Alan Govenar (18 page)

As the blues revival evolved, it became a kind of romantic movement, as Jeff Todd Titon suggests, among “idealists of all ages, involving a love for blues as a stylized revolt against bourgeois values.”
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Blues revivalists idealized African American life and music, especially as it related to the apparent rejection of the conventions of work, family, worship, and sexual propriety. The blues singer appeared to embody what many blues revivalists lacked—the confidence to express his or her innermost feelings and desires in music without reproach.

In the context of the early years of the blues revival, Lightnin' became a focal point of discussion, documentation, recording, and, to some extent, controversy among those who sought to advance their own careers by championing his. McCormick was trying to manage all of Lightnin's affairs. However, concurrent with McCormick's promotional efforts, John A. Lomax Jr. also tried to help Hopkins advance his career. Lomax Jr. was not a professional musician, though he did like performing and sometimes appeared on stage with Lightnin'. McCormick disapproved, and, in an interview with researcher Andrew Brown years later, commented, “John and he [Lightnin'] started playing a game that can best be described as ‘The Nigger and the White Man.' And that really started getting to me, because it was like old times have come again. Lightning was perfectly willing to play it. And they ended up with some dialogue on stage, little set routines, that were like Amos ‘n' Andy, and even worse. Just patronizing little exchanges: ‘Yeah, boss, yeah.' So some of the Lightning Hopkins/John Lomax Jr. concerts I was hearing about—and a few I attended—turned into these essentially offensive exchanges. That aggravated me.”
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At the time, however, McCormick also imposed his views about how Lightnin' should perform, though he did not appear with him on stage in such a patronizing fashion. Both McCormick and Lomax wanted Lightnin' to recreate his past for an audience hungry for what they thought was a “pure” sound, though in fact it was contrived. During this period, Lightnin' was changing sharply. He was more self-conscious and aware of himself as an entertainer. He played along with the wishes of McCormick and Lomax because the money was good, but he also held out for more. “Lightning had this habit of doing as little as possible musically on stage,” McCormick said, “and talking as much as possible. The story that led into ‘Mr. Charlie' got up to twenty minutes at one point. If you're on stage and you got an hour-and-a-half, two hours, you get a restless audience pretty quickly that way.”
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Lightnin' liked to perform the song “Mr. Charlie” about the man he remembered who ran the mill in Centerville. “See, that child, little old boy,” Lightnin' recalled, “he couldn't talk, he stuttered. He went to Mr. Charlie … but Mr. Charlie didn't figure that he could work.” But one Sunday, he “run on up to Mr. Charlie's house…. He tried to tell Mr. Charlie that his mill was on fire…. He tried to tell him but he stuttered so. Mr. Charlie said, ‘You back again, boy, I got my work to do.' And the boy kept trying, but couldn't get the words out, ‘Y … Y … Y …' And Mr. Charlie said, ‘If you can't talk it, just sing it.' And the little boy sang, ‘Ohhhh, Mr. Charlie, your rollin' mill is burnin' down.'”
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Lightnin' loved to tell this story, and it became a kind of prologue, which varied in length, before Lightnin' started singing.

