Trigger Let There Be Lightnin’
How Sam Hopkins killed the blues.
IT’S ONE OF THE ALL-TIME GREAT Lightnin’ moments: Austin City Limits, 1979, less than three years before he died. He was 67 and wearing a bright-blue leisure suit with rhinestones that sparkled in the TV lights and a beige fedora cocked at a 45-degree angle on the side of his head. He looked like a fabulous old pimp. He played a Fender Stratocaster in front of a rhythm section that included bass player Ron Wilson, a member of the Texas House of Representatives. Lightnin’ had been playing live music for almost sixty years, though his performances the previous decade had been rather unpredictable—flashes of brilliance competing with the age-related tendency toward sloth and crankiness. This show was no different: great riffing, uninspired noodling, blues clichés, bizarre stage patter, and angry glares at the bass player, who gamely tried to keep up with the impulsive chord changes.
The moment came halfway through “Ain’t No Cadillac,” when, after doing some soloing, Lightnin’ decided to do some more. For some reason he had a wah-wah pedal, and he either stomped it too hard or it had been turned up way too high, because his amplifier let out a high-pitched squeal—a loud, intense, and not unpleasant sound that lasted about three seconds. At first he appeared taken aback, but he kept playing, and a satisfied smile crossed his face. This late in his career, there were very few surprises. He may not have planned that particular outburst, but like all the other notes he played and noises he plucked, he was proud of it. “That’s what I’m talkin’ about,” he said, and jammed the pedal down again. Then he went on to craft a solo that began quietly and cascaded through a fall of bad notes, bringing the song to an early, crashing end, dragging his rhythm section down with him, as he’d been doing for years.
Lightnin’ Hopkins was ornery, stubborn, flashy, and capable of great inspiration followed by obstinate and calculated destruction. In thirty years of recording, he created a body of work as wide, deep, and maddening as anyone’s in American music history: some five hundred songs, or maybe six hundred, or maybe seven hundred. Nobody knows, because Lightnin’ would record for anyone who waved a $50 bill at him. He might play and sing something fierce and new, but just as likely he’d redo a song he’d done the day before, changing a line or two because he felt like it. Or he’d record a song by one of his peers and call it his own. Ultimately, the words didn’t matter. It was the sound of his voice—a deep drawl that was so lonely and sad it seemed to come from another existence—and his loping, finger-picking guitar style, which sounded like the rolling, rough cotton country between the Brazos and Trinity rivers where he was raised.
By the time he died, in 1982, he had become one of the great bluesmen, up there with Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson, and Muddy Waters. But no one knew a whole lot about him, beyond the fact that he was from East Texas, that he spent most of his life living alone in small rooms in dingy apartments in Houston’s Third Ward, that he gambled much of his money away, that he often performed and recorded on borrowed guitars, and that he seemed to have a hard time staying in tune. Part of that was his own doing: Lightnin’ told colorful stories about his past, and as he got older he amplified his Po’ Lightnin’ persona, a guy always mistreated by women and misunderstood and abused by everyone else. Part of it was the mythmaking of fans who saw him as the epitome of the blues: the guy with the shades, gold teeth, unlit cigar, and half-pint of whiskey or gin in his back pocket.
To find the real Lightnin’, you have to first go back and listen to his amazing catalog of songs. You have to find the liner notes from long-out-of-print albums and the interviews he did when he was “discovered” by white people almost fifty years ago. You have to talk to the people who knew him, chauffeured him, produced him, played with him, and tried desperately to keep up with him. The picture they paint isn’t always pretty, but the real blues seldom are.
SAM HOPKINS WAS BORN ON A FARM outside Centerville, in Leon County, on March 15, 1912. He would later say that one of his grandfathers, a slave, had hung himself in his misery and that his father, Abe, a cotton and corn farmer, was killed over a card game when he was three. Sometime in 1915, his mother, Frances, moved him and his four older siblings to nearby Leona. Sam picked cotton in the brutal sun. It was a hard life, made worse by the constant humiliations and intimidations of living under Jim Crow: men being called “boy,” no matter how old they were, and not even being able to buy a Coke in local stores (blacks had to make do with strawberry soda).
He told many stories of how he started playing the guitar; in the best one, he nailed a piece of plank to a cigar box and strung it with some screen wire. One of his brothers, Joel or John Henry, gave him lessons, presumably on a six-string guitar, and Sam also banged on the piano and organ in church. When he was eight, he went to a Baptist picnic in nearby Buffalo, where the famed blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson, of nearby Freestone County, was performing on a platform. Jefferson traveled all around Central and East Texas, playing on street corners and at picnics and dances, drawing crowds wherever he went. He was a one-man band, pounding the rhythm on the low strings, the melody on the high ones, singing and answering the words with notes and the notes with words. Standing in the crowd, Sam began playing along with the imposing blind man, who stopped in the middle of a song. But when he heard it was just a boy, he invited him up, and the two played together. Jefferson was famous and made a good living; he didn’t have to work the fields. Sam liked the sound of that.
He quit school and began hitting the road for long stretches, hitching rides and hopping trains all the way to Dallas, where he sometimes hooked up with Jefferson, walking him through the busy streets, holding his guitar, knocking out songs. Sam would return home and then leave again. At some point he started playing with his older cousin Alger “Texas” Alexander, a boisterous street singer who had spent time in prison. Alexander didn’t play an instrument and would freely improvise; Sam did his best to follow along. The duo went up and down Texas Highway 75, stopping in little towns, strolling the streets and performing, making some money and returning home. Sam was learning to sing, shout, entertain.
At eighteen Sam married a woman named Elmer (“Just like a man,” he said in a later interview) and tried to settle down in Leona, picking cotton and corn long enough to remember how hard it was. He and his wife had four children: two boys and two girls. He started playing Friday and Saturday night dances at the cotton farms and plantations. They’d have tap-dancing contests and make their own home brew and moonshine. Sam was making his own music too, taking bits and pieces of songs he knew—work songs he’d sung in the field, songs he had heard in the streets by Jefferson and famed guitarist Lonnie Johnson—and throwing in lines about whatever came into his head. But he had to be careful: Black musicians could get harassed or arrested for singing suggestive lyrics. This happened a few years later to Sam’s cousin Frankie Lee Sims, who was singing on a street corner in Crockett when the sheriff drove up, stopped, and listened. “Back then, if you didn’t have no job, they’d make you go and work,” recalls Crockett blues guitarist Frank Robinson, who witnessed the incident. “Frankie was singing, ‘My baby got a standard carburetor, burning bad gasoline.’ He finished, and the sheriff walked over and said, ‘Come on, you’re gonna see what kind of gas I’m burning.’ They kept him on a pea farm for two weeks.” Indeed, at some point Sam did time on a county road gang, though according to him, it was for cause. (“Had to cut an old boy,” he said in one interview. “I was . . . kinda mean,” he said in another.) The experience gave him even more songs, as well as scars on his ankle from the chains, and stories to tell, including one about how the same judge who put him on the gang let him off after Sam sang him a song (“How bad and how sad to be a fool.”). Eventually he and his wife split up—either she got fed up with his rough and rambling ways or he just took off.
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