Alan Govenar (15 page)

Once Strachwitz heard Lightnin' perform, he was even more entranced. “I remember very vividly us walking in there to Pop's Place that night,” Strachwitz says. “It was a little tiny joint, and when we came in, Lightnin' was standing to the left of the door about twenty feet away. He was just moaning some blues. He was playing a highly amplified electric guitar, with Spider [Joe “Spider” Kilpatrick] on drums…. Well, Lightnin' was singing about how his shoulder was aching that day and how he hardly got to the job that night because of the water. It had been raining, and the rain covered the chuckholes in the road and his car would hit these holes, and he needed a BC pill [an over-the-counter medication for muscle pain]. But I thought he would be doing songs that he had recorded, but that wasn't the case at all. What he was singing was a wonderful mishmash of totally improvised material and lines from his records. And since he'd seen us walking in, he suddenly pointed his long finger in our direction and sang, ‘Whoa, this man come all the way from California just to hear Po' Lightnin' sing,' and then he went on singing to some gal who was standing in front of him. And he'd be hollering at her and I mean I had never seen anything like that. I was just in blues heaven. This was just ferocious, and the whole scene was something I had never really experienced before.” Strachwitz was from a “fairly upper-middle class” background in Europe and hearing Lightnin' in what was ostensibly a low-income black neighborhood was illuminating: “To me, this was better than any books I could ever read, because it was right there, living.

“One night, after he had finished a job, Lightnin' said, ‘You guys, wanna come with me? Po' Lightnin's gonna wanna do some gambling.' So we went to this house, totally dark. I forget which ward it was in and Po' Lightnin' banged on the door and sooner or later the lights went on inside. And this sleepy black man appeared at the door in a bathrobe. ‘What you all want?'

“And Lightnin' said, ‘Man, you know what I want.'

“So, they sat down at a table and they played dice. And I thought the other man was half asleep, but as soon as Lightnin' would roll those dice, this man's eyes would just pop open and he would focus in on those dice and a couple of times Lightnin' tried to grab them: ‘That's me! That's mine! I gots that.'

“But his eyes were just on it. ‘You muthafucka, that ain't yours!'

“It was really something. The cockroaches were this big [three inches long] out there in Texas. I'd never seen creatures like that. They were wandering up and down planks on the side of the room, and it was hot. You know, the only time you could ever live was in the nighttime. There was no air conditioning in many places. By then, I was staying at Mack's place and he had a fan, and you went to sleep and you woke up feeling just as tired in the morning. It was humid! I had never experienced anything like it. But I thought this was just great and I decided at that time that I wanted to start—literally started a record label because I thought I wanted to capture Lightnin' Hopkins in his beer joints. And a year later, that's exactly what I did. That was the beginning of Arhoolie Records.”
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While Strachwitz was enthusiastic about the raw power of Lightnin's performance on electric guitar accompanied by bass and drums, that sound didn't interest McCormick or Charters, who both knew that the folk revival audience wanted to hear the unaccompanied, unamplified solo blues. McCormick, of course, had seen Lightnin' perform in the gritty juke joints of the Third Ward on numerous occasions, but Charters had not and had based his opinions about Lightnin' largely on his interpretation of his records and his single meeting with him.

McCormick, in addition to recording Lightnin', started promoting him in Houston and elsewhere. By the late 1950s, McCormick had become the chairman of the Houston Folklore Group, and had helped to organize a program called Hootenanny at the Alley at the Alley Theater in Houston on July 20, 1959, that was modeled after the hootenannies that musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, and labor activist Pete Seeger and the impresario Harold Leventhal had organized for more than a decade in New York City.
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John Lomax Jr. performed on the same bill with Lightnin', as well as with Howard Porper, Jim Lyday, Kyla Bynum, Jimmie Lee Grubbs, and Ed Badeaux, who were all folk revivalists. For the hootenanny, they each took turns singing traditional ballads and songs like “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Midnight Special,” and “Wayfaring Stranger,” accompanying themselves on guitar, autoharp, and banjo, interspersed with a choreographed script on folk music narrated by Ben Ramey. They were all active on the Houston folk scene, frequenting the Jewish Community Center when it was located at Hermann Park, and later, in the 1960s, the Jester (a small club off Westheimer), both of which featured local and nationally touring folk revival acts.