Lomax didn't want to interfere with Lightnin's performance on stage and tended to let him ramble on for as long as he wanted to. Despite the criticism leveled against him, Lomax was not deterred in his efforts to bring Lightnin' to a wider audience, and he didn't want any financial compensation for helping him. Lomax was a successful builder and real estate developer who headed a construction company in Houston and participated in the activities of the Houston Folklore Group when he had the time. After the 1959 Alley Theatre hootenanny, Lomax corresponded with Barry Olivier and his staff at the Berkeley Folk Festival, to be held on the University of California campus in July 1960, and was able to get Lightnin' booked for four hundred dollars, a fee that exceeded that for any of his previous public performances. However, Lomax did have some reservations. In a letter to B. J. Connors, secretary of the Committee for Arts and Lectures at the University of California, Lomax wrote: “If Lightning's presence adds to the rich flavor to the Festival, as I believe it can, I wish you know that I will be due at least a large pink rosette for my extra curricular duties with him. Largely, he lives each day to itself…. You might be surprised at the number of conversations and meetings I have already had with him to get the proceedings to this point. I had to agree to stay with him at all times throughout the trip; this includes his performance too.”
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Lightnin' was high maintenance, and although McCormick had a fairly good working relationship with him, he knew that he could be difficult. “Lightning behaved like he was some great star who should have champagne cooling in his hotel suite when he arrived,” McCormick told Andrew Brown. “He didn't demand those kinds of things, but he
did
demand an awful lot of care and protection in terms of arrangements, getting to places, this and that. Otherwise, he just suddenly wasn't there. So you couldn't just call a university and say, ‘Would you like Lightning Hopkins to appear?' You better be prepared to deliver him—to take him personally, to go get him up, buy his beer, carry his guitar, and all of that. And he had the people that would do that around town, all these young guitar players that wanted to learn from him, and people who treated him like a celebrity. So that was his existence here. He had an entourage; he went around like a prizefighter. Why should he, because he's going to a university, be this lonely person propelled into this world he really didn't want?”
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Although Lightnin' seemed content to simply be a “star” in the Third Ward, shying away from the audiences McCormick was dragging him toward, he was nonetheless beginning to earn more than he ever had before.

In the summer of 1960, Chris Strachwitz came back to Houston with his portable Roberts tape recorder and Electrovoice 664 microphone, hoping to record Lightnin'. But Lightnin' was in no position to record because he was getting ready to leave for California.
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On June 30, 1960, Lomax flew to San Francisco with Lightnin', who performed at the Berkeley Folk Festival on July 3 and 4 to great success. Alfred Frankenstein of the
San Francisco Chronicle
called Lightnin' a “great, authentic folk artist … whose gorgeous bass voice, colossal rhythm, and subtly shaded delicacy in guitar-playing provided the festival with one of its most distinguished moments.”
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Lightnin', when asked about the Berkeley Folk Festival the following week in a radio interview, said, “I liked it so well I just can't tell you. I had a wonderful time. I could go up on top of those hills and see the beautiful lights, cool breeze, just look down…. It was my first time up there which I hope it don't be the last time. I enjoyed it so, I want to go back again.”
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From San Francisco, Lomax took Lightnin' to Los Angeles, where his sister Bess Lomax Hawes helped to arrange a couple of dates at the Ash Grove, a folk club owned by Ed Pearl. Hawes was a folklorist and musician who was Pearl's guitar teacher, and when Lightnin' and Lomax got to Los Angeles, she hosted a “welcoming party.” In attendance were lots of people from the L.A. folk scene who had heard Lightnin's records but had never met him, including the singer, songwriter, and radio host Barbara Dane, a regular at the Ash Grove who was eager to meet Lightnin'. But she was shocked when she saw that Lomax had dressed Lightnin' as “a country bumpkin” in a flannel shirt and dungarees, because apparently that was his impression of what the folk scene was. “It was completely the wrong approach,” Dane says. “Ed was very sophisticated about these things and had plenty of the old timers, like Reverend Gary Davis, Jesse Fuller, a whole range of people coming to sing there. So it was not necessary to go through this charade.”
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Finally, after watching Lightnin' from afar, Dane moved closer to him. “I could see that he was uncomfortable,” Dane recalls, “so I wanted to give him a chance to be a little more relaxed, and just walk around with him a little bit in a blues manner. And he kind of let his hair down to me about the whole situation. He said, ‘You know, Mr. Lomax wanted me to dress like this.' And then he said he wasn't going to have his electric box, he was going to have a natural box. He was very uncomfortable in all of that, and so having said that to me, I said, ‘Don't worry about it. He [Ed] will see it through. He knows quality when he sees it and relax.' And he was fine with all that. And Ed did; he would have booked him sight unseen because, the thing is, Lightnin' had actually been very popular in the black cultural arena in years past…. So it was ridiculous to think you had to present him in some other way.”
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The afternoon before the show at the Ash Grove, Lightnin' got in touch with his old friend Luke “Long Gone” Miles, who was then in Los Angeles with his wife, Hazel.
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“Luke Miles was somebody who appeared on Lightnin's doorstep some time a long while back in Houston,” Pearl says. “He was very tall and very skinny and very gangly. And he just appeared on Lightnin's doorstep, and Lightnin' wanted to close the door on him, and Luke proceeded to just go to sleep on the door stoop. And he just stayed around. He was a real country guy. So, finally, Lightnin' took a fancy to him and let him hang around…. He was a good singer. And he'd do anything for Lightnin'. He'd carry his guitar if he needed it.”
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In the dressing room of the Ash Grove, Lightnin' was uncomfortable, not so much because of the clothes Lomax Jr. had provided for him but because his hair was a mess. He wanted to get his hair conked (processed and straightened), and Pearl didn't know where to find the chemicals. Lightnin' and Long Gone piled into Pearl's car and drove around Los Angeles, stopping at different drug stores, but they couldn't find the right product. Finally Pearl remembered that beneath his mother's apartment on West Adams was a black beauty salon. When he went inside, the beautician remembered him and gave him the chemicals. From the beauty salon, Long Gone took them to the home of Joe Chambers (of the gospel group the Chambers Brothers) and he conked Lightnin's hair. Lightnin' was pleased, and the show at the Ash Grove was a hit.

