Alan Govenar Read online

  Houston was rife with musical talent, and there were numerous orchestras and bands that, as early as the late 1930s, featured a mix of Texas-area performing artists, from Ivory Joe Hunter to Eddie Taylor, Henry Sloan, T. H. Crone, Giles Mitchell, Tack Wilson, Bob Williams, Jerry Moore, Joe Pullum, and the Prairie View Collegians. Pullum was one of the few to actually make records prior to World War II; most of these bands were ignored by the major labels recording in Texas at the time because company executives didn’t feel the music was commercially viable. Yet Pullum had a hit on Bluebird in 1934 with “Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard,” a song that Sam Hopkins covered and recorded in 1961.6

  By the time Sam made his way to Houston in the early 1940s, the Third Ward was teeming with nightlife. But to middle- and upper-class residents of the Third Ward, Hopkins was probably invisible. He was one of the many poor rural blacks trying to get a foothold in the city, frequenting the lower-class bars, some of which, according to the Informer, were part of a bigger social problem. In a March 2, 1940, editorial, the Informer wrote: “County Judge Roy Hofheinz has announced a fight on honky tonks which sell strong drinks to minors…. There are Negro places that knowingly sell beer to minors…. There are some places which permit marijuana to be sold to minors in their places. Every Negro should endorse the campaign to close such places of business.”

  Sam was not known to smoke marijuana, but he did play in the kind of honky tonks referenced in this editorial. In another article in the Informer, columnist Ted Williams gave a more visual description of the honky tonks, though he had a very condescending tone: “Yes Honky Tonks [sic], where one sees the other side of Houston’s nightlife. For these places are rendezvous for those who like the enjoyment in a crude way. Clothes are of the least importance. The men and women who frequent these places are usually in their work clothes…. Lacking in modern furnishings they make up for it with hilarity. The jocund strains of guitar music ringing from the nickelodeon sends the crowd there in to dances that crosses between the swing-out of today and the native dance of the dark continent. Women swing and shake their bodies, while the men do their numbers. Words of all description can be heard among the throng. Though somewhat primitive, it is an interesting spectacle.”7

  During his early years in Houston, Lightnin’ also performed on the street and did whatever he could to eke out a living. “I stuck around there awhile,” he said, “and they come to find out that I was playing up and down Dowling Street there. So that began to get around, see, and I began to ride the buses free. The bus driver stopped and picked me up anywhere he’d see me with that guitar. And they’d have a big time on that bus…. I’d pick up quarters, halves, dollars. He’d even shill me a couple of dollars…. And one thing that the bus driver did—God in heaven knows that I’m not lying—he knowed that I drank, so he stopped at the liquor store on the corner of Dowling and Leeland at his own risk. Sent me in that liquor store and I got me a half a pint of liquor and he wait till I come back and then he takes on off. He brought me on back to Elgin and Dowling, and I goes on down to Holman, and I told him, ‘Now, I wants to get off here.’ And he say, ‘Well, I’m gonna let you off here…. But you try to catch me on my next round.’ And every day, I’d catch that same man. And that’s the way that I’d ride them buses and didn’t pay nary a dime. Just get on there with that guitar. And one night, I looked for us all to get arrested. They had a dance on the bus. I got to playing that ‘Little Schoolgirl’ [referring to John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson’s ‘Good Morning, Little School Girl,’ recorded in 1937]. They all got up and went to swinging on the bus. Bus driver drive slow; he just had as much fun as anybody.”8

  Sam didn’t move to Houston until about 1945. He was living in Grapeland, about 130 miles north of Houston in January 1940, when he filled out his Social Security application, but it is unclear exactly when he left. He did say that Lucien Hopkins, a family friend, lent him the money to buy a new guitar and urged him to go to the city. In interviews, Sam often jumped between time periods for the sake of telling a good story. One time, Sam said he got on a bus in Houston around 1940 and played a song that he said he had made up called “Play With Your Poodle,” but the girls listening to it didn’t know what he meant. However, Tampa Red actually composed “Let Me Play With Your Poodle” and recorded it on February 6, 1942. But for Sam it didn’t matter. He wanted to talk about those girls who apparently didn’t understand the lasciviousness of his song. “I’d see them little school girls come by,” he recalled, “and I’d say, ‘I want to play with your poodle.’ And they’d say, ‘Listen to that man. That man saying that.’ ‘I wants to play with your poodle. I mean your little poodle dog.’”9

