Alan Govenar (23 page)

The details about Lightnin's daily life are revealing, though it is surprising that they were published as liner notes, especially given the ranting tone of McCormick's text. McCormick, instead of discussing the music on the LP, continued his diatribe against Hopkins and described how Lightnin' left Houston to avoid his sister's funeral, leaving the harmonica player Billy Bizor to make the necessary arrangements. Reportedly, Bizor drove Lightnin's brother Joel and their mother, Frances Hopkins, who was eighty-eight years old at the time, back to Centerville after the funeral and discovered that the gas and electricity had been turned off because the bills had not been paid. Resigned, Mrs. Hopkins, “resting herself on the steps of the rickety two-room cabin,” McCormick wrote, “mused by herself: ‘I had five children and they could each play music, but the baby couldn't do nothing else but. And he never has been no help to nobody except when you wanted to hear music.' She turned her head to the west, as if seeing the Hollywood nightclub where Lightnin' had gone, and firmly answered the question the fans had been asking: ‘I guess he never will change.'”
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Lightnin' had pushed McCormick to the limits of what he was able to endure. While the tone of his text is harsh, it is likely a realistic portrayal of what McCormick observed and experienced. Lightnin' was not easy to work with, but on the other hand, McCormick had been telling him what to do for years, and Lightnin' was no doubt fed up. In other places and with other people, Lightnin' was perceived differently. Ed Pearl from the Ash Grove describes him as a “gentle person,” as did Barbara Dane. But neither of them had tried to be Lightnin's manager as McCormick had; they might not have thought of him as “gentle” if they had.

Especially insulting to Lightnin' was the way McCormick characterized his relationship with his mother and implied that he had neglected her needs. Lightnin' was devoted to his mother and did his best to help her. Years later, Lorine Washington, a 105-year-old woman in Centerville who had been friends with Lightnin's mother, remembers, “Sam used to come back to Centerville and bring money for his mother and his aunt.”
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Mabel Milton, another friend of Frances Hopkins, concurs, “He'd come with Nette. She was a beautiful woman. Lightnin' liked good-lookin' women. And they'd bring things to his mother.”
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In a 1960 interview with Dane on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Lightnin' talked at length of the importance of his mother in his life. “She raised all us kids…. She's a mother and father, because my father got killed when I was three years old…. So I think it's my duty to stick around and do the very best I can for her until something else happens. That's the way I feel about it.”
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In this context McCormick's liner notes were likely intolerable to Lightnin', who, from his point of view, had given to McCormick more than he ever received in return, though McCormick didn't see it this way. McCormick's frustration with Hopkins had been building over the years of his association with him. To Andrew Brown, McCormick said, “He became a lot less vigorous about what he was doing as he made more money…. He took a glee in giving the least of himself and still collecting greater sums of money than he'd made earlier…. I think he kind of felt like he was scamming people. ‘Here I come, I'm supposed to sing, I do mostly talking, and the people laugh,' but it was often a slightly embarrassed laugh, because he was doing things that made people uncomfortable.”
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As much as McCormick blamed Lightnin' for the problems that ensued, he nonetheless did what he could to control his affairs. As he pointed out in an undated letter to Prestige in 1963, “Lightnin' Hopkins has been under comprehensive contract to me since 1959,” and acknowledged that Lightnin' had signed a ten-record deal with Prestige, of which only four of the LPs had been completed with him as producer. McCormick complained that Prestige had not contacted him for nineteen months and had moved forward to continue recording Lightnin' “in violation of the agreement.” Moreover, McCormick said that he was willing to “supervise what ever final sessions they should desire,” but they needed to be done quickly because “Hopkins's poor health and arthritis” was “growing more serious.” This letter prompted an exchange of correspondence between McCormick, Prestige attorney M. Richard Asher, and Sam Charters, who was then working as recording director for Prestige in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
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A deal was finally hammered out in November, and Prestige agreed to pay Lightnin' through McCormick for “at least 50 strong potential selections” with an advance payment of twelve hundred dollars and a balance of eight hundred dollars to be paid out in eight monthly installments. However, McCormick never produced the recordings, and on December 18, Prestige stopped payment on the second one-hundred-dollar installment check to McCormick.

On January 24, 1964, Charters made arrangements for funds to be transferred to the Homestead State Bank in Houston for the purpose of Lightnin' being paid five hundred dollars for each LP recorded at “the studios of Mr. J. L. Patterson, Jr.” (who had purchased Gold Star Studios from Bill Quinn).
¹⁰⁰
Lightnin's last three Prestige albums, starting with
Goin' Away
from June 1963, were recorded at Gold Star and overdubbed with bass and drums in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.
¹⁰¹
Prestige severed their working relationship with McCormick, who had disappeared and appeared to have taken the advance payments sent to him. McCormick later wrote to Charters from Jocotepec, Mexico, where he had gone to get away from “Houston's dampness and cold for health reasons,” stating that Lightnin' had received no royalty payments and questioned whether or not the check sent had in fact ever been cashed.
¹⁰²
Charters, who had long held a grudge against McCormick, angrily replied on February 27, 1964: “Your letter reached me in time to delay the issuing of a warrant for your arrest in Houston; however, if I don't hear from you concerning the money you have received for the Lightning Hopkins sessions I will have to consider some kind of action …. Lightning Hopkins, for whom the money was sent to you as agent, has stated verbally … that he did not see you at any time before you left the country and that the money sent on to you was not turned over to him. He also stated that he knew nothing about a pending exclusive contract with a major label and denied that poor health is interfering with his playing.”
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Moreover, Charters says that he had researched the Prestige files on Lightnin' to confirm that he had been sent regular statements, both as artist and composer, and that “all checks had been cashed.”

In a letter to Charters, received by Prestige on March 16, McCormick denied any wrongdoing. He claimed that he had made all the necessary arrangements before leaving for Mexico and had given the advance payment, after it had cleared the bank, to Lightnin' via a personal check, though this has never been confirmed. There are no copies of McCormick's canceled check to Lightnin' in the Prestige files. McCormick did not want to accept any responsibility for the missing money, nor did Lightnin'.
¹⁰⁴
It is possible that Lightnin' owed McCormick money, and that McCormick kept the advance as a means of collecting what was due to him. Lightnin' could be extremely demanding and irresponsible, but McCormick had nonetheless worked hard to record, manage, and promote his career. McCormick was a major figure in introducing Lightnin' to a white audience, but this incident with Prestige pushed their already strained relationship to the breaking point. Needless to say, McCormick never worked with Hopkins again.

When Charters saw Lightnin' a few months after McCormick had run off, he felt “Lightning didn't seem to mind what had happened that much…. He shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘You can manage me for a while—if you got any jobs.'”
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Lightnin' realized that he needed help to get the best recording deals and bookings in the white blues revival scene. He was making more money than he ever had in his life, and he was enjoying himself. He particularly liked the West Coast, where he was able to visit with family and friends. Antoinette had relatives in the Los Angeles area, and Lightnin' could spend time with her there without the pressures of her “other family” in Houston. The blues revival had untold benefits that Lightnin' was only just beginning to realize.

6

I
n 1962, Peter Gardner, the adult activities director for Houston's Jewish Community Center, started a Folk Song Series that featured a mix of revivalists and traditional musicians. Lightnin's first show at the Jewish Community Center on March 15, 1962, was a big hit, though he was initially skeptical. To perform for an enthusiastic audience of white, mostly middle-and upper-middle-class Jews, some of whom spoke Yiddish among themselves, must have made Lightnin' a little uncomfortable, yet more acutely aware of how his life and career were changing. His concert there typified the expanding folk and blues revival scene that was taking hold across the country, and the opportunities for new bookings had never been greater. But at this point, Lightnin' also had a following in the juke joints and cafes of the Third Ward, where he liked to gamble and carouse. As much as he was able to cross between black and white audiences, he did so with caution. He had a deep-seated distrust for some white producers and concert promoters, but he was learning how to get what he wanted and was loyal to those who treated him fairly.

Less than a week later Lightnin' returned to New York City, where he stayed for several weeks, presumably with Martha Ledbetter, and performed at the Village Gate seven times in a month-long period, appearing on bills with flamenco guitarist Sabicas, Roy Haynes, the John Coltrane Quartet, the Modern Jazz Quartet, Nina Simone, and Don Sherman.

On March 31, 1962, Robert Shelton, in his
New York Times
review of Lightnin' and Sabicas at the Village Gate, alluded to the comparisons “many have drawn between the flamenco music of the Spanish gypsies and the Southern Negro folk blues for their emotional content, personal expressivity, and rhythmic vitality,” but pointed out that “there is really more to contrast between these two leaders in their fields.”
¹
Most notably, Sabicas played a seven-hundred-dollar Velasquez guitar with “an ordered consciousness of technique,” while Lightnin' accompanied his “moody subjective songs” on a sixty-five-dollar Harmony. Moreover, Shelton observed that Hopkins's demeanor on stage had changed since he appeared in three New York concerts in the fall of 1960. “Aware that his fame has spread far from his home in Houston,” Shelton commented, “Mr. Hopkins seems more expansive on stage, and the audience seems more receptive to his subtle showmanship and wry humor.”
²

About three weeks later, on May 17, 1962, Shel Kagen supervised a live recording of Lightnin' at the Second Fret, a folk club in Philadelphia. The resulting LP was called
Hootin' the Blues
and was issued two years later by Prestige, which timed its releases in an effort to not oversaturate the marketplace with Lightnin's recordings. Lawrence Cohn wrote the liner notes and recounted his meeting with Lightnin' when he came to New York City to perform at Carnegie Hall in 1960. “A man of many, many moods (some of which must baffle even Lightnin' himself),” Cohn wrote, “he can be sullen and brooding, pompous and sarcastic and yet, in his own way and to his own personal desire and satisfaction, charming and coy—possessed of an unbelievable naiveté in respect to many worldly considerations and matters.” Yet Cohn maintained the coffee-house setting of the Second Fret enhanced Lightnin's music: “His sharpness and magnificent delivery have never been presented in better light and quite possibly, the atmosphere created by the live audience to which Lightnin' can work is responsible.”
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Bobby Robinson, when he issued his LP
Mojo Hand
on his Fire label in 1962 with the recordings he had made with Lightnin' two years earlier, took a different approach. In his liner notes Robinson wrote, seemingly in response to the intel-lectualism of folk and blues revival writers: “With so much having been said about the man, Samuel ‘Lightnin' Hopkins … has been probed, by every important committee on un-musical activities, even an attempt at assassination by the Mafia'd of Snobdom, and each time came out completely exonerated—there is no room or need for additional dissertation on the great personable career of this titan of the blues. Lightnin' stands today, as he has for more than a decade, a giant in the field of focus.”
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Robinson then went on to tout, tongue-in-cheek, the fidelity of his album and its presentation of “a new dimension in recorded sound … the aroma of his cigar, the open flask and the odors incident to and usually manifested as a result of the proximity of instruments and bodies, is evident and oozes up and out from every groove.”
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Robinson, based in Harlem for decades, understood his audience, and while the records he released had crossover appeal, judging from the charting success of not only Hopkins but Elmore James, Buster Brown, and others, he had a solid following in the African American community.