Alan Govenar (44 page)

While the circumstances surrounding Lightnin's death have left many questions unanswered, it is clear that Antoinette, over the thirty-five years of their affair, did help Lightnin' considerably, loving him, cooking for him, encouraging him to control his drinking, and providing a companionship that ultimately stabilized his life. Antoinette was his wife in every sense except legal. About Antoinette, Lightnin' once said, “If I had wings as an angel, I'd tell you where I'd fly. I'd fly to the heart of Antoinette and that's where I'd give up to die.”
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Lightnin', Benson says, was more affectionate than he would ever admit. Benson saw Lightnin' and Antoinette hug and sometimes kiss each other in public. “They were close,” Benson said, “and there was no stand-offishness about it. Now in that generation of black people, you don't see public kinds of things. But in terms of his warmth toward her, it was undeniable the love he had for her and she had for him.” However, Antoinette also explained to Benson that Lightnin' had some bad relationships before they got together.

Ultimately, had Antoinette not worked with Harold, and to a lesser extent, Benson, to assist in managing his bookings and keeping track of his recording contracts, he would not have been able to keep up with the revenues associated with his music. By the 1960s some of his records, like those on Arhoolie and Prestige, were not only earning royalties from record sales, but he was beginning to realize income from his compositions via their publishers. However, after Lightnin's death the amount of his royalties increased exponentially. For example, between 1962 and 1982, Lightnin's Prestige albums earned approximately $8,410 in artist royalties and $1,580 in songwriter royalties after fees and expenses were recouped. But since 1983, Antoinette, as Lightnin's heir, has received (from Prestige and its subsequent owners Fantasy and the Concord Music Group) in excess of $47,000 in artist royalties and $245,000 in songwriter royalties from airplay and covers (most notably by Huey Lewis in 1994 and Van Morrison in 2003).
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By comparison, Lightnin's artist royalties from Arhoolie sales, after fees and expenses were recouped, have been relatively low: about $3,900 between 1962 and 1982, and more than $42,000 from 1983 to the present. However, the songwriter royalties from Strachwitz's publishing company Tradition Music have been significantly less: about $2,100 during Lightnin's lifetime, and about $6,000 since his death. While these figures are illuminating, they provide a limited view of Lightnin's earning power. It's difficult to establish how much, if anything, Lightnin' was paid in royalties from his other contracts, especially since he usually sold his songs outright and wanted to be paid a flat fee of $100 per song. But this was not always the case. Prestige agreed to pay Lightnin' an advance of only $500 for each album with a 20-cents-per-LP royalty, and Arhoolie paid about the same.

Yet of all the white producers who recorded Lightnin', Benson said Lightnin' liked Chris Strachwitz the best. “He thought he was the most real, most genuine, and fair person. He thought that Chris genuinely had come through and tried to give what was due to the people who produced the music. He thought Chris was not up to no good, and that he had always proven out what he said. He didn't have too much respect for anybody else in that business, but he never said anything about Chris.”
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For Strachwitz, his working relationship with Lightnin' was an outgrowth of his personal response to the music. In a condolence letter to Antoinette, sent four days after Lightnin' died, Strachwitz wrote: “Meeting him first in 1959 was really a pilgrimage on my part to visit the man I admired most in my life. His voice and music had haunted me since I first heard him sing on his records over the radio in Los Angeles. I think I bought every 78 that came out by him and when I had a chance to go to Houston in 1959 I went…. Once I heard Sam playing in the beer joints making up these songs about anything that happened that day and about the folks right there in front of him I just couldn't believe my ears! I had never heard anything quite like it in my life and have never heard anyone since then who could do this with the intensity Lightning put into his singing. That's what started me thinking about wanting to make records.”
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Over the years Strachwitz had a satisfying relationship with Lightnin', even though he not only paid relatively small advances, but his recordings were never big sellers. Strachwitz said, “I liked being with Lightnin', and I feel we were able to connect in a very personal way. From the first time I met him, I had a sense that he was impressed or moved by the fact that I was simply a fan of his music and was so enthusiastic about him that I came all the way from California just to meet him, because all the other white guys that came his way were simply there to record him. And this held true through our years of knowing each other and carried into my interest in recording him and trying to get him booked in California. It wasn't just a business thing. We'd hang out with each other. I'd drive to Los Angeles to pick him up after he finished at the Ash Grove, and took him to Berkeley, where he stayed often, first in my apartment, and then at my house, sometimes with Antoinette. I spent a lot of time with him. I took him fishing; we went to Golden Gate Racetrack to watch them ponies run. I'd make him eggs for breakfast. He liked my down-home cooking. In the early days in the 1960s, I was totally devoted to Lightnin' and the other musicians (such as Mance Lipscomb and Fred McDowell) that I brought out here.

