Let There Be Lightnin’
How Sam Hopkins killed the blues.
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They were wrong. In 1959 McCormick, who had become the musician’s publicist and booking agent, put him on the bill of a Houston Folklore and Folk Music Society hootenanny at the Alley Theatre with white folkies singing songs like “Yankee Doodle” and “The Hammer Song.” Lightnin’ was nervous—he’d never done a sit-down concert in front of three hundred people before. But he was the real deal, not an interpreter of the real deal. That night Lightnin’ sang songs about chain gangs, mules, women, and hard traveling, told stories in his gravelly drawl, clowned a little, danced while he sat, and finger-picked effortlessly. The audience loved it. He’d been out of the public eye for only three years, but he was now “rediscovered.” He began making albums—ten over the next four years. Fans like Chris Strachwitz, a German-born, California-raised twentysomething who had been entranced upon hearing Lightnin’ on the radio (“It was his sound that hit you—goddam, it hit you”), brought tape recorders to the Third Ward, hoping to record the legend. Half the thrill was finding Lightnin’. Maybe he was on a cot in his room on Hadley Street, or maybe he was at a certain bar. He didn’t have a phone, so some seekers were told to leave a message at a nearby grocery store. Or to ask people on Dowling Street; his pal Junco Red always knew where he was.
The other half was recording him: negotiating the price per song, paying it (sometimes in advance), and finally experiencing him sitting in a room, drinking whiskey or gin while he spun out songs about prison life, picking cotton, Dowling Street, his arthritis, John Glenn, bunion stew, bootlegging to Indians, what it’s like to watch a one-eyed woman cry (“It’s misery every time she cries/It hurts po’ me”), and the unbearable loneliness of being Lightnin’. Listen to 1961’s “Got Nowhere to Lay My Head”—the starkness of the voice; the high, plaintive one-note solo. It even sounds like Lightnin’ stifles a cry at one point. He was still appropriating songs—“Take Me Back” was Jefferson’s “Beggin’ Back,” “Ain’t It Crazy” was Lightnin’ Slim’s “It’s Mighty Crazy,” and “Mojo Hand” (probably his biggest hit) sounded an awful lot like Muddy Waters’s “Louisiana Blues.” Of course, Waters had lifted it from someone else too. Lightnin’ was doing what everyone else did. He just did it a lot more.
LIGHTNIN’ HATED TO FLY, but John Lomax Jr., the son of the famous folklorist and a sometime agent for Lightnin’ (known as the only white man he ever trusted), persuaded him in 1960 to go to California, where he gigged at the Troubadour, the Ash Grove, and the University of California Free Folk Festival, in Berkeley. He went to New York, where he played the Village Gate and Carnegie Hall on a hootenanny bill with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez (he was “the only real folk singer on the program,” wrote critic Nat Hentoff in The Reporter). In 1962 he won Down Beat’s jazz poll for “New Star, Male Singer.” He was fifty.
Lightnin’ was influencing a whole generation of folkies trying to get the country rhythm of his finger-picking. He was also becoming an icon, the image of what a bluesman looked and acted like. In 1964 he was talked into going to England for the American Folk Blues Festival. But he didn’t seem to enjoy himself (in his first song, he sang about flying and how he was terrified about the trip home), not even hanging out backstage with other performers, such as Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, and Sonny Boy Williamson.
He preferred the Third Ward. “Here I can be broke and hungry and walk out and someone will buy me dinner,” he explained to a writer for the Houston Chronicle. “It ain’t always like that in a strange place where you don’t know no one.” His street corner days were over, and now he could play every night of the week if he wanted to in joints in the Third, Fourth, Fifth, or Sixth wards, making $35 to $70 from the bar, plus tips. His old Crockett friend Frank Robinson remembers how Lightnin’ wouldn’t play for fun anymore when sitting around with his buddies: “He quit doing that. He’d tell you where he was gonna be and what time.” Sometimes he’d book a gig in advance; other times he would just show up and start singing. Sometimes he’d knock off a song or two about Po’ Lightnin’ and leave; other times he’d go until closing time. He might sit on the stage and stare at the floor, or he might rock the house, hollering at the dancers (who hollered right back), singing to a certain woman, urging the dancers on, playing louder and faster or softer and slower. At the end, he might slip out without saying a word.
