Alan Govenar (24 page)

By the end of 1962, Lightnin's recording career was going strong, and his recordings on the Fire label combined with those on Arhoolie, Bluesville, and Vee-Jay were garnering considerable sales and attention. He had demonstrated his vitality among white college-age audiences, who were part of the burgeoning blues revival scene. Lightnin' even won the 1962
Down Beat
International Jazz Critics Poll as “New Star, Male Singer,” probably as a result of his appearances at the Village Gate.

On March 21, 1963, the German filmmaker Dietrich Wawrzyn and his wife, Anna Marie, documented Lightnin' in the Third Ward as part of a two-month tour around the country that Chris Strachwitz had been hired to arrange for them. “They wanted me to lead them to some of the most interesting vernacular musicians I had encountered,” Strachwitz said, “and to help them by doing sound recording and some lighting. We started in the Bay Area by filming Barbara Dane, Jesse Fuller, and Lowell Fulson, among others, and then set off to Los Angeles and went through Arizona, where we recorded Indians and Reverend Louis Overstreet. From Arizona, we traveled to Texas, and in Dallas we filmed Alex Moore and Black Ace, in Navasota, Mance Lipscomb, and in Houston, we met up with Lightnin' Hopkins before going on to Louisiana, Tennessee, and North Carolina.”
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For the filming, Lightnin' played “Lonesome Road” and “Lightnin's Blues,” which was actually a version of “Green Onions,” the recent hit by Booker T. and the MGs.
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For “Lonesome Road” he accompanied himself on acoustic guitar and was shown outside sitting on a chair in the middle of a sidewalk. He was wearing a plaid shirt, creased slacks, a Mexican
chaleco
[blanket vest], sunglasses, and a pork-pie hat, and had a towel slung over his shoulder. The footage was intercut with four domino players sitting at a table in a beer joint that was apparently the setting for “Lightnin's Blues,” an instrumental on a Harmony guitar with an electric pickup. Lightnin' was sitting in a chair with a group of men, sipping beers, looking on, listening, but very much aware of the camera.

In 1963 the enthusiasm for Lightnin's music continued to grow, and he began touring more than he had ever before, returning to the Second Fret, and working the Retort Club in Detroit, the Cabale in Berkeley, the Continental Club in Oakland, and Ash Grove in Los Angeles. He became a regular at the Village Gate, and was invited back from May 14 to May 31, playing on the same bill as Valentine Pringle, as well as the great Herbie Mann (May 28 to 30) and the Jimmie Smith Trio.

On June 4, 1963, Lightnin' recorded again for Prestige/Bluesville for an album titled
Goin' Away.
Once again Lightnin' recorded his tracks at Gold Star in Houston. They were then overdubbed with bass and drums at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, under the supervision of jazz and gospel producer Ozzie Cadena, who had considerable experience recording blues artists such as Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry.

Dan Morgenstern, who was then the editor of
Jazz Magazine,
wrote the liner notes, and instead of defining Lightnin' simply as an artifice of the musical past, he saw him in the context of jazz history. Morgenstern had seen Lightnin' perform live a couple of times at the Village Gate. “Lightnin' Hopkins would come in between acts,” Morgenstern says. “There he was, just a guy with a guitar, sometimes he'd have a rhythm section [bass and drums] with him, but most of the time, he was by himself. And he was able to engage that audience which was not necessarily a blues audience. He was there and he would grab them. He was so direct. One of the things about Lightnin' that was not true of all blues performers was that although he had a very natural diction, it was very clear. It was easy to understand what he was singing about…. He had a great sense of humor. Some of his stuff is very funny. It's sarcastic…. He was an engaging performer and human being. He seemed to be very much at ease with different people. Lightnin's thing was much more intimate than say Muddy Waters, because Muddy would have a band.”
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At the Village Gate, Lightnin' appeared at ease. “It was a very ecumenical club that was an epicenter for blues and other styles of music,” Morgenstern recalls. “Art D'Lugoff was a real village guy in the sense that he liked a lot of different stuff. He would have jazz, different kinds of jazz, and you had blues, and at the time, political stuff. It was like a cabaret. It was a big cavernous place. It was downstairs, and there were long tables. It was like what you had in a cafeteria or something. It was congenial.”
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At the Village Gate, Lightnin' could interact with his audience through his talking blues. He was comfortable, and because he played there fairly often, he got to know some of the people, not necessarily in a personal way but as a performer who recognized the faces of those who frequented his performances.

