Alan Govenar (25 page)

One night, Lyons recalled, “Hopkins was between songs, and some asshole in the back yelled out, ‘Sing, nigger!' Hopkins ignored him. He repeated himself, somewhat louder. After a bit, Hopkins looked back and adjusted his glasses and said, ‘What chew [sic] want?' The drunk yelled out again and Hopkins said, ‘What?' He straightened his glasses with irritation. By now the guy was really yelling and looked like a real fool. Finally Hopkins said, ‘Well, I can't play the song for you if I can't hear what you're asking for,' and continued his set, cool to his toes.”
¹⁹

By 1964, Lightnin' had had considerable experience performing in white clubs, though the Bird Lounge was a much tougher scene than the Jester on Westheimer in Houston, which was more like the folk clubs of New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. Lightnin' was on the road a lot during this period, and he traveled often between Houston, the West Coast, and New York City, though he still avoided airplanes and took the bus and train as often as he could. On May 4 and 5, he recorded enough material for two LPs—
Soul Blues
and
Down Home Blues
—for Prestige/Bluesville, probably at Gold Star in Houston with overdubbing by Gaskin and Lovelle at Rudy Van Gelder's studio in New Jersey. The recordings were technically well produced and were essentially free form improvisations by Lightnin' on songs, ranging from “I Like to Boogie” to “Just a Wristwatch on My Arm.” But again, musically, there was little new.

After Lightnin' returned from the East Coast, he headed off to California to play at the Cabale, where Strachwitz recorded him with Barbara Dane. The session wasn't planned, but emerged somewhat spontaneously. Strachwitz was recording Dane on Thursday afternoon, June 18, 1964. When Lightnin' walked in with his guitar and saw Dane on stage, he wanted to join in. “I was making a folk music style record by myself with a guitar,” Dane says. “Chris [Strachwitz] had his machine set up in there, and I had invited Carroll Peery and a few friends to come by so I'd have an audience recording it. And Carroll knew that Lightning was in town and brought him over. And of course, when Lightning saw me with a guitar, you know, up on the stage with a microphone, well, he just had friends there. It was the afternoon, and he assumed it was just a jam. And he pulled out a guitar and started playing along, and then we started to improvise lyrics at each other. That's all. There was no plan to it at all. It was not a normal recording session, and you can see how well he adapted to the situation and just, it's great. It's a wonderful example of how artists on the same wavelength can work together with their own idiosyncrasies. Every solo artist has little special things that they do. If they're really artists, they can sacrifice some of those in the spirit of doing something new together. So he was able to do that.”
²⁰

Dane had performed with Hopkins at different times, both at the Ash Grove and the Cabale. “Whenever I was in the Bay Area,” Dane says, “I would play the Cabale with Lightnin' or opposite Lightnin'.” For Dane, performing with Lightnin' was “always a surprise and a joy. The guy was a great team player…. I'm not anywhere in the league of a guitar player as he was. I'm playing rhythm guitar, and all of the idiosyncrasies that he has in terms of rhythm and meter and everything when he's playing with me … he's right there with me…. It's all improvised.”
²¹

By the time Dane and Hopkins recorded together, they had already become good friends. “I had a personal relationship with him … hanging out back stage, or he'd come by my house. There's a lot of that stuff in the songs. We're jivin' about one time he came over to my house all dressed up, and his cousin drove him over there. He knew I had to split from my husband. I guess he was hoping to see if there was any action there, whatever … it was natural for a musician, a guy on the road, to see how long the reception was; how can I put it? So he came by around dinnertime … I had three children, and … I was getting dinner ready, getting the kids ready for school…. So I kind of welcomed him in and he sat in the parlor. I use the word
parlor
because that's exactly how it was treated, very formally, sitting on the edge of a chair, just paying a social call. And I told him I'm really busy. So he said, ‘That's okay. My cousin's waiting in the car for me anyway.' So it was one of those situations where both parties were protecting their options and protecting their dignity. And he left appropriately.”
²²

