Alan Govenar (45 page)

Lightnin' did not want to be told what to do; he spoke his mind through his music. Lightnin' worked when and where he wanted to, and as he gained a white audience, the interest in his music among younger African Americans declined. Nevertheless, his concerts at college campuses were attended widely and introduced young audiences to down-home blues, which evoked a sense of the place that African Americans carried with them as they migrated away from country to the city, looking for new opportunities and a better way of life. As Chris Strachwitz has pointed out, even though Lightnin' spent most of his adult life in Houston, he remained “a real country man.”

Sam Charters described Lightnin' as “the last singer in the grand style. He sang with sweep and imagination, using his voice to reach out and touch someone who listened to him.”
¹⁰¹
For filmmaker Les Blank, Lightnin' was “clown and oracle, wit and scoundrel. Like Shakespeare, he had an understanding of all people and all their feelings. Whether he was singing other people's songs, or as it more often happened, making a song up as he played, Lightnin' Hopkins was a man of all colors and classes, and of all times. He was an eloquent spokesman for the human soul which dwells in us all.”
¹⁰²

While it is tempting to romanticize Lightnin' as a bluesman, one must not lose sight of the extent to which he was plagued by his own personal problems. He drank too much and was ostensibly an alcoholic, who in “Watch Yourself” sang: “I got to get drunk every day to please my mind.” But according to Carroll Peery and others, he was never a sloppy drunk. “He didn't lose control of himself when he was drinking,” Peery said, “because he didn't drink that heavily at any one time. But he drank pretty constantly. When I first met him he was drinking gin and then when we got a little bit of money, he switched to more expensive types of alcohol. He always drank whiskey [Canadian Club], but he started drinking it more consistently after he became more secure economically.”
¹⁰³

As much as Lightnin's creativity may have declined in his later years when he was paid more for playing less and often repeating himself, or re-recording old songs, he was nonetheless a professional who was at any moment capable of a great performance that could surprise and wow even the most jaded. Lightnin', like his contemporaries Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, was an entertainer with an uncanny sense of drama. His movements on stage were measured; he knew he was a “star” for the people who bought the tickets and packed the clubs and festivals where he was often a headliner, and he played what they wanted to hear. Even when he was sloppy, or maybe had too much to drink, he was still worth seeing, especially if one had never seen him before. Everyone who came into contact with Lightnin' Hopkins remembered him. His presence was indelible and imbued those around him with a mix of emotions, from admiration to disdain. While he was generally respected for his blues, his personality was often inscrutable.

Through his songs, he led young and old alike into his past, but could push them back in an instant with a terse phrase or a swipe of his hand. In performance, the audience hung on to every word, from the moment he stepped onto the stage and tipped his hat to the instant when he picked up a guitar and began to play. And when he reared back and muttered a few words, or pulled out a flask of whiskey to take a long sip, no one was impatient. During his last years just about everyone who came to see him knew his songs, but they also knew what they were about to hear would take shape as it was performed. He rarely sang a song the same way twice, and the structure of his songs was often sprawling and rough. If the lyrics were ragged and the metaphors skewed, it rarely mattered; for his devotees, his blues were pure, and he was an oracle.

In the end, regardless of the myths, and the inevitable mix of fact and fiction, Lightnin' was happy that his music had reached such a wide audience. “I don't think in his younger days,” Benson said, “he even imagined that there would be so many young people, so many white people, who would have such a genuine appreciation of his sound. He thought it was naive, but it was genuine. By the end of his life, his music had become sonorous, more than it was an exemplification of a particular social context. It became almost nostalgic, even as it related to the suffering. He knew that the people who bought his records and came to hear him play genuinely cared. They loved it, but it was artificial to the extent that it had been disconnected and removed from the reality that had generated it.”