“Blues in New York City came into the picture through the [white] folkniks,” Morgenstern says. “New York hadn't really had a blues scene. Harlem was not a blues center. In Harlem, it was jazz. Even in the 1920s when Ma Rainey came to New York, she was not a hit. And she was a tremendous hit down south. People like Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, and so on brought the blues to New York. But it was the folk thing, it was very much a left-wing thing…. There was a consciousness about the plight of black people.”
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Politically, many of those who came to hear Lightnin' were supporters of the civil rights movement and were active in protest marches and even traveled to the South to help the Freedom Riders. Lightnin's blues were not good-time dance music; his lyrics focused on his failed relationships with women and the hardships he and other African Americans of his generation endured. The white people who came to hear Lightnin' were looking for a meaningful alternative to the superficialities of pop music.

When Lightnin' went to California in the fall of 1963, he had just as much appeal, if not more than he had had in New York. Radio broadcast specials in Los Angeles—first on September 2 on KRHM-FM 94.7 with a show called “Blues with Lightnin' Hopkins”; and second on October 13 on KCBH-FM 88.7 with “Walking This Blues Road by Myself”—aired to a folk-oriented audience. The following week Strachwitz booked Hopkins for performances at the Berkeley Community Theater (October 18) and at Jenny Lind Hall in Oakland, where he was accompanied by the great jazz bassist Pops Foster. From the Bay Area, Lightnin' went back to Los Angeles to appear (October 29 to November 10) at the Ash Grove before returning to the Cabale in Berkeley (November 11 to 14) and the Continental Club in Oakland (November 15 to 17).

In Texas, Lightnin' still played the local joints in Houston, but not as much, and was more willing to leave when opportunities were presented to him. According to music critic Joe Nick Patoski, “If you gave him enough money, he'd play in your apartment living room, as he did for [concert promoter] Angus Wynne III at his pad in Dallas in 1963.”
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Lightnin' was even invited to perform at an afternoon party at a University of Texas fraternity's lake house. Gordon Dougherty, who was then a senior and a member of a different chapter of the fraternity, went to the party thinking there was going to be some kind of jam session, but when he got there, his “heart sank.” There wasn't a jam session. “It was your standard 1963 college scene,” Dougherty said. “Sorority goddesses with bouffant hair, guys in regulation BMOC casual, not an authentic folkie in the bunch. Everyone was out on a large patio and Lightnin' was over in a corner, together with a bass player and drummer…. He had this beat-up guitar with a cheap pickup jammed into the sound hole and connected to a small speaker.”

Dougherty had been familiar with Lightnin's music and thought he looked like the pictures on his albums, but up close he saw that “he had a wizened, wrinkled face and was sitting on a chair with a mike in front of him. He was skinny and his clothes were loose and baggy,” and “to those who didn't know who he was, he probably looked completely out of place.”
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As the afternoon progressed, the party went from bad to worse. The bass player and drummer hired for Lightnin' couldn't keep up with him. “The bass man bravely trying to follow standard 12-bar form was constantly behind chord changes that came too early or too late,” Dougherty said, “and both he and the drummer were often off-beat … endings were a catastrophe … several people complained they didn't like his music … lacking a steady beat at the right tempo, the kids couldn't dance to Lightnin'. They were constantly off step, speeding up and slowing down, finding themselves still dancing with the music suddenly absent.” After about forty-five minutes, Dougherty decided to leave the party, disgusted that the people there didn't understand they were listening to “one of the most famous bluesmen in the country.”
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There are no accounts of Lighntin' ever having played other fraternity parties, and it's likely after the experience that Dougherty described, if anyone presented the idea again to him, he would have declined. Nonetheless, in the folk world, Lightnin' was more in demand than ever. Wherever he went, it seemed people wanted to hear him play and to record him. The word was out: he'd record for anyone who paid him a hundred dollars a song. There was no exclusivity; even if he signed contracts, he had no regard for them. Lightnin' was his own man and he did whatever he pleased whenever it pleased him.

