Alan Govenar (9 page)

With the success of Milburn's records, Eddie Mesner from Aladdin encouraged Cullum to look for more local talent. She found out about the scene on Dowling Street, where Sam Hopkins sometimes played on the sidewalk with his old partner from pre-war days, Texas Alexander. Cullum told blues researchers Mike Leadbitter and Larry Skoog in a 1967 interview that she liked Hopkins's music and that she made some test recordings to send to Aladdin.

While country blues, performed by such artists as Big Boy Crudup and Big Bill Broonzy, was dying on the charts, the Mesners thought Hopkins might stand a chance in the marketplace. Initially, Hopkins wanted to bring Texas Alexander because of his longtime association with him, but once Cullum heard a rumor that Alexander had just been released from the penitentiary, she was worried about his marketability and replaced him with Wilson Smith, an accomplished barrelhouse piano player. Cullum also had to make Hopkins more presentable, and gave him some money to get new clothes before she drove him and Smith to Los Angeles.
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Sam told the story of how Cullum discovered him countless times, but with each telling, he tended to embellish the details. To Sam Charters, he recalled in 1965 that he was shooting craps at home when a friend told him that a lady outside was honking her horn wanting to speak to him. When he went outside, she identified herself as a talent scout and asked him to get his guitar and play one song for her, after which she offered him one thousand dollars to come with her to make records. Two years later, during the filming of
The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins,
Sam exaggerated even further and said Cullum, after hearing him play, gave him ten one-hundred-dollar bills before he even got in the car to go with her. A thousand-dollar advance was astronomical in 1946, especially for an unknown singer.

Clyde Langford says that when he was a child in Centerville, he heard a radically different version of the story, not only from his parents, but also from Sam's mother, Frances Hopkins: “That lady out of Houston [Cullum] first saw him in Centerville. He'd sit on the front porch and play his guitar sometimes. And he used to play on the street up there in town, on Highway 7, down toward the Lacy Grocery, toward FM 1119…. And that's where he was picked up when he got his start…. He was sitting there thumpin' an old, beat up guitar with a pair of run-over shoes on, no socks, overalls with all the tail ends of them tore out, an old, raggedy sundown hat, and she seen him and pulled over and stopped. And she asked him to get in and he got in and she drove off with him. He started to get into the front and she told him, ‘No, she didn't want no trouble. He better get on the back seat,' and that's what he did…. And they went on into California and she bought him a gorgeous suit of clothes … and had that ole kinky hair, they call it conked. And he said she gave him a pocket full of money, it might not a been over fifty dollars … and he slipped away from her. She didn't know when he left. He slipped away from her and went back to Houston and that's where he made his home.”
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While Langford's account is hard to believe, given it's based on hearsay from the perspective of a child, it does underscore the way in which Sam had become larger than life in his hometown. Sam was a kind of folk hero in Centerville, and this rags to riches story, even if it does distort the facts, is nonetheless revealing about how he was remembered.

Cullum, in her interview with Leadbitter and Skoog, was adamant about the fact that she had discovered Hopkins in the Third Ward, though she never said how much he was paid. When they got to Los Angeles, Eddie Mesner decided to record eight sides in a session on November 9, 1946, four that featured Hopkins on vocals, and four with Smith. While they were in the studio, according to Cullum, one of the producers, presumably Eddie Mesner, dubbed Hopkins “Lightnin'” and Smith “Thunder.”
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Years later, Lightnin' told different naming stories. To
Dallas Morning News
columnist Frank Tolbert, he maintained that “Blind Lemon said [in the 1920s] when I played and sang I electrified people. He was the one that started calling me Lightnin'.”
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But in the 1970s he told drummer Doyle Bramhall that he got his nickname when he was sitting on his porch and “got hit by lightning.”
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In many ways, how Lightnin' recounted his life paralleled his approach to his music. He was free form, at once confiding, endearing, and deceiving, saying and singing whatever he felt. He was a man of the moment, and by changing his story or improvising a new verse or line to an old song, he was able to take control of his own destiny and to engage the listener with details no one else had ever heard.

