Alan Govenar (17 page)

Country Blues
received far greater attention than
The Rooster Crowed in England
had. About
Country Blues,
Robert Shelton wrote in the
New York Times:
“Despite a poor job of taping, it is a record of great interest. Although there are occasional flashes of wit, Hopkins' mood here is generally more introverted and somber than it was on his Folkways release of a few months ago. One gets the feeling of listening to a sensitive man reflecting on a hard life with pathos, not sentimentalism, and meaning every word he says, an attribute rarely found in the rhythm and blues style.”
⁵⁴
Of particular interest to Shelton was the song “Go Down Ol' Hannah,” in which Hopkins took a traditional work song and reshaped it into a blues.

During McCormick's 1959 field sessions with Lightnin', in addition to collecting blues, he unexpectedly recorded one selection, “The Dirty Dozens,” that he felt at the time would “never be placed on the open market.”
⁵⁵
But McCormick ultimately changed his mind and entered into an agreement with Chris Strachwitz to release it in December 1963 on an LP titled
The Unexpurgated Folk Songs of Men,
for which he provided no artist credits because of the sala-ciousness of the lyrics.
⁵⁶
There was, however, a sixteen-page insert authored by McCormick, who wrote that the anthology was “an informal song-swapping session with a group of Texans, New Yorkers and Englishmen exchanging bawdy songs and lore.” McCormick traced the origins of the dozens in African American folklore as a cycle of ritual insults in which “the players strive to bury one another with vituperation. In the play, the opponent's mother is especially slandered and thus the male asserts himself through the rejection of the feminine and by the skill with which he manages the abuse. The appropriate reply is not to deny the assault, but to return even the greater evil-speaking hurled at the other person's mother.”
⁵⁷
In Lightnin's version of “The Dirty Dozens,” there is no verbal battle; it is instead a diatribe that strings together a series of insults that are at once vile and offensive:

Clearly it was impossible for McCormick to credit Lightnin' as the singer of “The Dirty Dozens,” as it no doubt would have identified him as obscene and would have made it very difficult to get him booked in “respectable” venues. It remains one of Lightnin's least-known recordings.

McCormick was building a reputation for himself as a folklorist, and 1960 was a Watershed year. In addition to the release of his recordings of Hopkins, he issued a two-LP set
A Treasury of Field Recordings,
a compilation of blues, zydeco, country, and folk materials recorded from 1951 to 1960 by the Houston Folk Group.
⁵⁹
McCormick had made a majority of the recordings himself. At the same time that McCormick was working on these projects, he also sought to undermine Charters and create problems at Folkways.

On November 26, 1959, Antoinette Charles, apparently with McCormick's guidance, handwrote a letter on behalf of Lightnin' to Folkways. Lightnin' usually referred to Antoinette as his wife, though in fact they were never married. “Nette,” as Lightnin' often called her, had a husband and children and a separate residence in Houston's Fifth Ward. How Lightnin' met her is unknown, but in 1948 they started having an affair that continued until his death. According to Strachwitz, Antoinette was originally from southwestern Louisiana. She was related to Clifton and Cleveland Chenier, and it may have been through them that she and Hopkins got to know each other. In time they developed a romantic liaison, and at some point during the 1950s, Antoinette became involved in Lightnin's business affairs. In her letter to Folkways, she complained about the terms that he had agreed to with Charters: [All spellings sic] “I was thinking I was going to get a share of the money that was made, and that would right I think any that sell your records they are suppose to give you part of the money made. If you dont agree I ask you to stop the records. This company doesn't have the contrack to be selling my songs & my singing on records. they didn't send me a copy of my records I did think they would send me one. I have a nother record coming out that is paying me Roaltes so I see no reason for not getting a shere from you all.”
⁶⁰

Lightnin' had never wanted royalties before—even though Quinn had included a provision for royalties in one of his contracts with him—but instead had insisted upon cash payments. When Charters had recorded Hopkins, he had paid him three hundred dollars in cash and explained that it was payment in full.
⁶¹
But once Charters was gone, McCormick seized the opportunity to challenge Charters and the business practices of Folkways. To his credit, McCormick helped to make Hopkins more aware of the pitfalls of the record business, but he had an ulterior motive—he wanted to prevent Folkways from producing any more of Lightnin's albums.

Asch responded to Hopkins's letter by stating that Folkways was not “a large company and the $300 represents a lot of money to us. We could have made this money part of a royalty agreement if you had received $100 advance and the balance to be paid at the rate of 25 cents per record sold. However, you did receive the $300 and we think this covers the lifetime of the record.”
⁶²