“One time I was driving Lightnin' to play at the Little Theatre in Carmel, California and I stopped at my mother's house. She actually cooked a chicken for us—although she was not known to cook much at all! My sister Frances—who was working in Germany when I went with Lightnin' with the AFBF in ‘64—remembered meeting us back stage in Frankfurt and when I introduced her to Lightnin'—he at once told her how our mother cooked a chicken for us when he played in Carmel!

“But by the 1970s, I didn't see Lightnin' as often. He became so busy and played extended gigs at bigger venues, like the Fillmore. And by then, he had recorded tons of stuff. The last time I saw him was in San Francisco a year before he died. He played so good—that electric box sounded like those sides he did for Herald—some of my favorites.”
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Strachwitz felt that Antoinette had essentially saved Lightnin's life, and in his condolence letter to her, he wrote: “I … want to let you know how he admired and loved you…. He would always tell me how you got him off the wine and really saved him—I am sure Sam would have left us much earlier if you had not been with him over the years—but you had a strong influence on him in many ways.”
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In assessing Lightnin's legacy, it is difficult to come to a definitive conclusion. John Corry, writing in the
New York Times
in 1980, wrote that “Sam ‘Lightnin' Hopkins … may just possibly be the single greatest influence upon rock guitarists,” though this was clearly an overstatement.
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It's not to say that he didn't have an impact upon many blues and blues/folk/rock musicians. Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jimmie Vaughan, Anson Funderburgh, and Billy Gibbons, among other white blues rockers, as well as singer/songwriters Townes Van Zandt, Steve Earle, John David Bartlett, and Bernie Pearl, have certainly acknowledged his influence, as did his cousin Albert Collins, Juke Boy Bonner, Johnny Copeland, Joe Hughes, Texas Johnny Brown, and Freddie King.

