onurblues: Lightnin' Hopkins - Texas Blues Giant (the 1946-1954 recordings, 3xCD set, 2010)

March 25, 2023

Lightnin' Hopkins - Texas Blues Giant (the 1946-1954 recordings, 3xCD set, 2010)

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Po' Lightnin'

Samuel John Hopkins recorded between 800 and 1000 songs in his career! Though famous for his sunglasses he wasn't blind contrary to the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893-1929) that he met around 1920. This encounter impressed the young Sam so much that he built his first guitar using a wood box and making the strings from a chicken house wire screen! He learned how to play it from his older brother Joel.

Hopkins left school and started an itinerant life, working from farm to farm, and also occasionally accompanying Jefferson on guitar at  religious gatherings, Jefferson who reputedly never let anyone play with him except Hopkins. In the late 1920s he teamed up with country blues singer Alger "Texas" Alexander, who was supposedly his distant older cousin, playing for tips at street corners and gigging in some low down blues joints.

1948: promo photo for Goldstar Rec.

The Hopkins-Alexander association was interrupted in the mid-1930s, when Hopkins was sent to Houston County Prison Farm for an offence unknown from Hopkins specialists. Once out, he resumed his duo with Alexander and the pair was playing Houston blues joints again. This was Hopkins crucial formative period during which he honed his personal style of blues.

In 1946, while singing on Dowling Street in Houston's Third Ward, the pair was discovered by one Lola Anne Cullum from Los Angeles label Aladdin Records, who organized a fist recording session : Alexander didn't show up in L.A. and Hopkins was teamed up with pianist Wilson Smith, both recording twelve tracks. Smith's piano can be heard on the first tracks featured on the first of this 3-CD set. To add more pep to the image of their new artists, Aladdin dubbed Wilson “Thunder” and Hopkins “Lightnin'”. He kept the surname.

From then on, Hopkins never stopped recording on multiple labels, sometimes giving them different versions of the same song. He actually put out some hit singles and becoming a local star. But the son killed the father : in the mid-fifties, the electric Chicago blues and above all the newborn rock'n'roll wave broke in making an acoustic Hopkins suddenly sounding old fashioned and sending him back to relative obscurity. This is all the more unfair that some of the fast rocking boogies he recorded during the April 1954 sessions for the Herald label could easily compete with the output of the early rock'n'roll artists. These April 1954 tracks are actually almost entirely featured on CD3 of this set.

In 1959, blues researcher Robert McCormick (some sources affirm it was blues scholar Sam Charters) contacted him hoping to revive his career with the dawning blues & folk revival.

That same year 1959 Hopkins was field-recorded at his Houston home by Charters and the resulting LP released on Folkways Records helped Hopkins to be discovered by a whole new audience. His career then exploded, leading him from the obscure blues joints of Houston to the neat coffee-houses and university circuit, TV programs and later European tour.

Though he toured intensively in the 1960s and early 1970s, Hopkins was in fact a rather reclusive man, afraid of flying, reluctant to leave his native Texas, his city of Houston, and particularly the Dowling Street neighborhood he considered as his home base, and whose people were his main source of inspiration.

With Mance Lipscomb

In 1970, a car crash slowed down his career. From 1974, his health started to decline and though he continued touring, he stayed most of this time away from the studios. He died in January 1982 from a cancer of the esophagus, leaving behind him some 85 records!

This 3-CD set compiles Hopkins early career, from his first sessions for Alladin in 1946 to his 1954 recordings for Herald (on CD3 as mentioned above). Hopkins unique style was basically already forged in these early years, especially his distinctive fingerstyle technique : he played simultaneously bass with his thumb, rhythm on the middle strings and lead on the higher ones, and sometimes percussion by banging his guitar body.

His lyrics, often improvised on the spot in the recording studios, were dealing with the usual blues topics (segregation, bad luck in love…) and he often humorously referred to himself as "Po' Lightnin'".
But one of his most appealing trademark was, at least in his further recordings, his low deep voice, one of a smoker and drinker. In 1968, he gave the best definition of “his” blues to a journalist : “People have learned how to strum a guitar, but they don’t have the soul. They don’t feel it from the heart. It hurts me. I’m killin’ myself to tell them how it is.”

Hopkins was one of the main inspirations for modern Texas blues artists (in a video interview featured on Onurblues, Jimmie Vaughan explains how much Hopkins influenced him, while B.B. King evokes his great influence on blues music in general)… Now, all you have to do is take time to listen to these 82 tracks. I guarantee you will not regret the few hours spent : Lightnin' will illuminate your day! ■

■ Documentaries

With Clifton Chemier

► “The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins”, documentary film by Les Blank & Skip Person, 1967 : https://youtu.be/8oWwhlQUfPY

► Driving around Lightnin' Hopkins' 3rd Ward in Houston : https://youtu.be/CrjlFANoq4g

► Jimmie Vaughan and B. B. King talking about Lightnin' Hopkins' fundamental influence in the history of blues music, followed by Hopkins performing "Lightning's Blues", "Mojo Hand" and "That'd I say?" : https://youtu.be/bCyX8tP_n6s

■ Lightnin' Hopkins' videos