Alan Govenar (5 page)

In his songs and in interviews, Sam usually shifted the focus from the crime to the punishment. He realized that it was in his best interest to portray himself as a victim who was able to triumph over his adversity. For example, in discussing one of his chain gang experiences, he began by asking, “You drive up around Crockett on them roads?” He then elaborated, “Well, I built roads by myself with a chain locked around this ankle. See the scar there, festering and scabby, ain't it? Back in ‘37 or so. That judge came and says to turn me loose after I'd sung him a song about ‘How bad and how sad to be a fool.'”
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Here, Sam was in effect demonstrating his ability to adapt the Leadbelly prison release legend to his own purpose, as had Texas Alexander before him.
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Jail and the chain gang were integral to the persona he wanted to project and to the myth he built for himself. Hardship and suffering engaged the listener, and the ironic humor with which he articulated his plight in his lyrics boosted his stature as a man of words. Certainly, Sam did his best to stay out of jail, but the hardheaded recklessness that got him there also energized his music.

Perhaps Sam's physical appearance played a role in the way he presented himself. He was of average height, but he was frail and skinny and could have easily been overcome in a fistfight. Maybe he adopted his knife-and gun-toting persona as a defense mechanism and as a means to establish that he could take care of himself if he needed to in the rough and violent worlds of the juke joints that were the lifeblood of his music.

Hopkins grew up fast, and by the time he was a teenager, he was ostensibly an adult; he had served jail time, worked as a farm worker, played music on the streets for tips, and traveled around East and Central Texas as a hobo. On September 21, 1928, at age sixteen, he married Elamer Lacy, also known as “Noona.” A year later, on August 29, his daughter Anna Mae was born.
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“My dad was a person that everybody liked that knew him,” Anna Mae recalled. “He'd sit there with his leg crossed and look out the window. And they'd come by and holler at him. He was a joyful person.”
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But he hated working in the fields. “It was hard times,” Sam said. “I was working in the fields, trying to take care of my wife, me, and my mother. Six bits a day. And that was top price. And I swear, I'd come in the evening, and look like I'd be so weak till my knees would be clucking like a wagon wheel. I'd go to bed, I'd say, ‘Baby, well I just can't continue like this.'”
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But it wasn't only the farm work that was a problem for Sam. “Me and my first wife were together fourteen years, and I never seen her naked in my life,” Sam said. “Wasn't nothing wrong with her and I know it. She told me that it was something that she was born with, to never get naked with no man, regardless to whom, husband or anyone else. You understand me? We were together, but she was never showing me, just like you get up here and pull your clothes off naked. ‘You get it under the covers. You can pull off anything and you still won't see me naked.' And she never walked in front of me naked in her life. Now, I'm not lying to you.”
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Anna Mae said that her parents split up when she was five: “Mama left and went out to the country. We stayed with Daddy's mother [Frances]. Daddy always loved his music. And he always let nothing or nobody keep him from it.”
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After Sam and Elamer separated, Anna Mae had very little contact with her father, “with him coming and going,” though she did say she always enjoyed seeing her grandmother, who was then living on Ike Dawkins's farm.

“Folks were close-knit back then,” Ray Dawkins says. “Mama Frances was in Leona, Texas, down here. She got into some kind of debt and Daddy cleared it and moved her onto our farm. And she had a grey horse and a buckskin horse. We had two houses on the place. The big house was where we lived, and another house was down below. Daddy bought that farm in 1931. He give $900 for 80 acres, eight miles southeast of Centerville on the other side of Nubbin Ridge across Keechi Creek. I was a little bitty boy of five or six when I first remember meeting Sam—he was a tall, kind of slender man. I guess he was about nineteen or twenty, and he come back to help his mama. And in the evenings, he used to sit me on his knee and play and sing. I wanted to imitate everything that he did, but I couldn't. So I became a dancer, and at house parties I'd tap or buck dance. Just about everyone had someone in the family who played guitar or piano. Not too many people could afford a radio. One or two had wind-up Victrolas. But playing music was the big entertainment. People would ride in a wagon if they had one. They go from one house to the next on Saturdays, and to church on Sunday. And if they didn't have a wagon, they'd ride a horse or walk.”
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Sam didn't spend much time with his mother because he was “always going off somewhere to play music or gamble,” Dawkins says, but he “did as much as he could to help her.” From the Dawkins farm, Frances Hopkins moved to Guy Store Prairie a few miles away. “They went to Herman Mannings's place,” Dawkins says, “and when they left from there, they went to Ben Coleman's place. Ben Coleman was white; Herman Mannings was white. Sam farmed down there, but he never did work too much. He played music all the time, and the white people had him playing music around the house, piano, guitar, organ. It didn't make him no difference.”
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According to Dawkins, Sam stayed “some with his mother,” but also with Ida Mae, who lived about a mile and a half away from his father's farm. “Ida Mae was a light-skinned girl,” Dawkins says, “and they lived together for I don't know how long.” In Sam's song “Ida Mae,” recorded for the Gold Star label in 1947, he sang, “Yes, you know that woman name Ida Mae/Folks say she good to me all the time,” but then implies that she was unfaithful, drawing upon a traditional blues verse that had been used by Robert Johnson, among others: “Yes, you don't think cause Ida Mae got every man in town/Baby, you know ain't doing nothing but tearing your reputation down.”
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However, Sam, on different occasions, said that Ida Mae was his wife, though there are no records that prove they were ever actually married. In another version of the song, Sam extolled her virtues and his devotion.