Bynum was a classically trained violist who performed with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, but was an active participant in the Houston Folklore Group. Her father played guitar and banjo and taught her traditional music as a child. “When I got to Houston from Oklahoma,” Bynum says, “my husband, Jim Lyday, and I went to the Unitarian Church and they had a program on folk songs that was presented by the Houston Folk Group [in the mid-1950s]. And we got involved. Jim was a banjo player. He worked for the Army Corps of Engineers. And I had studied the songs of Appalachia, the ballads collected by Cecil Sharp. I'd been singing ballads for a long time. I sang for the Kiwanis Club, the Rotary Club.”
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Bynum didn't know McCormick, though she did have a vivid memory of the event. “This was the old Alley [on Berry Street, not the current theatre in downtown Houston],” Bynum says. “It used to be a barrel factory, and there were four entrances, four ways to come in. It was theater-in-the-round; people were all around you. We had to use their set that had been built for a production of
The Iceman Cometh
and we couldn't change anything. So we just had our hootenanny on top of
The Iceman Cometh
set. We all came in with our guitars and banjos strapped to our shoulders, singing, ‘Father and I went down to camp …' Lightnin' Hopkins came out later.”
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McCormick introduced Lightnin' to the Alley audience, but didn't know what to expect. “I was apprehensive,” McCormick wrote, “because I knew the audience had come to hear the familiar ballads and songs popularized by book-trained singers. Here, in its habitat, there has never been any interest in the blues.”
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Clearly McCormick was expressing his feelings about the local folk crowd vis-à-vis local blues, even though Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry were by then relatively well known among folk revival audiences across the country and abroad. In Houston, McCormick understood the limitations of his audience.

For Lightnin', the Alley Theatre hootenanny was a completely new experience. While he had recorded for white producers, he had never performed for a predominantly white audience in a formal concert. “Yet,” McCormick remembered, “within seconds of the time he came out to prop his foot by me and begin ‘That Mean Old Twister,' he'd begun to steal the show. By the time he sang [the verse] ‘the shack where I was living really rocked but it never fell' the audience was hanging on every nuance of his voice. When his face stretched in pain, the guitar ringing bitterly, as he cried, ‘Lord! … turn your twister the other way!' the theater filled with the taut gasp of an audience caught and held in the grasp of a single man.”
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McCormick said that he encouraged Lightnin' to re-create the way he played on the streets of the Third Ward.
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The two-hundred-seat theatre was sold out, and when Lightnin' sang John Lee Hooker's “Hobo Blues,” the audience went quiet out of respect for the performance.
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But Lightnin' was confused, and at one point in the middle of a song, McCormick recalled that Lightnin' said, “‘Well, a preacher don't get no amen in this corner,' meaning people are clapping, but they're not saying anything during the song.”
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Lightnin' didn't hear any of the banter he was accustomed to when he played in the little joints in the Third Ward, which may have made it more difficult for him to improvise, as so much of the improvisation in blues stems from a call-and-response exchange with the listener. In the case of Lightnin's performance of “Hobo Blues,” there was, however, an added level of irony, in that it was probably the same song he had recorded as “Freight Train Blues” for Sittin' In With in 1951, but also represented some stagecraft on the part of McCormick to have him sing a song that implied he was a hobo who rides trains, when in fact he only once rode a train as a hobo, decades before.