  As much as Sam bragged about the tips he made from his music during the early 1940s, it was barely enough to support himself, and he often went back to Leon County to stay with his mother. “She’d always take him in,” Clyde Langford says. “He might bring her a little something, maybe help buy a few groceries. He’d do what he could, though in those years, my daddy said it wasn’t much.”10

  Sam never served in World War II, though he did say he was drafted. But on the night before his induction, he said, prior to moving to Houston, he was stabbed in a fight after winning all the money in a crap game, and his injuries made him unfit for military service.11 However, if he had indeed served time in jail or on a chain gang, he would never have been drafted in the first place. It’s likely he invented the stabbing story during the 1940s. It was another way for Sam to cast himself as a victim to elicit the sympathy of his audience. Moreover, it was means for him to save face; a man of his age and generation who didn’t serve in the armed forces was looked down upon.

  Sam did sing “European Blues,” apparently about World War II, but he didn’t record it until 1949.12 In the first stanza, the tone was at once a lament and an admonition.

  Yeah, you know there’s people raidin’ in Europe

  They’re raidin’ on both sea, land, and air (x2)

  Yes, you better be mighty careful, little girl

  Your man might have to go over there

  But then, in the second stanza, Sam admitted:

  You know, my girlfriend got a boyfriend in Europe

  That fool’s already crossed the sea (x2)

  You know, I don’t hate it so bad

  That’s a better break for me

  In the last stanza, he alluded to what might have been a draft notice, and even if it wasn’t his, he sang in the first person: “Yes, I got a letter this morning/Sayin’ practically all these boys got to go,” and then ended the song by advising those who don’t want to serve to move away (so that Uncle Sam doesn’t catch them): “Yes, if you’re goin’ live bad, son, don’t live here no more.”

  The fact that Sam never served in the military during World War II probably contributed to his decision to move to Houston, where he could get away from his past and build a new life for himself. He rented a room in a boarding house in the Third Ward.13 While Sam said he was married at the time, he never identified which of his “wives” was with him. Years later, he liked to boast that he’d written songs about “practically every wife” he ever had and often named Ida Mae, Katie Mae, Mary, and Glory Be, even though he was never legally married to any of them. In most instances, he referred to these women as common-law wives, though it appears that he used the title wife in the same sense that men use girlfriend today, meaning somebody he was sleeping with but not married to. Certainly, at that time living with a woman out of wedlock was considered sinful, and his use of the term wife was probably just a ruse to cover these illicit affairs. “I been married to ten common-law wives,” he said, but for him, his first wife had special significance: “The first woman that you marry, that was your wife until she die…. But you know, that’s just an old saying. You can grab a license and marry twenty times. But the first wife is the only one.”

  However, he claimed, “Every time I get ready to go, I just throw the divorce money up on the table and
the paper’s already signed. I’m gone. I done bought about seven divorces. I love these women. You know what I mean? But if they make me mad, I’m gone. Good-bye, honey, because there’s another somewhere else, just like the saying goes, ‘For the flower that blooms, there’s another of a different color.’ White flowers, blue flowers, I can pick any kind I want. And if I got a blue one that makes me mad, I go get me a red one. I kind of like to pick my flowers, and if I get hot, I pick a good one.”14

  No records of any of Sam’s “divorces” have ever been found. His daughter from his first wife, Anna Mae Box, had in her possession the marriage certificate for Hopkins and her mother, Elamer, but wasn’t sure whether or not they were ever legally divorced, which might explain why there are no records of any of Sam’s other “marriages.”15 Hopkins did his best to avoid the judicial system by moving around, and his desire to play music, gamble, and carouse trumped being a responsible father and raising a family. Once Sam moved to Houston, Anna Mae lost contact with him.

