Alan Govenar (31 page)

Lightnin' Hopkins and Antoinette Charles (seated), Gothenburg, Sweden, 1977. ©
PHOTOGRAPH BY ERIK LINDAHL

Lightnin' Hopkins, Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1977.
COURTESY OF HANS KRAMER

Lightnin' Hopkins memorial by Jim Jeffries, Crockett, Texas, 2007.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN GOVENAR

Lightnin' Hopkins grave marker, Forest Park Cemetery, Houston, Texas, 2007.
PHOTOGRAPH BY ALAN GOVENAR

7

I
n 1966, Trident Press, a division of Simon & Schuster, published J. J. Phillips's novel,
Mojo Hand
(later reprinted as
Mojo Hand: An Orphic Tale),
which is loosely based on an affair she was in the midst of with Lightnin' Hopkins. While the book is fiction, many readers have assumed the biographical fallacy and interpreted the book as thinly disguised autobiography, with Phillips as the character Eunice, and Lightnin' as the blues singer Blacksnake Brown, with whom she was obsessed. In fact, the novel is significantly different than the actual affair. Unraveling the facts of the relationship is revealing as a means to illuminate the life of the man behind the music. Little is known about Hopkins's private life and the experiences that informed the self-styled autobiography of his blues.

Phillips's story elucidates some of the social and cultural dynamics surrounding Lightnin's career and life that are much more complex than had been previously thought. While a close examination of Hopkins's discography and the continuous stream of record releases serves to debunk the myth of “rediscovery,” his day-to-day life experiences, as recounted by Phillips, offer a window into his currency and vitality among African Americans.

Phillips was born April 2, 1944, and grew up in a progressive African American family in Los Angeles. “My immediate family was assimilated, atheist, and were for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Caucasians in visage and speech. My immediate family was also neither ‘color struck' nor class bound. My mother's family came to Los Angeles from Austin, Texas, and the Kansas prairies in the 1880s. My mother attended UCLA, and taught elementary school for 60 years in the public school system. My father was a claims examiner for the State Department of Employment. His father, who knew Classical Greek and Latin, had been a professor of Belles Lettres and Modern Languages around the turn of the twentieth century at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, a historically black college, where he received his education. In the early 1920s, he moved his family to Pasadena, California, and became that city's first African American attorney and real estate developer, and he was active in the early civil rights community. I grew up in a neighborhood that was quite diverse as to ethnicity and class, and consequently, from early on I was exposed to varieties of cultural expression, including dress, food, music, languages, dialects, idiolects, ways of looking at the world and inhabiting it.”
¹

Phillips became interested in black roots music while she was a freshman at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in 1962: “That year, the musicologist Peter Yates came to the Art Department to give a series of lectures on American music. In addition to introducing us to the music of Charles Ives, John Cage, Harry Partch, and other avant-garde American composers, Yates played old Southern music, white and black, including African American work and prison chants and shouts, as well as the music of Leadbelly, and other kinds of music that predated the blues. I loved it all, but was especially drawn to the chants and to Leadbelly's music. It grabbed me. I was living in the dorm. The folk music scene was burgeoning at that time; we all listened to Baez and Dylan, Odetta, old country bands, wailing women from the hollows of Appalachia. Several of us got guitars and tried to play along, I among them. I took a few lessons in basic folk guitar and tried my hand at various styles.”
²

That summer after completing her freshman year, Phillips traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to join the civil rights movement. She worked on a voter registration campaign administered by the National Students Association, and later joined a CORE-sponsored sit-in at a Howard Johnson's restaurant. She was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in the county jail. Once she was released, she flew back to California, and as the fall semester geared up, the nuns at Immaculate Heart College saw her as a problem. “My life had not been consciously touched by racism,” Phillips says, “until I came to Immaculate Heart, and I was ill-equipped to handle it. Even then, the school prided itself on being liberal and progressive; and I could not compass the fact that I'd gone to Raleigh to help eradicate racism, I'd gone to jail
and
I'd been a passenger in a car that was chased by the Klan—I literally put my life on the line for my convictions, only to return to Los Angeles to be done in by the very beast I had gone South to slay—at the very institution I had naively put my trust in. In despairing rage and frustration, I was driven to repudiate everything I had previously known and aspired to.”
³

In reaction to what had happened to her, Phillips says, “I consciously began to explore African American culture, and as I delved more into black roots music, I came across Samuel Charters's book,
The Country Blues.
I cannot remember whether or not this was the first time I had ever heard of Lightnin' Hopkins, but it was the first time he caught my attention, and after reading Charters's description of him, I was immediately captivated, both by the man Charters described and by what his music seemed to promise. I bought a couple of Lightnin's albums and was extremely put off by his music when I first listened to him.
⁴
I don't know just what I'd expected, but what I heard was so raw and direct that I couldn't handle it, neither the blues nor the boogies. The more I listened, the more I came to like it, and soon I was hooked.”
⁵

The elusive Lightnin' that Charters depicted in his book also intrigued Phillips, and she wanted to go to Houston to see if she could track him down as Charters had done. “I and one of my roommates, Krista Balatony, who was very blond and from Austria (now clinical professor of law emerita at the University of Wisconsin), decided we were going to find Lightnin'. Krista and I went to Houston over Thanksgiving break [1962], telling our parents that we were going to spend the holiday at a friend's home in Montecito. We took the Sunset Limited, hoboing in coach by keeping one step away from the conductor.” They were worried that they were too light skinned and that Lightnin' might reject them for this reason, even though Phillips was in fact African American: “As the train neared Houston, we slathered ourselves with Man Tan [an early sunless tanning cream] so we'd look darker and less conspicuous, but instead of imparting the desired degree of brownness to our skin, we turned a ghastly yellow ochre, as if we were jaundiced and in the terminal stages of liver disease. We couldn't wash it off; it took several days to fade. We felt so foolish. That was my brilliant idea.”
⁶

When they got to Houston, they checked into a hotel on Dowling Street and asked around for Lightnin'. “Krista recalls that we met a fellow who told us he knew where Lightnin' lived, but said that he wouldn't be at home until much later that night. The three of us then went to our hotel and waited around, it seemed interminably, until about two in the morning, when the man declared that Lightnin' would now be at home. He walked us over to Mama's Place on Hadley Street, just a few blocks from the hotel, where we found Lightnin' in his room, and we introduced ourselves. He told us he'd be playing the next night at a honky tonk called the Snowboat Lounge, and we could see him play there. The meeting was brief; we bid him adieu, ditched our new friend, and returned to the hotel to get some much needed sleep.

“Sometime the next day, I got a call from one of Lightnin's minions, perhaps Billy Bizor, instructing me to repair to a particular alley nearby and wait for Lightnin' to meet me there. It was all very cloak and dagger, but I followed his instructions. I don't remember what time of day it was, but I did meet Lightnin', who was in his car, with his shades on. He wanted to know who we were. He and I exchanged a few words. He seemed very enigmatic, and soon he was gone, crunching gravel as he slowly drove away. I don't know what he said to me or what I said—or more probably stammered—to him in that encounter. I might well have said something very brash and outrageous, such as ‘Hey, I like your music and I want to be your woman.'

“That night, we showed up at the Snowboat Lounge and immediately became the cynosure of all eyes in this rather raucous juke joint—especially blond, vivacious Krista, whom everyone called ‘Crystal.' I was fairly oblivious to the stir we caused in the club and on Dowling Street because my objective was to meet Lightnin'. I was surprised that people did not simply sit quietly and listen, then applaud demurely when a song or a set was over. They drank and ate and talked while the music was playing, and sometimes whooped and hollered. But it was nothing akin to a supper or folk club atmosphere, either. There was no raised stage or special lighting. Lightnin' was just a few feet away from the audience, and frequently directly interacted and bantered with them, as individuals and as a group, drawing them in, weaving them into his performance, cracking jokes, making up timely verses on the spot, directing songs or lines of songs to specific people, who would counter with wisecracks and perhaps get up and dance.

“We returned the next night as well. Krista says that there was an after-hours room at the rear of the club, where people continued partying into the wee hours, while Lightnin' played and sang. I had my guitar and jammed with him in the after-hours room both nights, though I have only a very dim memory of this. I could barely play the guitar at this time, and cringe at the thought that I could have had that much chutzpa.”
⁷