When asked once about what made him different than anyone else, Lightnin' replied, “A bluesman is just different from any other man that walks this earth. The blues is something that is hard to get acquainted with. Just like death. The blues dwell with you everyday and everywhere.”
¹⁰⁴

T
he first attempt at compiling a Lightnin' Hopkins discography was made by the pioneering blues researcher Anthony Rotante in 1955 for
Discophile
magazine in England. Lightnin's style of blues must have seemed archaic enough at the time for Rotante to feel safe in referring to the subject of his piece in the past tense, unaware that a folk-blues renaissance was just a few years away. After a brief period of inactivity, Lightnin' began recording in earnest again, and (in Colin Escott's memorable phrase) “the world would never again want for a Lightnin' Hopkins record.” By the time of his final studio recording in 1974, he had long since become established as one of the most recorded blues singers of the postwar era.

At the start of Lightnin's career in 1946, recording sessions in the music industry usually followed a predictable pattern: musicians (often members of the musician's union) would gather in a studio with a contracted artist and producer, and would, over the course of three hours or so, record two to eight masters. The musicians would get paid union fees for their work. If their contract called for it, the artist would repeat this scenario two or three times a year. Re-creating such sessions for a discography decades later can be challenging, but there was usually a logic that can be reconstructed without too much effort—particularly if session sheets and union files exist that can help identify dates, locations, and personnels.

None of this applies to Lightnin' Hopkins, who ignored exclusive contracts, did not join the musician's union until the latter stage of his career, and would record as many songs per session as he could get paid for. Session sheets and company files no longer exist for the majority of his recording sessions—and probably, in many cases, never existed in the first place. The chaotic and confusing nature of his discography is testament to the idiosyncratic nature of both Lightnin' and the small, independent producers who recorded him.

How do you bring order out of chaos? We have taken a fresh approach that considers the nature of Lightnin's recordings above the strict rules of discography, rules that sometimes don't even apply to his sessions (and introduce confusion of their own). It is thus divided into two main parts: the years when Lightnin' was a singles artist (1946–1954), and the period in which he was primarily an album artist (1959–1974). Within that scope, we have endeavored to make it as accurate and accessible as possible.

Our methodology is as follows:

Session dates.
All sessions have been listed chronologically in the order in which they were recorded. Educated guesses and estimates are required for nearly everything Lightnin' recorded before 1959, and quite a few dates in the 1960s are speculative as well. We have broken down the sessions to a suggested chronology, but it should be emphasized that the 1946 to 1954 period is
only
suggested. Some singles sessions in which we have listed two songs to have been recorded may have been longer, etc. More difficult questions about longer sessions (such as those for the Sittin' In With and Herald labels) are addressed within the discography.

Location.
We have tried to establish the city and studio in which Lightnin' made each of his recordings. It's well documented that the majority of them were recorded in Houston at Gold Star or ACA Studios. In other cases, we only know the city.

Personnel.
Precisely who plays on Lightnin's recordings was largely pinned down by researchers in the 1960s. Some unknown musicians remain, however, and are unlikely to be identified at this point. We have corrected and updated the known personnel of earlier discographies as much as recent (and recently discovered) research allows. To cite one example: for the past forty years it has been written that Frankie Lee Sims plays slide guitar on Lightnin's 1949 “Jail House Blues,” but we now know from the unpublished research of Laurence Schilthuis that the instrument heard on this session is a steel guitar, played by Harding “Hop” Wilson.

For the album era, each session has been considered individually in relation to the album. Where an album was recorded over different sessions, and featured different personnel, we have either listed the collective personnel, or, when it made more sense, specified which song a particular musician was playing on.

Instrumentation.
Long-held misconceptions in popular writing about when Lightnin' started playing electric guitar have, we feel, made it necessary to establish whether he was playing acoustic or electric guitar on his sessions. Most of his early sessions feature Lightnin' playing a hollowbody electric guitar. After he became established as a folk-blues artist in 1959, he would often record with an acoustic guitar, or (especially live) an acoustic guitar outfitted with an electric pickup. In some cases, the aural differences between acoustic guitar sessions and acoustic-electric ones are not noticeable enough to make a definitive judgment.