  During his first year in Houston, Sam mainly played in the little cafes and honky tonks, like those ridiculed in the Houston Informer, near where he lived in the Third Ward, though he did venture off into the Fourth and Fifth Wards as well as the surrounding areas. “I used to sing on Dowling Street,” he explained, and then “go to Fourth Ward and Fifth Ward, and back to the Third Ward. That was my run. I’d get money. They would give it to me. Sometimes two dollars, just to hear one song and all that. I was doing pretty good at that time. Sometimes, I’d make a round from Third Ward to Fourth Ward. I’d go on a bus out there and back and I’d have seventy dollars. See the people that were living there, they didn’t know how much I was making with them little fifty cents and two bits and dimes. All you have to do is keep working, and then go count your

  money.”16

  Generally Sam worked by himself, but sometimes he’d make his rounds with a friend. “I had a friend play with me by the name of Luther Stoneham. We was playing on the corner of Pierce and Dowling. We walked to Harrisburg [Boulevard] and every joint we play they want us and we get in that joint and play. When we got back from Harrisburg, we counted up on the corner Pierce and Dowling a hundred and eighty-one dollars. And that was just from that corner. But when we put out all that money on the concrete, here come a load of cops. They want to know where we got this money. That’s the only time I was ever questioned on Dowling Street. We had it down on the concrete. We had to divide it, you see. I had to call a man [to tell them] that I played in his cafe for them to know that we made that money like that. They thought we had done robbed something. I told them it would be silly for me, if I had robbed something, to count my money down on the street. I was talking to the cop and they called two more carloads of cops. I wasn’t intending for them to take it. So they told us, ‘Y’all get that money off the street and go to your house and count it.’ They knowed I was a musician.”17

  Sam never played at the El Dorado Ballroom or any of the more “respectable” clubs in the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Wards. His talking blues spoke to the experiences of the people who listened to him on the street and in the cafes or bars that he frequented—the day laborers, the domestics, the custodians, and others who toiled long hours for low wages. He was building a reputation for himself, and in 1946 word of mouth about him attracted the attention of Lola Ann Cullum, who was married to the respected dentist Dr. Samuel J. Cullum and was well known in the African American community for her abiding interest in blues and jazz.

  As early as 1940, Lola Cullum had organized a musical program for the Retail Beer Dealers Association, under the auspices of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, in the hope of getting radio station KPRC to “replace the music by records, now heard on the Saturday night programs for colored, with that of local talents.”18 According to the Houston Informer, the program included a public school teacher and a quartet featuring Novelle and Leonard Randle, as well as Percy Henderson and the young blues guitarist Lester Williams.

  On March 26, 1946, the Houston Informer reported in a front-page story that Dr. and Mrs. Cullum were the hosts of W. C. Handy, who came to Houston for the first time in forty-eight years to perform at Don Robey’s Bronze Peacock Dinner and Dance Club with the Wiley College Log Cabin Theatre. While Cullum had helped to plan musical programs around Houston, her first foray into the record business was with Amos Milburn. She had heard Milburn in a San Antonio nightclub, and was so impressed with his vocal capacity that she asked him to come see her when he was next home in Houston. When they finally got together, she made “some crude paper-backed tapes” of his singing and sent them to the Mesner brothers at Aladdin Records, who invited her to bring Milburn to California.19 Cullum had probably heard about the Mesners from Houston blues pianist Charles Brown, who was already an established star on the Aladdin label by the time she found Milburn.