He was seeing a woman named Antoinette Charles, who took care of everything for him, from making sure he ate to sobering him up to whispering lyrics to him when the words wouldn’t come. By all accounts, Lightnin’ was equally devoted to her. He was never known as a womanizer; his songs don’t have the kind of macho salaciousness you find in those of a lot of blues singers. He was kind of old-fashioned that way.
But if he was sweet to Charles, he was hell on his kin. He never tried to contact the children he’d left behind in East Texas, and he did little to help his indigent mother or siblings. After his sister, Alice, died, in 1963 (Lightnin’ didn’t attend the funeral), McCormick wrote that the singer’s 88-year-old mother said, “I had five children . . . but the baby . . . has been no help to nobody except when you wanted to hear music.”
IN 1967 FILMMAKER LES BLANK came to Texas and persuaded Lightnin’ to let members of a documentary crew film him in Centerville and Houston—but only after he had suckered them into gambling away a large sum of money. The resulting film, The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, is a gorgeous 31-minute poem of a movie, a series of snapshots from his life as well as a look at an era fast disappearing. The camera follows Lightnin’—cowboy hat, shades, hair slicked back, four front teeth capped in gold, brown half-pint bottle—as he sits on a couch with a woman and drunkenly sings a duet, returns to Centerville and lovingly greets long-lost relatives, and throws rocks at a snake along the railroad tracks with a friend. He fishes and goes to a black rodeo. He tells a story about driving into a ditch to avoid hitting a pig and getting arrested for being parked on the wrong side of the road (the judge told him, “Well, boy, you know better than that,” and fined him $500). Lightnin’ and a washboard player perform at a daytime country picnic where young people dance and an elderly woman shakes her head in wonder. He blasts a solo and people whoop and shout. Watching the film is something of a revelation, at least if you ever had a doubt where the blues came from. The blues came from the soil of East Texas and the people who lived there, who danced and whooped to a drunken guitar player, who knew the physical pain from picking cotton and the small, daily degradations of being second-class citizens, who knew the words to “Trouble in Mind” and “CC Rider” but didn’t really care if the singer put in some of his own. Blues isn’t about the song—it’s about the singer, how he makes you feel. And Lightnin’ made people feel good.
As the sixties wound down, Lightnin’ would hang out around Dowling Street, lie on his cot and watch baseball on TV (he loved the Houston Astros), and hold court in front of fans like Townes Van Zandt, who was obsessed with his hero’s finger-picking style as well as his lifestyle. Lightnin’ gambled and lost thousands. “The reason he was such a terrible gambler,” says Michael Point, who served as his unofficial driver for several years, “was he couldn’t hide his emotions. He’d have aces and his eyes would start twinkling.” Point was a young hippie writer and blues fan who would show up at his boss’s apartment to take him to his nighttime show—in the late afternoon. Lightnin’ had some stops to make. “First we might stop at a barbershop, and he’d go in, shoot the shit with the men there for a while, then say, ‘Can’t stop. I gotta go to work!’ Then we’d go to a bar and have a drink or twelve, then go to a card game. He’d wave at people, stop and talk to women in the street. They loved it. He was a star. They’d say, ‘Here comes Lightnin’ Sam!’”
He recorded when he needed the money, cash up front, as always. In the studio, he drove bass players and drummers crazy and took other artists’ lyrics and melodies and remade them as his own, as always. “I class him the legend of the record business,” Lomax wrote in a 1970 letter to Van Zandt, “since he’s doubtless violated copyrights more so than any others.” By this point, Lightnin’, who was being managed by his doctor, Cecil Harold, had recorded hundreds of songs.
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