Jesse Cahn, Dane's son, remembered Lightnin' coming to their house whenever he was in the Bay Area. “I don't know how young I was when I first met him. I just remember Lightnin' being around, but by the time I was about fifteen, he was staying at Carroll Peery's house in Berkeley and so was I. And some situation had come up, as a crazy fifteen-year-old, I had hit a wall and broken a hole in the door. One of those jilted girlfriend situations or something like that, a typical thing. So I'll never forget … Lightnin' said, ‘When I gets like that, I hit the pillow,' meaning a number of things behaviorally that are pretty obvious, but he was also saying if you want to play guitar, you better take better care of your hands.”
²³
Cahn described Hopkins as a “complete gentleman,” who liked to dress well: “Lightnin' had sweaters and that Mexican
chaleco
that he liked to wear. He wore dapper slacks, really nice shoes, polished Stacy Adams, classic, shined.”
²⁴
On stage, Cahn felt that Lightnin' played the role of a kind of “jester,” and was sometimes self-deprecating when he called himself “Po' Lightnin',” but musically, he was much more versatile than he usually let on. “I remember one time,” Cahn says, “I don't know if it was during a sound check, but he was on stage. I was about fifteen years old and I used to clean the bathrooms and sweep up the inside of the Cabale. And I'm watching him, and he's playing his usual blues thing, and I turn away and remember hearing these jazz chords, and I turn around and he's playing these jazz chords and he's looking dead pan right at me and then he goes back to his blues thing.”
²⁵

On the Arhoolie release, titled
Sometimes I Believe She Loves Me,
Dane and Hopkins engaged in a kind of blues dialogue, and “made up stuff, taking it [their relationship] to a further degree, acting like there was really some kind of thing going on there, which there wasn't.”
²⁶
The lyrics are suggestive, humorous, teasing, and sometimes silly.

In the LP's title song, Lightnin' begins by singing:

And Dane answered:

Lightnin' replied:

Overall, Dane and Hopkins's blues dialogue is entertaining; the guitar work is tight, but at times rambling, and the lyrics have a drive that evokes the spirit of improvisation and the joy of swapping words and music on a Thursday afternoon for a small audience of friends and family.

When Lightnin' got back to Texas, he mostly played around Houston, though he did perform as part of the KHFI festival at Zilker Park in Austin on July 13, 1964, with Mance Lipscomb, Carolyn Hester, John Lomax Jr., and Mickey and Marty. Over the course of the summer, Lightnin' didn't travel much, though he was no doubt thinking about the American Folk Blues Festival that he had agreed to earlier that year. His dread of air travel meant he was even more apprehensive by the time Strachwitz arrived in Houston to fly with him to Germany. “We took a United or American plane from Houston to New York, New York to Frankfurt,” Strachwitz says, “In those days, it was a charter flight, it wasn't the system they've got now. Air India was one of the ones that had one plane a day flying around. I think the whole fleet had three planes. And if one got stuck some place, then you got stuck. Anyway, we got on this Air India plane. I think it was one of those back loading ones where you crawl in on the back, and I remember Lightnin' and I were already sitting in our seats and the crew walks in. And Lightnin' turns to me, ‘Chris, these people are going to fly this airplane?' I said, ‘Ya, they're good, you know.' And it only dawned on me later on that he had never encountered these East Indians, except as ‘hoodoo' people down in Louisiana.”
²⁷

When they finally landed in Frankfurt, Lightnin' was a wreck: “He was just sickened. He couldn't play. We called a doctor and they couldn't find anything wrong with him. And thank God, we had a whole week in Baden-Baden for the television program that Joachim Berendt had arranged for and had apparently paid for much of the whole tour. So they put him on the last day of the week. By that time, he sort of regained his ability to play. I think he had a nervous breakdown.”
²⁸

During the TV recordings, the German photographer Stephanie Wiesand took an interest in Lightnin' and realized his mysterious illness was psychosomatic. “I was looking after Lightnin',” she recalled; he “spent quite some time at my kitchen table and on a sun chair on my balcony [located in Baden-Baden]. Lightnin' recovered under my supervision, after providing him with his beloved soul food (steaks, etc.).”
²⁹
Lightnin' was very grateful to Wiesand, and the following spring, on March 17, 1965, enshrined his memories of her in a song he recorded with his brother Joel Hopkins for Chris Strachwitz, who simply called the loosely structured tune “Two Brothers Playing (Going Back to Baden-Baden).”
³⁰

Strachwitz felt Hopkins “must have been scared shitless that these damn hoodoo people were going to fly that airplane. That was his big thing. ‘I'm gonna get me a mojo hand, so I can fix my woman so that she can have no other man,' and all this stuff. He really believed in that.”
³¹
In any event, once Lightnin' got better, he was able to perform and by all accounts was well received during the tour that included Sonny Boy Williamson, Hubert Sumlin, Willie Dixon, Clifton James, Sunnyland Slim, Sleepy John Estes, Hammie Nixon, John Henry Barbee, Sugar Pie DeSanto, and Howlin' Wolf.

After playing for German TV in Baden-Baden, the American Folk Blues Festival went to Strasbourg, where it was featured at the Palais des Fêtes. Francis Hofstein, who was then a student at the University of Strasbourg, was at the performance, and after the show he got a chance to meet Hopkins. Like many in Europe at that time, Hofstein was excited to see Lightnin' because he viewed him as a kind of myth or legend, but ultimately he didn't get much of a response. “He was detached, but present,” Hofstein says. “I asked him some questions: How is it to be in France? And he wasn't very interested, but then I asked him when we were leaving together if he would come again to France or to Europe and he said, ‘No.' Like that. And I asked him why. And he just answered, ‘I don't want to die wet.' And that was it.”
³²

From Strasbourg, the festival toured to Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, and back to France for one date in Paris before leaving for Great Britain. Derek Stewart-Baxter in
Jazz Journal
described the festival as the “most important blues event of the year” in England, where there were five dates, presented in association with the National Jazz Federation.

British blues fan Alan Balfour recalled going backstage before Lightnin's show at Croydon's Fairfield Hall concert and asking him to sign an album sleeve. Lightnin' looked at Balfour “over the top of his dark glasses and said rather testily (people were plaguing him like mad for interviews and discographical information) ‘Boy, everybody's bin asking me one damn thing or another. I'll sing you something from that record when I get out there. You're here to hear me sing, ain't ya?'”
³³

In reviewing the concert, Stewart-Baxter wrote: “Good as all this was, it was not until Lightnin' Hopkins ambled on stage that things really began to happen, for he, in his own quiet way, proceeded to take the Fairfield Hall apart. Like all really great performers, Hopkins has the ability to cast a spell over his audience even before uttering a word; and when he commenced to sing and play his guitar the effect was electric. It was a most memorable experience and was to be repeated at every concert. Everything he sang was magnificent from his well-known “Short Haired Woman” to a semi-improvised blues on his fears of air travel. The latter a good example of how Lightnin's music is influenced by every-day events. My only criticism was that his spot was far too short. This man is quite capable of carrying a whole show on his own.”
³⁴

Paul Oliver concurred with Stewart-Baxter in
Jazz Monthly
and wrote: “In the completeness of his performance Lightnin's appearance was the peak spot of the concerts.” Oliver described Hopkins's performance with exacting detail: “Lightnin' came on with the slow tread which earned him his ironic nick-name. He looked sleek and slick, his gold-edged teeth flashing and his newly straightened and brushed-up hair dyed with a positive hair-line. Lightnin' settled down at the chair, picked the strings with elaborate casualness and played as he talked. To the large audience he spoke conversationally as if they were just a handful of people around him. His easy-going manner hardly alters on stage or in club; it is the secret of his success in these unlikely circumstances. Many of his conversational asides must have been virtually incomprehensible to all save a very few collectors … like that ‘one-eyed woman when she cry…' he commented, making reference to a small incident that occurred several years ago and affected him deeply. Hardly a soul could have known what he was talking about but they were happy to be taken into his confidence. ‘Two old women in a foldin' bed …' he sang; then stopped and said, ‘Y'know, it's bad when there's two people in one foldin' bed … ‘specially if they both mens…' The audience picked that up all right. Lightnin' talked about his trip over to Europe. He was still shaken by one air trip and apprehensive of the flight back, for he is very frightened by aircraft. He talked about it and sang ‘Airplane Blues'… ‘Mister Airplane driver, you got po' Lightnin' in your hand …' which was a version of ‘DC-7.' It was indicative of his lack of any self-consciousness or even any real awareness of usual delicacies … that he sang: