Let There Be Lightnin’
How Sam Hopkins killed the blues.
(Page 2 of 4)
IN 1939 SAM LEFT THE SIMPLE life behind and moved to Houston, settling in at a rooming house in the Third Ward, southeast of downtown. For a while he worked for the Missouri Pacific Railroad, laying rails and ties. He also made a cotton-picking trip to Arizona with some friends from back home but spent most of his time there gambling, playing guitar, and bootlegging wine to Indians. He returned to Houston and went back to music full-time. He made his living by his wits and his riffs, singing standards like “Trouble in Mind” or Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” on street corners on and around bustling Dowling Street. Taking his guitar on a bus that transported blacks to and from jobs in the white neighborhoods, he’d do requests, make up songs, and walk off with enough change to pay for food, whiskey, and maybe some time rolling the dice.
He started performing in little juke joints, playing songs his own way, with his own meter—a standard twelve-bar blues tune might become thirteen or fourteen bars—and his own words, rarely doing a song as he’d done it before. His years of having to grab a crowd’s attention and hold it had given him a knack for drama; he’d clown, banter, dance, finger the guitar while lying on his back. He was like a rapper, using repetition to tell a story and get people to dance. He’d see a pretty girl in a red dress and shout out in his rough voice a line about a pretty girl in a red dress. It would start raining and he would sing about how the rain made him feel. In these urban clubs, as at the association picnics back in the country, Sam played for people who knew what he was talking about, who heard in his words and music their own history, their own blues. He was at his best here, in front of the people in whom he saw himself.
In 1946 a talent scout for Aladdin Records heard Sam play on Dowling Street and invited him to Los Angeles to record. He had been performing in the clubs with a piano player named Wilson “Thunder” Smith, and they took a train west and recorded four songs with a drummer, a gloriously chaotic mix of twining acoustic guitar and tinkling piano. You can hear the basic playing styles Sam had been developing and that he would use his whole life: a fast, rocking shuffle (“Feel So Bad”); a mid-tempo one where he’d alternate a low-string rhythm with higher melody riffs, like Jefferson played (“Katie Mae Blues”); and a slow, shambling, ghostly, finger-picking drone (“Rocky Mountain”). Sometimes Sam is out of tune and often he’s out of time—the band tries its best to follow him as he tumbles through his twelve-, thirteen-, and fourteen-bar blues, crashing at the end of each song. Before the 78’s came out, someone dubbed the duo Thunder and Lightnin’, so Sam got a nickname.
He returned to Houston and, a year later, with his brother Joel, recorded some sides for a local label called Gold Star, rerecording two songs he had done for Aladdin; “Short-Haired Woman” became a hit, selling 40,000 copies. He would record another three dozen songs for Gold Star over the next three years, and they would also do well; “Baby Please Don’t Go,” for example, sold 80,000. Producers began coming to Houston and recording Lightnin’—paying him per song, as he refused to sign any recording or publishing contracts—and he began recording for other labels. In 1948 he went to New York and recut some of the songs he had done for Gold Star. He went to Chicago and recorded for Mercury. He went back to New York. From 1946 through 1951 he recorded some 150 songs for a dozen labels, some of which would then sell the songs to other labels and not tell, or pay, Lightnin’ (they could do what they wanted, since they owned all the rights to the recordings). His 78’s were sold all over the country, and he became a member of a club of influential postwar blues artists that included Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and John Lee Hooker.
Occasionally a producer, trying to latch on to the R&B trend, would hook Lightnin’ up with bass players and drummers who clearly didn’t know what they were getting into. But the best stuff was Lightnin’ with just his acoustic guitar, rocking like a one-man band, with rapid bursts of notes answering his words. On the slower numbers, his guitar banged like a rope against a desolate flagpole. He could sound impish or isolated; there was a deep loneliness in his voice, something you couldn’t fake, the equivalent of one of seminal folk artist Bill Traylor’s stark drawings. Some of the songs he had sung for years, but he would also sit in the studio and make up new ones about whatever was on his mind. Sometimes these were inspired snapshots of a moment in time; sometimes they were just clichés about the troubles of Po’ Lightnin’. That didn’t matter to him. “Everything I do is good,” he claimed. He never saw himself as a songwriter, at least as that term is used today. Lightnin’ was an entertainer; whatever had happened today was different from what had happened yesterday, so he would play and sing the song differently too. Or he would just steal one outright, like Big Joe Williams’s “Baby Please Don’t Go” or Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (retitled by Lightnin’ as “One Kind of Favor”). He would later claim that he wrote every song he played, and to the extent that he personalized them so much, you could see why he believed it. His audience didn’t care where the songs came from. His words, like Jefferson’s, were theirs too.
He made a lot of money and spent it, gambling (he was a terrible gambler) and drinking (he was a good drinker, buying rounds for his buddies in the Third Ward). He was the king of Dowling Street, and he reveled in his fame. Much to the frustration of his record companies, he hated to fly and didn’t want to go on package tours. He was comfortable at home, living in a rooming house, working juke joints and icehouses, and cavorting with gamblers and hustlers. He would occasionally go back to Leon and Houston counties to perform—he was, like Jefferson, barely known in the white communities but famous in the black ones, such as Crockett’s Camp Street area. “He would just walk and start playing,” remembers Frank Robinson, “and people would block the streets. There would be so many people that the store owners would run him off. He would just move on up the street and do it again.” Out in the rest of America, however, his old-fashioned country blues were fading in popularity. He stopped recording in 1956.
A COUPLE YEARS LATER, folklorist Mack McCormick, who over the previous decade had seen Lightnin’ perform on the streets as well as in the studio, tracked him down in the Third Ward. McCormick told producer Sam Charters about the discovery, and in 1959 Charters put Lightnin’ in a studio with a borrowed acoustic guitar for the Smithsonian Folkways label. McCormick asked Lightnin’ to cut some songs too—also with just an acoustic, as he had first heard him. His 78’s had been made for the black market; these new recordings would be for whites. The folk music boom was on, and the blues revival was just around the corner.
McCormick found it difficult to get Lightnin’ into a studio with a guitar. The bluesman was wary—he had been burned before by record producers. Lightnin’ was also skeptical about McCormick’s idea of booking him in front of white audiences. “He was like a lot of blues singers,” remembers McCormick. “They were concerned about what white people could understand. Blues was their private language. They didn’t think white people were interested in what they had to say.”
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