Ida Mae, identified by blues and jazz researcher Mack McCormick (who would later play a pivotal role in Lightnin's career) as Ida Mae Gardner, appears to have been involved with Sam through the 1950s, even though their relationship was at times tumultuous. By some accounts they had a vicious fight around 1937, and Sam stabbed her. But when Sam was sentenced to two years in the Crockett County jail and served his time on the chain gang, McCormick maintains she “got a job cooking for the prisoners in order to be close enough to Lightnin' to attend to his wants and at the same time pay off his fine.”
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However, Dawkins says that he knew Ida Mae for many years and that she lived out her life in Guy Store. To his knowledge, she never married, and when asked about these contradictions, Dawkins speculated that there might have been more than one Ida Mae. Certainly, Sam's loose attitude toward the term
wife
is a complicating factor in trying to sort out the women in his life. He often bragged about how many women he had over the years. “They just be around,” he liked to say, “don't you know, I'm some bad man?”
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Sam's exploits with women were well known in the African American community of Leon County. People recognized that he was gifted as a guitarist and singer who carried forward the musical culture in which he was raised, but many disapproved of his behavior. Dawkins and Langford were among the many who marveled at his capacity as a performer, but understated his reckless and at times violent conduct. As a person, Sam was scurrilous. He was affable and sharp-witted, but introverted; wary, but sly. He was a backslider by church standards, a drinker and a brawler who lied and gambled, doing anything he could to stay away from the chain gang and the cotton field. Yet he was apparently never completely ostracized, and over the course of his life, he never forgot his country roots. Sam's blues gave voice to the hardships and foibles that he and so many in his community were experiencing, but by the early 1930s, he had gotten himself into enough trouble that he had to move on.

2

S
am Hopkins was about twenty years old when he met Alger “Texas” Alexander at a baseball game in Normangee, about seventeen miles southwest of Centerville. Normangee was playing against a team from Leona, but off to the side of the field, Hopkins heard someone shouting the blues. “So, I got down there,” Sam said, “and I seen a man standing up on a truck with his hand up to his mouth, and man, that man was singing…. He like to broke up the ballgame. People was paying so much attention to him. They was interested in him.”

Baseball had been a popular sport among African Americans in Texas since the late 1880s. The numerous attempts to organize a viable, professional black baseball association culminated with the formation of the Lone Star Colored Baseball League of Texas in 1897 with clubs representing Galveston, Palestine, Beaumont, Lagrange, Temple, Austin, and Houston.
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The Normangee and Leona teams were not formally part of this league. They were likely amateur, or, in a sense, semi-professional, where the players aspired to advance their careers, but were not necessarily paid. Local teams got some local sponsorship to help defer the costs of equipment, and the games attracted people from the surrounding communities. A blues singer, like Texas Alexander, seized the opportunity to perform for tips.

Sam claimed that Alexander was his cousin, but no direct kinship has ever been established. Sam had a very loose definition of the term “cousin” that he tended to use more as an expression of endearment than a statement of fact. Texas Alexander was born on September 12, 1900, in Jewett, Texas, in Leon County, about seven miles from Centerville. He eventually settled in Normangee, a small town that grew up around the railroad stop on the Houston and Texas Central Railway established in 1905 at the intersection of Farm Roads 39 and 3. He was raised by his grandmother because his own mother was “rowdy” and “runnin' around.” Growing up he toiled as a field hand, but by 1927 he had moved to Dallas, where he worked as a store man in a warehouse and made “spending change” by singing in cafes and on the streets of the Deep Ellum and Central Track area of the city.

Deep Ellum was the area of Elm Street in Dallas, north of downtown, where immigrants to the city flocked. The spelling Ellum resulted from the mix of dialects of the people who settled there—African Americans displaced by the ravages of the boll weevil in East Texas and Eastern European Jews fleeing the pogroms and persecution in their homeland. The juncture of Elm Street and Central Avenue was where day laborers were picked up and dropped off, taken to the cotton fields of Collin County or to do other jobs. Many of the black businesses were strung out along Central Avenue, which ran alongside the railroad tracks. Black show business and musical activity flourished in Deep Ellum. As early as 1908, John “Fat Jack” Harris opened the Grand Central Theater there and featured local and touring acts. The Grand Central was followed by the Swiss Airdome, the Star, the Circle, and the Palace. The Park Theater was operated by vaudevillians Chintz and Ella B. Moore and offered “high class vaudeville and moving pictures.” Black vaudeville entertainment took various forms, including the “tab” or “tabloid” musical comedy show, as well as touring minstrel and stock companies; novelty acts such as the five-hundred-pound Cleo-Cleo and Jack Rabbit, the hoop contortionist; comedians such as Little Jimmie Cox, a Charlie Chaplin imitator; high-kicking dancers; duos such as Butterbeans and Susie; and musicians and singers.
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In 1920, Chintz Moore and about thirty other black Southern and Midwestern theater owners established the premier black vaudeville circuit, the Theater Owners Booking Association (TOBA), which grew to more than eighty theaters and eventually became known as the “Chitlin' Circuit.” Performers often joked that the acronym stood for “Tough on Black Asses” because contracts heavily favored management and the conditions of work were often harsh.

Pianist Sam Price, who worked at R. T. Ashford's shine parlor and record shop on Central Avenue in Dallas and was instrumental in the discovery of Blind Lemon Jefferson, was looking for new talent when he heard Texas Alexander singing on the street. “Texas Alexander had an uncanny voice,” Price said, “but he couldn't keep time. That was one of the things I had to teach him.”
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With Ashford's help, arrangements were made for Alexander to go to New York to record in August 1927 and for Lonnie Johnson to accompany him.