Song Order.
The exact song order for most sessions is not known. Therefore, we have arranged sessions to reflect the chronology of songs as they were issued, rather than by master numbers (which serve no purpose in this context). For singles, this means clusters of two songs per side of a 78 rpm or 45 rpm record. In the case of albums, the song order reflects the sequencing of side one and side two of the original albums. Titles in italics represent songs originally unissued from the particular session.

Song Titles.
A great deal of what Lightnin' recorded was later reissued with altered song titles—by accident or design. (To give only one example, generations have been listening to a song titled “I Can't Stay Here in Your Town,” unaware that they are actually hearing the original “Rocky Mountain Blues.”) Other songs were mistitled upon release. A complete list of such titles super-cedes the purpose of this discography; we have only noted when his singles were reissued with altered titles during his early (1946–1954) singles period.

Releases.
Only original issues (or reissues from the same era, in the case of the earliest singles) are listed. We have not tried to address the hundreds of configurations in which these songs have been reissued (and often retitled) since their initial release. Rereleases of the same single have been divided by a slash. Single 45 rpm releases pulled from albums are divided from their LP release number by a semi-colon and a “(45)” prefix.

Album Sessions.
Beginning with his Folkways album in 1959, most of Lightnin's sessions were specifically recorded as albums, or with an album concept in mind. Our discography reflects this change by listing album titles above the session, arranged with the earliest session date for that album (if there were more than one). While this method doesn't eliminate all possible confusion, we feel it makes the most sense in organizing and assimilating this material. Albums that feature sessions that were recorded more than one year apart have been further subdivided by session date. For Various Artists LPs, only Lightnin's songs have been listed.

Mono/Stereo.
All of Lightnin's records prior to the early 1960s were released in monaural. Some of his 1960s albums were available in mono and stereo; these usually have been reissued on compact disc with only the stereo versions. A minority were only available in stereo. As a side point, a large number of Lightnin's early recordings were reissued after 1959 with added reverb to disguise their age. The listener should be aware that many reissues in the compact disc era are still using these inferior, altered sources rather than the original masters or singles.

Release Dates (Albums).
Lightnin's singles were usually released a short time after they were recorded. Albums, on the other hand, were often released months, years, and decades after they were recorded. With this in mind, we have tried to establish release dates for all of Lightnin's original albums. In a few cases, this creates a conflict with the chronology by session dates
(The Rooster Crowed in England
LP is listed before the Folkways album; the latter was released first, but the
Rooster
LP features two songs recorded in 1954), but overall we feel this is the least confusing method of listing these sessions. Estimated release dates on LPs have been based on advertisements and reviews found in
Billboard, Sing Out!, Blues Unlimited, Blues and Rhythm, Jazz Journal, Cashbox, The American Folk Music Occasional, Mother, Juke Blues,
and
Soul Bag.

Lightnin's work as a session musician for other artists (Thunder Smith, L. C. Williams, J. D. Edwards, et al.) has not been included.

In compiling this discography, we have been indebted to all those who came before us: Anthony Rotante, Chris Strachwitz, Mack McCormick, John Holt, Mike Leadbitter, Neil Slaven, Simon Napier, Frank Scott, Chris Smith, and Les Fancourt. For this revision we have been assisted, directly or indirectly, by Dave Sax, Chris Strachwitz, Mack McCormick, Paul Drummond, Mary Katherine Aldin, Richard Flohil, Chris Smith, Don Logan, Stefan Wirz, Bill Bellmont, Ed Pearl, Bernie Pearl, Roger Armstrong, and Alan Govenar. The Huey Meaux Papers at the Center For American History (University of Texas) contain relevant paperwork from the Gold Star era that was crucial in establishing the early chronology. The unpublished research of Laurence Schilthuis, who interviewed both Hopkins and Hop Wilson in 1974, was also helpful. We have also relied upon the following books: