Let There Be Lightnin’
How Sam Hopkins killed the blues.
(Page 4 of 4)
FOR THE MOST PART, LIGHTNIN’ didn’t trust white people, in particular record business white people, all of whom, he claimed, had cheated him. Even Lomax had horrible experiences with the bluesman. On their eight-show 1960 trip to California, every show had gone well except for one, and Lightnin’ complained bitterly and took it out on Lomax, who later wrote in a letter, “I couldn’t help but recall Mark Twain’s description of one of his characters: ‘He had every attribute of a dog except gratitude.’” McCormick took his share of abuse too but says that Lightnin’ would show flashes of contrition. “Sometimes when I’d be driving him somewhere, he’d say, ‘I really do appreciate what you’re doing. Sorry I don’t act like it.’” Wrecks Bell, who played bass with Lightnin’ from 1966 through 1979, says, “He didn’t like white people all that much. He didn’t trust them. He used to make me go in the back door of his apartment.”
But Lightnin’ was plenty suspicious of blacks too—especially musicians. When Clyde Langford, a friend who had grown up in Centerville and whose grandmother had dated Joel Hopkins, went to Houston in the fifties to break into the big-city music business, he asked Lightnin’ to take him around and to show him some things on the guitar. Lightnin’ refused (though he did let him play a few songs at a gig). “He didn’t want me to learn,” Langford says today. “He thought I would use it to try and top him.” Point says that several times he saw Lightnin’ help other bluesmen, but only if he thought they weren’t a threat to him. “His worldview was, people were not nice, the majority of them were out to get you, and you had to fight your way through life.”
Lightnin’ didn’t record much in the seventies, but he gigged a lot, mostly out of Houston and mostly with pickup bands. Approaching sixty, Lightnin’ (now largely on the electric guitar) wasn’t playing as precisely as he had before—plus the Po’ Lightnin’ persona had become, in Point’s words, “character acting.” Between songs he would talk . . . and talk. A live recording from a 1971 concert shows Lightnin’ babbling (“When the woman said she was riding a bicycle by your window, now, I wasn’t riding no bicycle, I was crawling by the window”), claiming “Tex Riddle” stole one of his songs, and berating his band (“Get on there, all of you. Goddam you”).
Performing with him was still an adventure, especially for bass players, who had to keep up with his idiosyncratic chord changes and sudden stops in the middle of a song when he got tired of playing it. Lightnin’ rarely took rhythm sections with him on the road; the promoter would line him up with local musicians who were usually young, inexperienced, and thrilled to be onstage with a legend. “We didn’t rehearse,” remembers drummer Doyle Bramhall, who played half a dozen shows with Lightnin’ in the mid-seventies, “and we didn’t have set lists. You just followed Lightnin’. He would start to play and you’d better be ready. Sometimes he’d stop the band, usually because the bass player had made a mistake. He’d say into the mike, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, me and the bass player got to get it together.’ He’d humiliate him in front of everyone.” Sometimes he just fired bassists and drummers in the middle of a show. It made no difference that they were doing what they were supposed to: Follow the twelve-bar-blues rules. It was Lightnin’, stubborn as ever, who was wreaking the havoc. When pressed, he would utter his mantra: “Lightnin’ change when Lightnin’ want to.”
Bramhall, of Dallas, was part of a new generation of white kids—including his buddies Jimmie and Stevie Ray Vaughan—who loved Lightnin’ and his music. He was the wise, cranky elder, and they would sit at his feet, carry his guitars, do what he told them. “You didn’t mind it, because he was Lightnin’,” Bramhall says. “He was always telling stories. When he’d walk into a room, he’d light everything up. He always had to be the center of attention, onstage and off. If somebody in the audience disrupted the performance, he’d stop everything and say, ‘This is Lightnin’s show.’ He was a tough old bird, not easy by any means. But I wouldn’t trade my experience with him for anything.”
Around that time, his daughter Annie Mae, who lived in Crockett, contacted him, and he spent his final years making amends with her, going to visit her or inviting her and her family to Houston a couple times a month, getting to know her daughter, Bertha. Lightnin’ even showed Bertha’s son, Andre, some things on the guitar. “I spent good times with him his last years,” Annie Mae recalled in 2002, not long before she died.
In 1979 he played Carnegie Hall again, this time as part of a show put on by Houston’s de Menil family, with John Lee Hooker, Clifton Chenier, and Honeyboy Edwards. Wrecks Bell, who backed Lightnin’ at the concert (and smuggled in a twelve-pack of his favorite beer, Pearl), says, “I think he was really, really, really proud of getting that recognition.” His last years were quiet ones, especially after he was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus in 1981. Lightnin’ was persuaded to get a phone for the first time in his life. He caught pneumonia and entered St. Joseph’s Hospital, in Houston, where he died on January 30, 1982. He was buried in Forest Park Cemetery after a small, private funeral (he had told family and friends he didn’t want any TV cameras), but a public memorial service drew some one thousand people.
Until Beyoncé came along, Lightnin’ was Houston’s most famous musical celebrity, but you won’t find much evidence there of his tenure or influence—not on scruffy Dowling Street, where he was once king, nor anywhere else. Various people tried in the past to get parks and roads named after him, but they gave up when city officials showed no interest.
You have to go to Crockett to see any real tribute to Lightnin’. In the grass across the street from the Camp Street Cafe—formerly the Starlight Barbershop, where he hustled coins with his guitar years ago—sits a statue of Lightnin’ playing an acoustic guitar, panatela in his teeth, fedora on his head, shades on his face. The memorial was masterminded by Pipp and Guy Gillette, the owners of the cafe and fans of the bluesman’s since they saw him at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965. When it was unveiled in 2002, four generations of his family came out, including his great- and great-great-grandchildren. Antoinette Charles, who controls his estate, didn’t show up, and neither did his manager, Cecil Harold. Their attitude about his legacy remains a mystery. Charles didn’t respond to a request for an interview, and Harold turned down interviews for both of them, saying, “The problem is, people won’t let him stay dead.”
Maybe Lightnin’ would have agreed with his longtime manager’s inscrutable logic, this idea of just leaving him and his amazing life alone. Though Lightnin’ was proud of everything he did, calling himself “the best goddam blues player in the world,” he also hated publicity and fled from fame whenever possible. More to the point, he was just so suspicious and bitter that he would probably assume that, once again, someone was out to get something from Po’ Lightnin’. The thing is, of course, he came by his bitterness honestly. His blues—the ones that kept him on a cot in a rented room, refusing to play by the twelve-bar rules, refusing to be nice or to take any chips off his shoulder—were real, bad, and real bad. Most of the time.
Michael Point remembers a regular sight when he’d arrive a little early to drive his boss to a gig, a sight that demystifies Lightnin’ but deciphers Sam. “He’d be out on the porch with all these neighborhood kids around him,” Point says, “and he’d be playing a kids’ concert for them, all cheerful and positive—Sesame Street versions of his songs. It was the last thing he’d want anyone to know.” Lightnin’ was like Blind Lemon Jefferson, letting his guard down around children, singing songs for fun, just like he had done back home.
But then he’d hand his guitar to Point, who’d put it in the car. Po’ Lightnin’ had a show to do.
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