1940, for example, the Informer reported: “Amid a conglomeration of laughter, colorful gowns, well-fitted tuxedos and good music, sepia Houstonians came to the realization, last Tuesday evening at the swank El Dorado Ballroom, that this hither
to flat and backward Southern town has definitely broken into the glorious realm of glamorous and chic society. Seven hundred or more socialites were present to witness the advent of this great phenomena, a strictly formal affair given by the El Dorado Social Club, one of the oldest and yet one of the most active organizations.”

  The El Dorado Ballroom featured touring stars and local performers, as well as talent shows and teen dances. Some of the top bands that performed there were the I. H. Smalley Orchestra, the Sammy Harris Orchestra, the Sherman Williams Orchestra, and the Milton Larkin Orchestra, which was a breeding ground for aspiring musicians, such as Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, Cedric Haywood, Wild Bill Davis, and Tom Archia. These local big bands, six to twelve pieces deep, played the music of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, and the orchestrated swing-era hits of the time. And when they weren’t performing at the El Dorado, they might be found at other clubs around the city. The Downtown Grill, Pyramid Club, the Rendezvous Club, the Harlem Grill (a.k.a. Sportsman’s Club), Tick Tock Tavern, Southgates, and Abe and Pappy’s (a white club) all featured black bands on weekends and special occasions. Bigger-name national acts, like Jimmie Lunceford, Erskine Hawkins, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, often picked up sidemen in Houston for shows at the Pilgrim Temple in the Fourth Ward or at the City Auditorium downtown.