Lightnin' Hopkins

Guitarist

• Born: March 15, 1912
• Birthplace: Centerville, Texas
• Died: January 30, 1982
• Place of death: Houston, Texas

American blues songwriter and guitarist

Hopkins played guitar with the “Texas pinch,” a right-hand thumb-and-forefinger interaction characteristic of country blues-based Texas guitarists.

The Life

Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins was playing guitar by age eight, when he reportedly received encouragement from the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson. After becoming confident enough to play for dances in his community, Hopkins left home to travel across Texas, where in Dallas he again encountered Jefferson. Another primary influence was his reputed cousin, Alger “Texas” Alexander, who played no instrument but whose powerful voice sang topical verses in the style of the work songs that predated blues. Hopkins often accompanied Alexander, and this apprenticeship helped him develop his strengths as a lyrical improviser.

In the late 1930’s, Hopkins served time on a Houston County prison farm, an experience he would later recall in such songs as “Prison Farm Blues.” By 1946 he was back accompanying Alexander on Houston’s Dowling Street, where a talent scout heard him and hired him to accompany a pianist, “Thunder” Smith, at a recording session in Los Angeles. The record company thought “Thunder and Lightnin’” would look good on a label, so Hopkins acquired a nickname and made his first recordings. His “Katie Mae Blues” became a hit.

For the better part of a decade, Hopkins recorded prolifically for a variety of labels, but by the mid-1950’s recording offers dried up. After a few lean years in Houston, the appearance of Hopkins’s first album on the Folkways label ended his recording slump and introduced him to a new audience.

A 1960 trip to New York was a watershed: Hopkins appeared on CBS television’s A Pattern of Words and Music, he recorded fifty songs for four labels (among them Nat Hentoff’s Candid), and he even performed at Carnegie Hall on a folk bill with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.

In 1962 Hopkins won the Down Beat International Jazz Critics Poll as New Star, Male Singer. Two years later, he traveled to Europe and to England as part of the American Folk Blues Festival Tour. With little change in his style, Hopkins continued to tour and record until he died of cancer in 1982.

The Music

Hopkins epitomized the lone blues singer with guitar, his songs at once deeply personal and expressive of universal emotions. Thanks to his mentors Jefferson and Alexander, he drew on deep wells of tradition, yet nothing he sang or played was merely derivative of those who came before him. He created his own musical world, alternately harsh and poetic, and he had a rare knack for drawing listeners into it. For all his music’s intimacy, Hopkins was an expert performer who understood musical dynamics and getting an audience on his side. Whether that audience was one person listening to a record or a packed festival crowd, Hopkins knew how to connect. He did it with his expressive guitar, which was a voice all its own. He did it with his lyrics, more tightly focused than the often rambling verses strung together by many blues singers. He did it with a raw voice that adeptly conveyed the rough pleasures and sorrows of his life.

“Katie Mae Blues.”Hopkins’s 1946 recording debut shows his musical talent fully formed. The lyrics praise a woman with some humorous blues poetry, comparing her to various makes of cars, while the guitar playing is assured and speaks of long experience. The success of this recording launched a brief renaissance of so-called country blues recorded for black audiences, at a time when rhythm and blues was moving in a more urbane direction.

“Short Haired Woman.”Hopkins’s 1947 hit, with its rueful dismissal of its subject and picturesque references to hairpieces called “rats,” made a deep impression on black audiences of its time. B. B. King, who worked as a deejay before his success as performer, admired the song for its topical reference to a then-popular hairstyle. He must have also noticed Hopkins’s stinging, now-electrified guitar lines as well.

“Tim Moore’s Farm.”The harsh lot of the sharecropper is vividly depicted in this song, supposedly about a plantation overseer named Tim Moore who earned a bad reputation for his rough treatment of black workers. Hopkins reputedly cobbled this together from sundry local songs on the topic, but his cohesive result shows his knack for sharply focused storytelling. This is a rare example of a blues that plainly criticizes racial and economic conditions.

“Going Home Blues.”This autobiographical song (also known as “Going Back and Talk to Mama”) opens with Hopkins’s birth date. It is the sort of tune that came effortlessly to Hopkins, who could yearn for his mother and his birthplace, the usual turf of hillbilly singers, but without sounding maudlin.

“Grosebeck Blues.”Hopkins reported learning this from Alexander, though Hopkins follows a straight narrative thread, which was not typical of Alexander. The song does have a chantlike pre-blues freedom, and structurally it is not blues. It is a prison work song, representing the oldest strain of tradition in Hopkins’s recorded repertoire. His guitar work is likewise noteworthy, especially for the way the guitar traces the complex vocal melodic line.

Musical Legacy

Hopkins made more than six hundred recordings; he was the subject of a documentary by Les Blank, The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins (1969); and he inspired Jane Phillips’s novel Mojo Hand (1966). Although he enjoyed international celebrity, Hopkins was happiest in Houston, where he became something of a hero in its Third Ward. His music has lost none of its capacity to move as it depicts the world of Texas sharecroppers. Hopkins’s first recordings led to other country blues singers and guitarists being recorded in the late 1940’s and the early 1950’s, a time when their music might otherwise have faded into obscurity. Without the success of Hopkins, we might never have heard of John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters.

Principal Recordings

albums:Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1959; Autobiography in Blues, 1960; Country Blues, 1960; Lightnin’ and the Blues, 1960; Last Night Blues, 1961; Lightnin’, 1961; Walkin’ This Road by Myself, 1961; How Many More Years I Got, 1962; Lightnin’ Hopkins and the Blues, 1962; Lightnin’ Strikes, 1962; Mojo Hand, 1962; Blues in My Bottle, 1963; Goin’ Away, 1963; Lightnin’ and Co., 1963; Smokes Like Lightnin’, 1963; Down Home Blues, 1964; Hopkins Brothers: Lightnin’, Joel, and John Henry, 1964 (with the Hopkins Brothers); Swarthmore Concert, 1964; Blue Lightnin’, 1965; First Meeting, 1965; Hootin’ the Blues, 1965; My Life in the Blues, 1965; The Roots of Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1966; Soul Blues, 1966; Gotta Move Your Baby, 1968; The Great Electric Show and Dance, 1968; California Mudslide, 1969; Texas Blues Man, 1969; Blues Is My Business, 1971; Double Blues, 1973; Low Down Dirty Blues, 1975; Lightnin’ Strikes Back, 1981.

singles: “Going Home Blues,” 1946; “Katie Mae Blues,” 1946; “Grosebeck Blues,” 1947; “Tim Moore’s Farm,” 1949.

Bibliography

Charters, Samuel B. The Country Blues. New York: Rinehart, 1959. Charters’s groundbreaking book closes with a chapter on Hopkins, presenting him as the last great country blues singer.

Obrecht, Jas, ed. Rollin’ and Tumblin’: The Postwar Blues Guitarists. San Francsico: Miller Freeman Books, 2000. Obrecht offers a fine chapter on Hopkins’s life, music, and impact on the white blues-rock guitarists who admired him.

Waterman, Dick. Between Midnight and Day: The Last Unpublished Blues Archive. New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003. Waterman offers some funny and insightful recollections of Hopkins, along with stunning photographs.