Alan Govenar (7 page)

Fulson maintained that he met up with Texas Alexander in 1939: “I worked in a string band for a while in Ada, Oklahoma—Dan Wright and his string band. I couldn't get the blues feel for the type of music they were playing. So Texas Alexander came through there, and he wanted a guitar player. So he heard me…. I went on a trip with him to Texas. First, we started out in Western Oklahoma and played Saturday night fish fries and whatever else they had going on. They'd cut the nickelodeon [jukebox] if they thought you sounded pretty good. They let you play there, and they passed the hat around, take up a little collection.”
¹⁷

Texas Alexander insisted that he had been in prison twice, once with a sentence of ten years on Ramsey Farm for murder or attempted murder “over some woman,” and then a second time, for singing the “obscene” song “Boar Hog Blues.” However, no prison records have survived to establish that Alexander was ever in prison. In fact, he may never have served prison time, but told people that to establish a badass credibility that even Sam found appealing.

Sam never talked much about Texas Alexander's crimes, or how long or where he was in jail, though he did confirm that he was punished for singing “Boar Hog Blues.” However, when Mack McCormick asked him if they put Alexander in prison, Sam was vague: “Well, I don't know. That's what they tell me.”
¹⁸

Texas Alexander made a huge impression on Sam, even though in the overall scope of Alexander's career, Sam was a relatively minor accompanist. The peak of his popularity was probably between 1927 and 1929, but he continued to have a following that extended into Oklahoma and was concentrated in the small towns of East and Central Texas and the segregated wards of Houston. Alexander never exuded optimism in his songs. His music was always more unsettling than it was entertaining, and while he dwelled heavily upon the difficulties he claimed to have experienced, his actual biography remains inscrutable. Whether or not Texas Alexander was forthright in his songs wasn't important. His lyrics had a resonance that moved those who identified with the hard luck and bad times that he sang about, and from Alexander, Sam learned that it wasn't necessarily the truth of the song that mattered so much as the emotions it evoked.

Hopkins's rambling vocal style is heavily indebted to Alexander, but Sam seemed to know few of his songs, at least the ones he recorded. Texas Alexander may have discouraged him or warned him not to imitate him, but then again, Sam may simply not have liked his songs, or perhaps was only interested in certain lines. As Sam matured as a singer and guitarist, the recordings of Big Bill Broonzy, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red, among other popular blues artists, figured more heavily in his development. To Sam, Texas Alexander's music probably seemed dated, and he wanted to keep up with his peers whom he heard on jukeboxes. Yet, on a personal level, Sam admired Texas Alexander, who demonstrated what success as a bluesman might bring—booze, women, and even a Cadillac car—but also made explicit the perils of a self-destructive life.

3

W
ith the growth of Houston as an oil-rich shipping port and industrial center, the African American population increased rapidly to meet the needs of an expanding work force. By 1920 there were an estimated 35,000 African Americans in Houston, and by 1940 the number had swelled to roughly 86,000 out of a total population of 384,000. In 1945 the Port of Houston was the fourth busiest in the United States, and by 1948, it was second only to New York in overall tonnage. While Houston embraced and promoted a Western image for itself (replete with rodeos and cowboy culture), it was very much a Southern city during the first half of the twentieth century, with everything that entailed, even as the burgeoning oil industry supplanted the cotton economy that had helped Houston flourish. The sharecropping system of the surrounding rural areas was collapsing as African Americans moved to the city looking for jobs and a better way of life. Houston's black community was spread across principally the Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards. While the ward system of government was dissolved by the City of Houston in the early 1900s, the names remained, and as the city evolved over the years, so did the geographical boundaries of the neighborhoods they defined.

Racism was rampant in Houston. The separate-but-equal principle, upheld by the United States Supreme Court in
Plessy v. Ferguson
(1896), legalized racial discrimination, and Houston, like other cities throughout Texas, passed Jim Crow laws that restricted African American access to public facilities and permeated every social, political, and economic institution in the city, including housing, education, and employment.

On August 23, 1917, years of racial tension erupted in a deadly riot that was triggered by the arrest of a black soldier stationed at Camp Logan on the outskirts of the city, for interfering with the arrest of a black woman in the Fourth Ward. Though the soldier was released, rumors spread to Camp Logan that he had been executed, and more than one hundred black soldiers marched on the city in protest, killing sixteen whites, including five policemen. The consequences of the riot were severe; nineteen black soldiers were hanged and sixty-three received life sentences in federal prison, and the separation of blacks and whites across the city was strictly enforced and more carefully monitored.
¹

Lower-, middle-, and upper-class African Americans lived and worked in close proximity to one another, but the level of education and income of the residents in the wards varied greatly. Articles in the
Houston Informer,
founded as the
Texas Freeman
in 1893 and still publishing today, attest to the diversity of life in the segregated wards, and point out the complexities of social, economic, political, and cultural growth among all sectors of the black population in which Sam Hopkins lived and worked.
²

The Fourth Ward, established as a freedman's town after the Civil War, was the site of the first black church, high school, and medical facility in the city. As it grew, so did the degree of stratification within the community there. It developed its own musical identity early on. It was home to what was known as the Santa Fe Group, a loosely knit assemblage of blues pianists in the 1920s and ‘30s which included Robert Shaw, Black Boy Shine, Pinetop Burks, and Rob Cooper. Together and individually, these pianists frequented the roadhouses along the Santa Fe railroad that sold “chock” (bootleg liquor) and prostitution, playing a distinctive style of piano that combined elements of blues with the syncopation of ragtime.

According to Shaw, there were so many blues pianists in Houston during this period that each neighborhood had its own particular style. In the Fifth Ward, the most well-known pianists and vocalists were members of the George W. Thomas family. The eldest child George Thomas Jr. was born about 1885, followed by his sister Beulah, better known as Sippie Wallace, and brother, Hersal. Their style of piano playing involved more fully developed bass patterns than those of the Santa Fe Group.
³

The Fifth Ward of Houston also had an area known as Frenchtown, where about five hundred blacks of French and Spanish descent migrated from Louisiana in 1922. As the population grew, the music performed there reflected both Creole and African American influences, not only in blues but in the emerging zydeco style. African American businesses, from restaurants, pharmacies, and doctors' offices to undertakers, beauty parlors, and barbershops, flourished on Lyons Avenue and served the people who lived in the area, many of whom worked for the nearby Southern Pacific Railroad or on the Houston Ship Channel.

During the 1930s, the acclaimed music program of Phillis Wheatley High School in the Fifth Ward vied with Jack Yates High School in the Third Ward for local recognition. Their marching bands were a breeding ground for aspiring musicians, and the competition between them reflected the breadth of the Houston blues and jazz scene. Student members of the marching bands played at football and basketball games, and orchestra students played at all school functions. On weekends, many of the school band directors performed around the city (and some, like Abner Jones, Sammy Harris, and later Conrad Johnson, led jazz orchestras). Student musicians were often featured at church socials and at events sponsored by civic organizations, such as Jack and Jill of America, and Links, and by the numerous sororities and fraternities in the African American community.

By the late 1930s the
Informer
had started to use the phrase “Heavenly Houston” to describe the can-do attitude of the upwardly mobile African American population pulling out of the Great Depression. The Third Ward had the highest concentration of African Americans, and Dowling Street became the main street of black Houston. Lined with churches and African American owned businesses, it was the epicenter of community life. The opening of the El Dorado Ballroom on December 5, 1939, on the second floor of a Deco-style professional building at the corner of Elgin and Dowling Streets was a banner day for African Americans in Houston.
⁴
C. A. Dupree, treasurer of the El Dorado Social Club and an employee of the very exclusive (white) River Oaks Country Club, was the driving force behind the building. The El Dorado Social Club was in existence for many years prior to the formation of the ballroom and lent it their name and support. The ballroom was comanaged by Dupree and his wife Anna and quickly became the showplace of the Third Ward, if not all of black Houston. “The El Dorado Ballroom made us feel like we were kings and queens,” blues vocalist Carolyn Blanchard recalled. “When you went there, from the moment you walked through the door, everything was taken care of. Anna and Mr. Dupree didn't let you want for anything. They would get whatever you wanted for you. We always held our heads a little higher after leaving the El Dorado.”
⁵

Black social clubs and fraternal organizations dominated the El Dorado Ballroom, and the
Houston Informer
usually covered their festivities. On March 9, 1940, for example, the
Informer
reported: “Amid a conglomeration of laughter, colorful gowns, well-fitted tuxedos and good music, sepia Houstonians came to the realization, last Tuesday evening at the swank El Dorado Ballroom, that this hitherto flat and backward Southern town has definitely broken into the glorious realm of glamorous and chic society. Seven hundred or more socialites were present to witness the advent of this great phenomena, a strictly formal affair given by the El Dorado Social Club, one of the oldest and yet one of the most active organizations.”

The El Dorado Ballroom featured touring stars and local performers, as well as talent shows and teen dances. Some of the top bands that performed there were the I. H. Smalley Orchestra, the Sammy Harris Orchestra, the Sherman Williams Orchestra, and the Milton Larkin Orchestra, which was a breeding ground for aspiring musicians, such as Arnett Cobb, Illinois Jacquet, Cedric Haywood, Wild Bill Davis, and Tom Archia. These local big bands, six to twelve pieces deep, played the music of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, and the orchestrated swing-era hits of the time. And when they weren't performing at the El Dorado, they might be found at other clubs around the city. The Downtown Grill, Pyramid Club, the Rendezvous Club, the Harlem Grill (a.k.a. Sportsman's Club), Tick Tock Tavern, Southgates, and Abe and Pappy's (a white club) all featured black bands on weekends and special occasions. Bigger-name national acts, like Jimmie Lunceford, Erskine Hawkins, Count Basie, and Duke Ellington, often picked up sidemen in Houston for shows at the Pilgrim Temple in the Fourth Ward or at the City Auditorium downtown.

Houston was rife with musical talent, and there were numerous orchestras and bands that, as early as the late 1930s, featured a mix of Texas-area performing artists, from Ivory Joe Hunter to Eddie Taylor, Henry Sloan, T. H. Crone, Giles Mitchell, Tack Wilson, Bob Williams, Jerry Moore, Joe Pullum, and the Prairie View Collegians. Pullum was one of the few to actually make records prior to World War II; most of these bands were ignored by the major labels recording in Texas at the time because company executives didn't feel the music was commercially viable. Yet Pullum had a hit on Bluebird in 1934 with “Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard,” a song that Sam Hopkins covered and recorded in 1961.
⁶

By the time Sam made his way to Houston in the early 1940s, the Third Ward was teeming with nightlife. But to middle- and upper-class residents of the Third Ward, Hopkins was probably invisible. He was one of the many poor rural blacks trying to get a foothold in the city, frequenting the lower-class bars, some of which, according to the
Informer,
were part of a bigger social problem. In a March 2, 1940, editorial, the
Informer
wrote: “County Judge Roy Hofheinz has announced a fight on honky tonks which sell strong drinks to minors…. There are Negro places that knowingly sell beer to minors…. There are some places which permit marijuana to be sold to minors in their places. Every Negro should endorse the campaign to close such places of business.”