Moreover, Lightnin' influenced blues players in not only Southern states, such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, but in other regions of the country and abroad. In Baton Rouge, for example, Lightnin' Slim (a.k.a. Otis Hicks) even appeared to have taken his nickname from Hopkins. Lightnin' was an effective songwriter, who had a fairly simple guitar style that could be readily grasped and imitated by beginning blues guitarists.
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“A lot of times you have people,” Benson remarked, “especially white musicians, who have used Lightnin' as a way to push their own career. Everybody can go back and say Lightnin' influenced them, and say ‘I played with Lightnin' Hopkins,' but Lightnin' was the kind of guy who let anybody come up on the stage, not that they could stay now, because if they couldn't play, or they pissed him off, he'd chase them off the stage as quick as he would let them on. So anybody could come to any show, and say, ‘Lightnin', can I play with you tonight?' And he'd say, ‘C'mon, get on up there.' So when people come back and say, ‘I played with Lightnin' Hopkins,' they weren't necessarily the people who were steady. For example, Rusty [Hill], a red-headed guy, was a bass player Lightnin' preferred cause Rusty had a family. He would drive his own car to wherever Lightnin' went, and Lightnin' liked Rusty. So he would always get me to go find Rusty to play. Tommy Shannon, who played with Stevie Ray, was another one he liked. He played with Lightnin' all the time. So he would tell me to find Tommy to play bass. Lightnin' thought of Stevie [Ray Vaughan] the way he thought of all these other guys. And he knew Jimmie [Vaughan] before he knew Stevie because we played at the Texas Chitlin' Cook-off at Manor Downs in Austin with the Thunderbirds. They were all just young. Lightnin' didn't care too much for young guys, period. He thought they were pretty much full of shit like he had been at that age. And then, by them being young white guys, he didn't really trust them as such. He thought they were good bands, but they were white kids mimicking something. It was rarefied. It was imitation.”
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Lightnin' understood his importance as a bluesman, though he was sometimes prone to gross exaggeration. During the shooting of
The Blues According to Lightinin Hopkins,
he stated that not only had he “learned B. B. King the notes that he make. He learned them off Po' Lightnin',” but that “the last of the blues is left here and the ones that's trying to do it right now they … after Po' Lightnin' Hopkins.”
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A decade later, Lightnin' reiterated this point in an interview in the
New York Times
and maintained that “the last of the blues is almost gone … and the ones who doin' it now got to either get a record or sit ‘round me and learn my songs, ‘cause that all they can go by.”
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Throughout his career, Lightnin' mythologized himself, especially when he began to have a white audience, in part because he wanted to impress his listeners with the vast scope of his experience, but also due to the fact that certain myths were nurtured and fueled by collectors and the media. The perpetuation of misinformation as it relates to Lightnin's life underscores the complexities and difficulties in separating the myth from the man. On one hand, Lightnin' wanted to please those around him, whether his family, girlfriends, wives, friends, or record producers or blues fans, but at the root, he was a survivor. If survival meant leaving town, violating a contract, or not showing up for a gig, he did what he needed to do. “He didn't really care,” Harold recalled. “He'd always say, ‘Let him sue me, Doc.'”
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He often referred to himself as “Po' Lightnin'” in his songs to elicit sympathy as he carried on in a talking blues about anything that came into his mind. But he wasn't just speaking for himself. He was every man who had suffered and struggled and fought to make a living and to find some joy in the midst of the hardships of daily life. The songs he wrote gave voice to the swirling emotions of the world around him, the fears, anxieties, and aspirations of his generation of American Americans. He soaked up what was around him, whether it was what people said or what he heard, and he put it all into his blues. The lyrics spoke with a raw honesty and a bitter irony about the foibles of everyday life, but imbedded in the words there was at times a humor and genuine compassion for what he knew his listeners might be faced with and going through.

Lightnin's music accentuated the social injustices and intense emotions that informed the civil rights era, although Lightnin' himself was not known to participate in rallies or marches. Few of his songs were topical in nature, although “Slavery” and “Tim Moore's Farm” were protest songs, and he did sing about World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Principally, Lightnin' voiced the yearnings and adversities of African Americans who moved away from the sharecropper farms and boll weevil-ravaged cotton fields of East and Central Texas to Houston's Third Ward. But by the late 1960s, when his audience had become predominantly white, it was difficult for him to gauge what his white listeners were feeling. They didn't whoop and holler and call out to him in the way people in a juke joint in the Third Ward might have done. White listeners may have misunderstood some of the metaphors and subtlety in his songs, and perhaps missed the innuendos and humor, though they were nevertheless captivated by his on-stage presence—his spiffy suits, polished shoes, gold-capped teeth, and Ray-Ban sunglasses.

When asked why he wore sunglasses all the time, he simply said, “I'm a hidin' man. I been hidin' all my life.” He sometimes said he wore sunglasses because of a “lazy eye,” but he told others that bright lights bothered him. However, he knew that sunglasses made him cool; other musicians tried to copy his style, but he had essentially defined the look. “They taken my habit to try to take my stuff,” Lightnin' maintained, “and ain't but one thing they can do and that is wear shades. Because they can't do what I do. They tries … all these cats here be hip by Lightnin' Hopkins.”
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When Hopkins would say, “Lightnin' change when Lightnin' change,” he was not only telling his sidemen they needed to be ready, he was expressing exactly who he was. In performance, he had a general sense of where he wanted to go, but didn't know exactly how he was going to get there until he started into a song. At its best, his blues were a seamless dialogue between words and guitar, a largely improvised conversation not only between him and his instrument, but also between him and those who were listening. It's difficult to tell which lyrics are his, and which are from other sources, but in performance it didn't seem to matter.