In a radio interview with Dane, Lomax talked about what he was hoping to accomplish by taking Lightnin' to California. While he didn't explain why he dressed him as he did, he was well intentioned, even if he didn't fully understand the expectations of the audience. Clearly he had been influenced by his father, John Lomax Sr., who had dressed Leadbelly for one of his first concerts on January 4, 1935, in a rough blue work shirt over a yellow one, and old-fashioned high-bib overalls and red bandanna around his neck.
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To Dane, Lomax Jr. said, “I was very happy to have made this trip. Lightnin' has been with me all the time. I just want to say that I've had a lot of personal enjoyment out of it, from my own singin' in a small part, and from helpin' Lightnin' to make this trip. I thought that he would be of great interest to all the people he could sing to and that could hear him because he has a big appeal to me. I felt that certainly … he was bound to find some spark with anybody who would take time and be quiet enough to hear him here.”
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At the Ash Grove on July 6 and 7, Lightnin' performed as part a program that included Big Joe Williams, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. “Lightnin' simply created a sensation,” Pearl says, “because the audience seemed so ready for it. I had had Brownie and Sonny and a couple of other traditional blues players before Lightnin'. But Brownie and Sonny had been playing for decades variations of their original music, but it had been adapted to the wishes of a white audience, but Lightnin' wasn't that. Brownie knew what songs people wanted to hear.”
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It was the first time Lightnin' met McGhee, Terry, and Williams, whose 1935 recording of “Baby, Please Don't Go” was undoubtedly an influence upon him. However, Lightnin' had relatively little experience playing for white audiences, so when he came on stage, no matter how much Lomax Jr. may have tried to coach him, he could only be himself. There was no pretense. Lightnin' was still trying to figure out what white audiences really wanted, so he played whatever came to mind, and his songs rambled on in the style he was accustomed to.

The World Pacific label worked out a deal with Lightnin' and the other musicians to make an LP together.
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Pearl says,
“Down South Summit Meetin'
was recorded entirely in the studios of World Pacific studio, by Ed Michel, with me there as holding it together, kibbitzing and making suggestions. [Applause was added to the LP master to make it sound as if it was recorded live at the Ash Grove.] It was initially called
First Meeting
as it was the first time Lightnin', Brownie, and Sonny had appeared on an LP together. Surprised the hell out of me, but there it was…. I bought a huge bottle of whiskey at the request of the guys as we drove to World Pacific. Big Joe drank half of it in the first couple of hours and not so gradually slipped through incoherence into dreamland. An historic error by yours truly.”
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Essentially the LP was a loosely structured jam session, with the four performers trading licks in songs that extended longer than five minutes each. Lightnin's vocals and acoustic guitar picking were impressive because he was able to quickly improvise as he played along, but it was the banter that propelled the session forward.
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“Big Joe Williams, he got over there,” Lightnin' said, “he told me, ‘You can steal my chicken, Lightnin', but can you make her lay?' I told him I had roosters all over my cabin, and I make any hen lay when the times get hard. I think it was great…. I guess we all felt good, and we all went along with it.”
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