courtesy of the Texas Music Museum (1912-1982) Birthplace: Centerville Genre: Blues Influenced: Blues guitarists throughout the world Other Sites: Lightnin' Hopkins

One of the most prolific of blues recording artists was Houston's Lightnin' Hopkins. In the sixties and seventies, Hopkins brought a special form of country-urban blues to the growing white audience of blues fans across the U.S. and Europe. His guitar style, which ranged from the dogged repetition of traditional country blues to dead-heat ferocious boogie was appreciated by connoisseurs, but it was his poetic spontaneity -- the creation of vibrant images of a lifetime of experience -- that touched and amazed everyone who heard him. Born in rural East Texas, Sam Hopkins was raised with a blues heritage. He learned to play the guitar from his brother John Henry, and a cousin, Alger "Texas" Alexander, a role-model whose style of singing (recorded on the Okeh label of "race records") young Sam learned to imitate.

Sam Hopkins' long career might be said to have begun around 1920 when he climbed onto the platform at a church social in Buffalo, Texas, and picked up the blues beat along with the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson. Jefferson stopped abruptly and yelled, "Boy, you got to play it right!" Sam accepted the admonishment as encouragement, and spent much of the next two decades practicing his art wherever he could, for whatever people would offer. Drinking, women, and the blues were his life, and traveling the small towns and big city night spots with Texas Alexander, Hopkins honed a natural poetic genius that transformed his rough life into art.

After a stint in the Houston County prison farm in the mid-thirties for what biographers ambiguously refer to as his "excesses," Sam Hopkins moved to Houston where he teamed up with a piano player named Wilson "Thunder" Smith, a pairing that called forth the nickname "Lightnin'," which stayed with Hopkins for the rest of his life. The two soon left Texas to find a recording contract in Los Angeles. Aladdin, a "race records" label, gave them a small contract, but they found they couldn't make a living in LA. Thunder and Lightnin' returned to Houston, where Lightnin' recorded his first modest hit, "Short-haired Woman," on Gold Star. Although many other recordings followed -- a total of 43 for Aladdin alone between 1946 and 1948, and 48 for Gold Star -- with the notable exception of "Shotgun Blues," which went to number five on Billboard charts in 1950, they met with little interest from buyers. Not until the blues revival of the late fifties and early sixties did Hopkins' music see the wider exposure that catapulted him from a local favorite in the black neighborhood blues clubs of Houston and East Texas into a sought-after recording artist and opening act for such rock bands as the Grateful Dead.

The first step in that process occurred in 1959, when Sam Charters recorded Lightnin' for Folkways, producer of his first album, The Roots of Lightnin' Hopkins. Soon thereafter, Chris Strachwitz heard Lightnin' in a Houston club and decided to found a new recording label, Arhoolie (Hopkins' early recorded material done for Gold Star is available on Arhoolie). In less than a year, Lightnin' was introduced on the folk circuit, playing to a young, appreciative white audience at the University of California in Berkeley. Houston radio deejay and folk enthusiast Mack McCormick took up Lightnin's management and arranged tours that culminated in the early sixties at Carnegie Hall, where he performed concerts with the likes of Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. Beginning in 1960 Lightnin' also made a series of recordings for Prestige-Bluesville, as well as recordings for many other labels, including Arhoolie and Verve, many of which have been rereleased on CD. Highlights of his subsequent career include his 1964 trip overseas with the American Folk Blues Festival and the invaluable prize-winning documentary film by Les Blank, The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins in 1968.

By the seventies, Hopkins was an established blues master, touring Europe and appearing in a command performance before the Queen of England. He continued to record, but after a 1970 auto accident, Hopkins preferred to play in the small Houston clubs he knew so well. According to one biographer, Lightnin' had recorded at least 85 albums by the time of his death from throat cancer in 1982.