For Lightnin's first release on Aladdin 165, he played guitar accompaniment for Thunder Smith, who sang “West Coast Blues” and “Can't Do Like You Used To.” Aladdin 166 was attributed to only Thunder Smith, and for Aladdin 167 Lightnin' accompanied himself on guitar and sang “Katie Mae Blues” and “Mean Old Twister.” On Aladdin 168, Lightnin' sang “Rocky Mountain Blues” and “I Feel So Bad.” For this session Lightnin' played acoustic guitar, which he would record with only a few more times until 1959.

Of these recordings, “Katie Mae Blues” was one of Lightnin's favorites, and he performed it often. Katie Mae was one of Lightnin's “wives,” and while he extols her virtues when he sings, “Yeah, you know Katie Mae is a good girl, folks, and she don't run around at night,” he admits that even though, “she walks like she got oil wells in her backyard,” she isn't quite as good as what people think: “Yeah, you know some folks say she must be a Cadillac, but I say she must be a T-Model Ford / Yeah, you know she got the shape all right, but she can't carry no heavy load.” The mixing of metaphors related to oil, cars, and sexual innuendo was traditional in blues, and in this song, Lightnin' seized the opportunity to give the lyrics his own twist by establishing a solid call and response with the guitar, accompanied by Smith on piano and an unidentified drummer. Smith's barrelhouse sound, however, is almost incompatible with Lightnin's country flair, and it's not surprising in future recordings that the piano is rarely ever used as accompaniment to his guitar, though he sometimes liked to have a bass and drums. Lightnin' was not a finger-style guitarist like Mance Lipscomb and other country bluesmen. He tried to play bass and melody runs simultaneously with a thumb pick and a finger pick on some recordings in the 1960s, but nearly everything he played was single-string guitar style, without a slide, whether he was using an acoustic or electric instrument.

It's difficult to say how well the first Aladdin records sold, since nothing from the session ever charted. But the fact that Lightnin' was not invited back to record for nearly a year is a good indicator that they didn't do very well. By contrast, Amos Milburn was back in the studio after only three months. Still, when Lightnin' returned to Texas he was proud of what he had accomplished, and he went back to Centerville as soon as he could to tell his mother and friends that his records were going to be issued soon. Ray Dawkins recalled, “We was there at Jack Marshall's farm. Everybody wanted to hear him play. And he told us about how he made up that song ‘Rocky Mountain' after he saw someone being buried when they were passing through West Texas. And he told us how it was going to be hitting the deck in the next two weeks, how they were putting it out and how he had finally made it.”
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After Hopkins and Smith returned to Houston, they essentially parted ways. “Lightnin' never tied himself down too long with anybody,” Brown says. “He was kind of freelance.”
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Brown got to know Hopkins at Lola Cullum's house in the Third Ward. “I remember when he started doing tunes [after his first session],” he says. “I remember the times we'd be sitting there in her den, and Lightnin' would be going through some of the things that she and Lightnin' put together.”
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Cullum helped Lightnin' write out his songs and corrected his bad pronunciation of words that she transcribed.

Brown wasn't sure if Lightnin' could actually read or write, but it's likely that he was mostly illiterate. Lightnin' bragged that he left home at age eight, and there was never much indication of how much schooling he actually had. He was able to sign his name, as evidenced by some of the contracts he agreed to—though his distrust of contracts that persisted throughout his life no doubt related to the difficulty he had in understanding them. No contracts with

Aladdin have ever been located; certainly Cullum was responsible for negotiating the terms.