The day after the Alley performance, two articles appeared in the Houston press, and were likely the first in a Houston paper to ever mention Lightnin'. Frank Stack of the
Houston Post
reported, “Lightning Hopkins, a Dowling Street Negro folksinger who makes up his own songs, in the grand old ballad tradition from his own experience, overshadowed everybody else on the program with an easy personable style.”
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In the
Houston Chronicle,
Bill Byers was more evenhanded in his review, but he was especially moved by Lightnin', who appeared on stage “with dark glasses, shined shoes to reflect his broad grin … to sing some folk songs of today's woes and smiles. Unlike the others in the ‘Hootenanny' program, Lightnin' concentrated on his own anxieties in life—the trouble with a short-haired woman [“Short Haired Woman”] and the miseries of tornados [“That Mean Old Twister”] sweeping into East Texas. His personality electrified the overflow audience … which had thought it was going to hear only songs which detailed the bitter laughter and travail of the past. But Hopkins's surprise was only one of the many given by members of the Houston Folklore Group.”
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Byers praised Ben Ramey, who narrated the evening program, “as a relaxed comfortable storyteller, with the authority of a friendly professor and the warmth of a good friend … introducing chapters from American history to be told in song.” Each of the performers received positive notice, as did the entire event: “The audience particularly enjoyed the times when it was asked to sing, and often joined in when Ramey least expected. It's hoped it won't be long before the Alley stages another ‘Hootenanny' so more people can participate in the spirit and fun found in this one.”

For his performance, the Folklore Group paid Hopkins twenty dollars, which was his share of the $425 box office take.
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While twenty dollars doesn't seem like much pay, McCormick reassured him that he could make more money doing these type of shows. McCormick became the point person for queries about Hopkins and began negotiating performance dates on his behalf as his manager.

In August 1959, Charters's recordings of Lightnin' were released on the Folkways label. In John S. Wilson's three-column review in the
New York Times,
McCormick was never mentioned because, apparently, Charters did not talk about him in the interview, though he did acknowledge him in his liner notes to the LP. Wilson reported that Charters had “gained pre-eminence for his invaluable series of disks for the Folkways label called ‘The Music of New Orleans.'” In his praise of Charters's recordings of Hopkins, Wilson wrote that they were “technically … the best of his disks and in some ways, one of his most important,” documenting “some stirring examples of undiluted, close-to-the-earth blues by an unusually talented and balanced singer.”
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However, Wilson's article perpetuated a myth of “rediscovery” in the way he described how Charters “rescued from obscurity a singer who seemed to have committed professional suicide by trying to adapt to rock ‘n' roll standards…. He attempted to shift his ground, and by changing from unamplified guitar to a clangorously amplified one and supplementing its heavy beat with a loud drum and bass … he not only failed to catch on in rock ‘n' roll but also lost his blues following and soon dropped out of sight…. On the basis of these recordings, Mr. Hopkins must be counted as one of the best (possibly
the
best) of unalloyed country blues men still singing.” While Wilson's review in the
New York Times
was a major boost to Lightnin's career, it also demonstrated a gross misunderstanding of Lightnin's work up to that point. Lightnin', in his mid-1950s recordings, was not “trying to adapt to rock ‘n' roll standards.” Blues was the lifeblood of rock ‘n' roll, and Lightnin' was trying to sustain his own popularity with black audiences.

On the same day that Wilson's article appeared in the
New York Times—
August 23, 1959—Charlotte Phelan published an article in the
Houston Post
that never mentioned Charters's recordings. Aside from the fact that Phelan's knowledge of Hopkins's career prior to his involvement with McCormick was very limited, her interview with Lightnin' was revealing. Lightnin' told her that playing at the Alley was “wonderful,” and that he “wouldn't mind doing that again. A lot of people see those faces, turn around, and go back. I just love people. I don't care if it's 50,000. I ain't never scared, but I'm just kind of particular.”

Phelan noted that Hopkins, when he wasn't performing, was a “quiet, self-contained man with deep-seated dignity,” but that he could also be “pensive, remote, reluctantly responsive, even after his regular breakfast of two bottles of beer, which are always supported during the day with similar sustenance.” By most accounts, Hopkins often appeared on stage with a flask of gin, which he liked to pull out of his pocket and take a sip from in between songs. Kyla Bynum described Lightnin' as a “lush,” and said that on the day of his performance at the Alley Theatre, “somebody had to stay with him all day and keep him sober or he wouldn't show up for the show. Ed Badeaux [a folk revival singer who worked for Folkways] might have helped us out with that because it was a matter of just sort of babysitting him, talking to him, keeping him happy until the eight o'clock show time came…. It was well known he had a real drinking problem as we say these days.”
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