  Guitarist Johnny Brown, who worked as a guitarist and sideman for Milburn, recalls, “Mrs. Cullum was a full-figured woman. She was light skinned. And she had them Indian features. She had straight, long hair. Mrs. Cullum must have been around five ten; she wore all kinds of fancy clothes. She was a fancy-dressing person.”20

  Brown met Cullum in 1946, shortly after moving to Houston. Brown says, “One club in particular where I played at was Shady’s Playhouse [then called Jeff’s Playhouse] on Simmons Street in the Third Ward. It was the most popular club in the Third Ward at that time. And Mrs. Cullum kind of found out. She went looking for young musicians. She was the kind of person who took the young musicians and kept them busy, kept them working.”21

  Lola Cullum also let Milburn rehearse with his band at her house in the Third Ward. “She had a beautiful home at that time,” Brown says. “She had one of the upper-class houses in Third Ward, and she would make sure everything was just right. And if they [the sidemen] weren’t wearing the right clothes, she get them something. She used to take the doc’s [her husband’s] white shirts and put them on musicians.”22

  Milburn’s first session for Aladdin on September 12, 1946 was well received. Sid Thompson of the Informer said that when Milburn returned to Texas, he had “crashed the movie and musical capital with his particular brand of blues. He cut six sides for Aladdin Recording Company … and is back here for a rest.”23 A month later, Thompson wrote: “Amos Milburn, newest recording star to flash across the jukebox world, has really hit big time with his boogie woogie singing and piano playing…. He is under the management of Lola Ann Cullum. This brings to mind the little known fact this lady is a song writer of excellence with several hit numbers to her credit. ‘Twas she who got the lucrative contracts for Milburn, who is quite a youngster and just out of the Navy.”24

  With the success of Milburn’s records, Eddie Mesner from Aladdin encouraged Cullum to look for more local talent. She found out about the scene on Dowling Street, where Sam Hopkins sometimes played on the sidewalk with his old partner from pre-war days, Texas Alexander. Cullum told blues researchers Mike Leadbitter and Larry Skoog in a 1967 interview that she liked Hopkins’s music and that she made some test recordings to send to Aladdin.

  While country blues, performed by such artists as Big Boy Crudup and Big Bill Broonzy, was dying on the charts, the Mesners thought Hopkins might stand a chance in the marketplace. Initially, Hopkins wanted to bring Texas Alexander because of his longtime association with him, but once Cullum heard a rumor that Alexander had just been released from the penitentiary, she was worried about his marketability and replaced him with Wilson Smith, an accomplished barrelhouse piano player. Cullum also had to make Hopkins more presentable, and gave him some money to get new clothes before she drove him and Smith to Los Angeles.25

  Sam told the story of how Cullum discovered him countless times, but with each telling, he tended to embellish the details. To Sam Charters, he recalled in 1965 that he was shooting craps at home when a friend told him that a lady outside was honking her horn wanting to speak to him. When he went outside, she identified herself as a talent scout and a
sked him to get his guitar and play one song for her, after which she offered him one thousand dollars to come with her to make records. Two years later, during the filming of The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sam exaggerated even further and said Cullum, after hearing him play, gave him ten one-hundred-dollar bills before he even got in the car to go with her. A thousand-dollar advance was astronomical in 1946, especially for an unknown singer.

  Clyde Langford says that when he was a child in Centerville, he heard a radically different version of the story, not only from his parents, but also from Sam’s mother, Frances Hopkins: “That lady out of Houston [Cullum] first saw him in Centerville. He’d sit on the front porch and play his guitar sometimes. And he used to play on the street up there in town, on Highway 7, down toward the Lacy Grocery, toward FM 1119…. And that’s where he was picked up when he got his start…. He was sitting there thumpin’ an old, beat up guitar with a pair of run-over shoes on, no socks, overalls with all the tail ends of them tore out, an old, raggedy sundown hat, and she seen him and pulled over and stopped. And she asked him to get in and he got in and she drove off with him. He started to get into the front and she told him, ‘No, she didn’t want no trouble. He better get on the back seat,’ and that’s what he did…. And they went on into California and she bought him a gorgeous suit of clothes … and had that ole kinky hair, they call it conked. And he said she gave him a pocket full of money, it might not a been over fifty dollars … and he slipped away from her. She didn’t know when he left. He slipped away from her and went back to Houston and that’s where he made his home.”26

  While Langford’s account is hard to believe, given it’s based on hearsay from the perspective of a child, it does underscore the way in which Sam had become larger than life in his hometown. Sam was a kind of folk hero in Centerville, and this rags to riches story, even if it does distort the facts, is nonetheless revealing about how he was remembered.