Years later Lightnin' complained that Aladdin had cheated him, but he claimed that the label had also paid him one thousand dollars for his first session. We have no way of knowing how much or how little Lightnin' actually got paid for these records, but generally Mesner was held in fairly high esteem by other musicians who recorded for him. About Mesner, Houston blues singer Peppermint Harris (a.k.a. Harrison D. Nelson) said, “It's hard to describe my feelings for him. He was like a father or a brother. He was the most important man in my life as far as my career was concerned. He did more for me than anyone I've ever been associated with. He was beautiful to me. It's like Ella Fitzgerald felt about Chick Webb. Eddie Mesner showed me the way. He paved the way for me. He was straight about everything. Including royalties. I had no problems. If I wanted a new car, Eddie Mesner got it for me. He did things for me, like the only reason I'm a BMI writer now is because of him…. The only regret I have about Eddie Mesner is that the man died.”
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Lightnin's interactions with Mesner and Aladdin were much more limited than Harris's, but Hopkins was apparently looking for a better deal and a way to record closer to home, since he didn't like traveling. He'd heard about Bill Quinn, possibly from Dowling Street record store owner Eddie Henry, who distributed Quinn's early releases.

With a background in radio and electronics, Bill Quinn moved to Houston in 1939 and started a repair shop called Quinn's Radio Service. By the early 1940s he expanded his small business to establish the Quinn Recording Company, located at 3104 Telephone Road on Houston's east side. He began producing radio commercials and jingles, but saw the potential for producing records, though the materials needed were scarce. “The war had made materials short,” Mack McCormick observed, “and the four major companies had a practical monopoly on the manufacturing process. The independent labels of that period came into existence because of people like Bill Quinn. He invented his own method of making records. Somehow, he bought or confiscated an old pressing machine. He'd been experimenting and thinking about the process for years before he actually did it. The precise material—that is, the biscuit that goes into the pressing machine—was an industry secret. They called it ‘shellac,' which is a mixture of insect matter and other resins and fillers…. One of the solutions he tried was to melt down other people's records. Eventually, he found an independent way to go from the studio to the warehouse—recording, mastering, electroplating, and pressing his own records, and so was free to put regional talent in record stores.”
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Quinn soon joined forces with another radio repairman, Frank Sanborn, and a Houston-based hillbilly singer, Bennie Hess, and together, they founded the Gulf Record Company on July 14, 1944. But after a handful of releases, beginning around August 1945, including blues singers Jesse Lockett and Inez Newell (nothing by her was actually released, as far as we know), Quinn started his own label, which he called Gold Star, in the summer of 1946.
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His first release on Gold Star had the catalog number 1313, which was his address on Dumble Street in Houston, and featured Harry Choates, whose song “Jole Blon” exceeded all expectations. “Jole Blon” was a traditional Cajun waltz that had been recorded before, but Choates's version accelerated the tempo and added prominent piano. It became a giant hit because it was done in the contemporary Western swing style of Bob Wills and was sung in such a charismatic way that it was immediately accessible. Quinn was not prepared by the response he got from that record, and it went to #4 on the
Billboard
folk charts twice in 1947. That same year, Quinn, who imprinted his label with the slogan “King of the Hillbillies” under the name Gold Star, decided to branch out.

The discs that Quinn produced were uneven and ranged from unlistenable to passable, but he was not deterred. Even
Billboard
magazine, as early as April 1944, had observed, “It is generally agreed that the public is not too particular about quality—either in the record (durability, etc.) or in the production. The indies say that a hot tune and a good ork [orchestra] will sell that are not the gems of perfection.” Quinn's quality steadily improved, and by 1949 he was pressing good-sounding records on high-quality vinyl.

Lightnin's debut release on the Gold Star label ushered in a new sound for him and simultaneously helped lead the direction that country blues would take after World War II. In a significant departure from his Aladdin session, his guitar was now amplified—a novelty that Quinn seized upon by printing
ELECTRIC GUITAR
in bold capital letters on the label, hoping it would catch the fleeting attention of retailers and jukebox operators. Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup had enjoyed some recent country blues hits featuring electric guitar, but his popularity was fading. Muddy Waters had cut an amplified session for Columbia in 1946, but it was left unissued, and he was still months away from recording his debut for Aristocrat Records. John Lee Hooker would not put out his first record for another year and a half. The country-born bluesman with an electric guitar, still finding his way during these immediate postwar years, was about to blend the old with the new into an alchemy that would force the record industry—and eventually the world—to take notice.
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