In February 1964, Strachwitz returned to Texas to meet Horst Lippmann from the Frankfurt-based Lippmann and Rau Company, who had come to Houston because his French promoter had said that he would not take on the American Folk Blues Festival again if he did not get Lightnin' Hopkins to perform. Lippmann had started the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962 with Fritz Rau as an outgrowth of the jazz shows they had been promoting for more than a decade. They learned about Lightnin' from his records and saw Strachwitz as a vehicle to booking him.
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“Horst had heard that I was the only guy he should deal with,” Strachwitz says, “and apparently it helped that I was German. And when I got there, we met with Lightnin', who said he wouldn't fly to Europe if I didn't go with him. So Horst said he'd pay for my whole trip, hotel and all, to tour with Lightnin' in October.”
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After Lippmann left, Strachwitz stayed in Houston for a while, and one day Lightnin' told him that his oldest brother, John Henry Hopkins, had recently been released from the penitentiary, where he had been serving time for murder. “Lightnin' said he was the best songster in the family,” Strachwitz recalls. “So I asked Lightnin' if he wanted to make a family record that would include not only John Henry, but also his brother Joel, and he agreed.” At first Lightnin' didn't know the whereabouts of John Henry, but finally he located him in Waxahachie, Texas. They left Houston in two cars; Strachwitz, Joel Hopkins, and a folk singer from New Orleans (whose name Strachwitz could not remember) in one, and Lightnin' and his mother in the other. Lightnin' led the way, and eventually he found the shack where John Henry lived.

Once they got to Waxahachie, Strachwitz set up his equipment and managed to record about twenty songs, but it was difficult and frenzied. “It was horrible,” Strachwitz says. “We always had to get some little drink thing. ‘Got to get some toddie,' Lightnin' would say. So we took some along and got to the shack, and first it was real nice and friendly, ‘I haven't seen you in many years,' you know, all this kind of stuff, and it was going good, but they could never agree who was playing behind who. They were all not very good at playing together. None of them were quite in the same tuning.”
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The resulting LP that Strachwitz produced with the Hopkins brothers is intriguing; Lightnin' hadn't recorded with Joel since he accompanied him on “Short Haired Woman” in 1947, and he had never recorded with John Henry. John Henry hadn't played guitar or performed in a long time, though the traditional lyrics he peppers into his songs evoke a strong sense of the rural tradition out of which the Hopkins brothers came. To Blind Lemon's “Matchbox Blues,” for example, John Henry added the traditional verse:

In “Black Hannah,” Lightnin' traded traditional verses with John Henry, but John Henry's guitar playing was so weak that the song barely hung together with lyrics that were traditional, but only tangentially connected by the improvisation with which they were performed. One of the most interesting recordings on the LP was Lightnin's story about a dice game that he had gone to with John Henry when they were boys. Lightnin' had won about four dollars, but the “fella who lost” got angry, grabbed a piece of wood, and smacked Lightnin' across the head. John Henry pulled a gun, and the man backed off.

As the session progressed Strachwitz says it got “very chaotic, and towards the end they all got pretty drunk and Lightnin' got really ugly. When I paid them their little money, maybe a $150 each, and Lightnin' went up to John Henry, ‘Lookie here, brother, you owe me that from 1930,' And John Henry got so pissed he threw the money at Lightnin'. It was just horrible. You knew the guy didn't have a pot to piss in. I don't think Lightnin's mother said but peep. Not that I remember. She was totally quiet; when they got into it about the money, she just sat there. She wasn't going to get between them drunk brothers.”
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On an unspecified date in 1964, presumably after Strachwitz's Arhoolie recordings of the Hopkins brothers, Lightnin' recorded an LP for the Guest Star label, a budget record line, at the Bird Lounge, a small jazz/blues club in Houston. The fidelity was poor, and the songs offered nothing new despite the claim in the liner notes that the live recordings “captured Lightnin' seldom heard.” According to blues fan George Lyon, Lightnin' played often at the Bird Lounge in the mid-1960s, sometimes with Cleveland Chenier and once with Elmore Nixon. Located on Shepherd Drive on the outskirts of the wealthy River Oaks, and not far from “one of the wilder Houston ghettoes [the Fourth Ward],” it was later known as Lu's Ricksha Lounge (in 1966), and was a place that Lyon thought was a “beat hangout” when he was growing up in Houston. “Houston was a minor oasis for beats stranded away from either coast,” Lyons wrote in the British
Blues Unlimited.
“It was suitably trashy and regularly raided (the reason, I'm sure, it became the Bird). The clientele was lily white, almost exclusively. It really wasn't a folky place … they were mostly, I think, white trash and frat boys.”
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