Hopkins answered Asch in a typed letter, dated December 12, 1959, which sounded as if it had been written by McCormick, asking that Folkways remove the record from sale. Hopkins also explained that prior to recording for Charters, he was paid $350 for recording four songs for the San Antonio–based TNT label: “It was my original idea that I was to receive my standard fee which would have been $200 for two songs. I was trapped into thinking this and did not find out otherwise until the recording had already begun. You got 9 songs altogether and I was only paid a part of the money down and my understanding was that royalties would be paid to make up the rest.”
⁶³
In addition, the letter mentioned that he was paid $120 for the lease of a selection of his recordings to be issued in a limited edition of ninety-nine copies and to be sold only by mail order from England
(The Blues in East Texas
LP on Heritage). Moreover, it stated that Hopkins was “protected by the fact that my original songs are not copyrighted (and so are not subject to the compulsory license provision of the copyright law) and so are still my property and cannot be used without my agreement.”
⁶⁴
Hopkins (McCormick) then reiterated his fundamental point that he would agree to Asch's “making an album” only if he was given a “fair royalty payment,” and went on to detail what he thought was fair: “That would be 7%-of-the-retail price on all copies sold after the first 100; the first 100 copies would be paid for at $100. This is the same agreement as I have made with the English company. I will give you the same opportunity if you sent [sic] out the contract immediately.” However, Hopkins (McCormick) also insisted that Asch's contract include “some bond with a $100 penalty” to be paid if he did not receive his royalties on time. In addition, he alluded to the royalty problems that John Lomax Jr. had been having with Folkways and the grievances articulated in McCormick's December 5, 1959, letter to Ed Badeaux, written on behalf of the Houston Folklore Group, John Lomax Jr., and Lightnin' Hopkins.
⁶⁵

Charters says Asch had told him that he was going to be sued by McCormick on behalf of Hopkins, but he never heard what ultimately transpired to settle the dispute, and there are no written records in Asch's files that indicate that the suit was ever filed or brought to court. In a letter Charters wrote to Asch, dated January 13, 1960, he complained, “I am much disturbed that McCormick is bothering you about Hopkins. As I've told you, McCormick is simply a leech on Hopkins' side. I'm sorry I even gave him Hopkins' address,” implying that McCormick didn't even know where Hopkins lived until Charters told him.
⁶⁶
Charters, in an effort to bolster Asch's position, wrote, “If it will be of any help to you in dealing with him—my English contact has written that McCormick sold an LP of Hopkins material to an English company for the total sum of $70. No royalty. I really fail to see where McCormick can involve himself. Especially after we took all the chances and presented him on LP.”
⁶⁷

Over the next several months, the tension surrounding Hopkins's Folkways album intensified. An unsigned memo, dated May 6, 1960, apparently from Marian Distler to Asch, stated that McCormick had not really been interested in recording Lightnin', even though he claimed through a letter written for Hopkins, dated December 12, 1959, that he had wanted to make an album two years earlier. In the end, after months of heated exchange, Lightnin' did sign a contract with Folkways, dated October 21, 1960, in which he was promised a “royalty of 25 cents per record album and/or tape album sold,” a percentage that exceeded the standard commercial contract of that time. However, it's difficult to determine the extent to which Hopkins ever received royalties, or how many copies of the Folkways album sold.
⁶⁸
Asch's accounting records are inexact.

While McCormick wanted to help Lightnin', he was not completely altruistic. Like Asch, McCormick was a complex individual who, though he may have shared Asch's mission to “record folk music and people's expression of their wants, needs and experiences,” also saw the potential for personal gain. By acting as Lightnin's manager and promoter, McCormick probably didn't make much money, but he was able to enhance his own reputation as a folklorist through his articles and liner notes that espoused the values of the folk revival. McCormick was smart to cultivate his own relationship with Lightnin' and

Antoinette, but as hard as he tried, he was not able to control them. As time went on, Antoinette was to become a much more important influence upon Lightnin' than McCormick probably ever realized.

While McCormick and Charters celebrated Lightnin's “country” roots, they minimized the influence of the urban reality in which he lived and ignored the inherent social stratification within the African American community. Lola Cullum, for example, and to some extent Antoinette were from more financially stable backgrounds than Lightnin', though the people who frequented the little dives where he played in the Third Ward were more like him, farm workers and day laborers who migrated away from the country hoping to find a better life in the city. Among African Americans, the appreciation of Lightnin's music, whether for its expressive qualities or finesse, was rooted in a shared cultural experience, and in this way was significantly different from the perceptions of those associated with the folk revival.

Charters, McCormick, John Wilson of the
New York Times,
and many others writing during this period all denigrated Lightnin's use of the electric guitar, yet it was this instrument that had propelled his commercial hits and contributed to his vitality in Houston's Third Ward. By championing the acoustic sound, the folk revival perpetuated a misunderstanding of not only Lightnin's earlier recordings, but the history of blues in general. Yet, at the same time, the folk revival created a context in which Lightnin' and many of his contemporaries could reach new audiences and earn more from their performances and records than had ever seemed possible.

5

W
hile the blues revival overlapped with the folk revival, it had been incubating for years. Record collectors were among the first researchers of blues in the 1930s, if not earlier, compiling discographies to piece together the history of the music. However, for a long time blues was thought of as a basic building block of jazz. Sam Charters, Mack McCormick, and Chris Strachwitz first learned about blues from 78-rpm records, and like their colleagues in the United States and Europe, were arriving at an understanding of the blues from a jazz background.

Prior to the publication of Charters's book
The Country Blues,
accompanied by the release of his Folkways recordings of Lightnin' Hopkins in 1959, little had been written about the subject. Certainly McCormick's research paralleled Charters's quest, as did the pioneering record work of Paul Oliver, among others, in England and throughout Europe. The first attempt at a Lightnin' Hopkins discography was compiled by New Yorker Anthony Rotante and published in the British magazine
Discophile
in 1955.
¹
Building on Rotante's work, Strachwitz published a Hopkins discography in the British
Jazz Monthly
in 1959, with explanatory comments by McCormick.
²
These discographies were crucial to the blues revival, which was propelled by an orientation to records and the record-listening experience that became the basis of new documentation and interpretation.