Kertojan Ääni: Sam Lightnin' Hopkins (ENGLISH)

That Woman named Mary

LIGHTNIN' STRIKES TEXAS

Sam Hopkins was one of Abe and Frances Hopkins' six children and was born on March 16, 1912, in Centerville, Texas, in a small farm town north of Houston. Hopkins's musician father, Abe, was killed over a card game when Sam was only three, and Sam's grandfather had hung himself to escape the indignities of slavery. After his father died, Sam's mother, Francis Sims Hopkins, moved him and his four brothers and one sister to Leona, Texas.

When Sam was eight, he made his first guitar out of a cigar box and chicken wire. His brother Joel taught him the basic chords, but it was at the feet of Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson that Hopkins began his real blues education. Hopkins met Jefferson around 1920 at a Baptist Church Association meeting in Buffalo, Texas. Jefferson was singing and playing for the crowd; Hopkins, who was only eight, got behind the stage and joined in. At first Jefferson was angered, but when he noticed that Hopkins was just a boy, he softened and showed Hopkins a few licks.

It wasn't too much later that Hopkins left home to hobo through Texas playing in the streets, at picnics, parties, and dances--often just for tips. Even at the age of eight he knew he wasn't willing to live the hard life most Texas blacks faced in those days. "Chop that cotton for six bits a day, plow that mule for six bits a day--that wasn't in storage for me," he told Les Blank in the film documentary The Sun's Gonna Shine. Particularly since Lightnin’ claimed to have left home to become a traveling musician at age 8 he had very little schooling and remained functionally illiterate his entire life.

Hopkins eventually reconnected with Jefferson and for a time served as his guide. Then in the late 1920s Hopkins formed what was to be a long-running duo with his cousin, blues singer Alger "Texas" Alexander. The two played the Houston bar circuit and toured eastern Texas.

Apparently he married Elamer Lacey sometime in the 1920s, and they had several children. When Hopkins married, he and his first wife hired themselves out to Tom Moore, a farmer whose callousness Hopkins immortalized in the song, "Tom Moore's Blues." but by the mid-1930s Lacey, frustrated by his wandering lifestyle, took the children and left Hopkins.

During this era Hopkins was chronically short of money. Hopkins was a bristly fellow, one who enjoyed his alcohol rather too much, who gambled away what little money he earned from his music, who had a very violent streak, and a very highly developed ego. He spent (by his own reckoning) a dozen or more stretches in jail for assault and related charges. But with the right people, he could be a bosom friend and companion, in particular with the woman he called his “wife”, who actually had a legal husband and children with whom she continued to live at night while spending her days with Hopkins.

At one point he was sentenced to a chain gang for committing adultery with a white woman. He probably also served time in the Houston County Prison Farm in the late 1930s. After the last sentence Hopkins moved to Houston with Alexander in an unsuccessful attempt to break into the music scene there. After working on the railroads and singing on the streets, By the early 1940s he was back in Centerville working as a farm hand.

In 1943 Hopkins married his third wife, Antoinette Charles, and moved to a large farm north of Dallas, where he worked for a time as a sharecropper. Around 1946, he was given a new guitar by a family friend, "Uncle" Lucian Hopkins. That inspired Sam to move back to Houston where he teamed up with his old partner Tex Alexander to play the local beer joints.

Instrumental guitar jamming

Cotton

CALIFORNIA DREAMING

The pair was dishing out their lowdown brand of blues in Houston's Third Ward in 1946 when talent scout Lola Anne Cullum came across them. She had already engineered a pact with Los Angeles-based Aladdin Records for another of her charges, pianist Amos Milburn, and Cullum saw the same sort of opportunity within Hopkins' dusty country blues. Alexander wasn't part of the deal; instead, Cullum paired Hopkins with pianist Wilson Smith, And Aladdin Records executive decided the pair needed more dynamism in their names and so he dubbed Wilson "Thunder" Smith and Sam "Lightnin'' Hopkins. In the same year 1946 They recorded twelve tracks in their first sessions in Los Angeles. "Katie Mae Blues," his first single, was a hit around Houston. Hopkins recorded more sides for Aladdin in 1947.

After a few years Hopkins had grew homesick and left Aladdin and contracted with Houston's Gold Star Records back in Houston, Texas. Hopkins insisted that record company owner Bill Quinn pay him $100 cash per song at the recording sessions; he was convinced that he woud be ripped off otherwise. Looking back, however, historians have commented that this arrangement caused Hopkins to lose large sums in royalties.

Through the early 1950s, Hopkins recorded for small labels and hit Billboard magazine's r'and'b Top 10 with songs like "T Model Blues" & "Coffee Blues." His uptempo numbers of this era helped to pioneer rock and roll, but rock's teenage audience had little interest in Hopkins himself. To make matters worse, his original black audience also abandoned him for a more teen-oriented sound. Given his declining popularity, record companies lost interest in Hopkins, and he stopped recording as a popular artist in 1956.

Coffe Blues

Katie May Blues

REDISCOVERED BY McCORMICK

Scarcely three years after his exit from the popular marketplace, Hopkins was "discovered" by Houston folklorist Robert "Mack" McCormick and introduced to a college-educated audience, which saw the blues as "folk music." That same year folklorist Samuel Charters devoted a chapter of his book called The Country Blues to Hopkins and recorded a whole album of Hopkins's material for release on Folkways.

When labels realized that Hopkins's sparse acoustic guitar and understated prose appealed to white audiences, they rushed to record him. By the early 1960s Lightnin' Hopkins reputation as one of the most compelling blues performers was cemented. In 1962 he won Down Beat magazine's International Jazz Critics' Poll in the New Star, Male Singer category. He had finally earned the success and recognition which were overdue.

Through the 1960s and into the 1970s Hopkins released one or sometimes two albums a year and toured, he travelled widely in the United States, and overcame his fear of flying to join the 1964 American Folk Blues Festival; visit Germany and the Netherlands 13 years later. He became one of the post-World War 11 blues’ most prolific talents. He toured Europe and completed hundreds of sessions for scores of major and independent labels.

But while his fame grew, his attitude toward his career remained much the same as it had when he was roaming around Texas. "He hated to fly, and refused to have a telephone," Les Blank wrote in Living Blues. "He turned down tour offers of $2,000 a week yet played in small rough Houston bars for $17 a night."

Mojo Hand

Mr Charlie scene from The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin Hopkins

LAST YEARS

In 1967 Hopkins was featured in Les Blank’s short subject documentary, The Sun’s Gonna Shine. It is a documentary about young Sam Hopkins dreaming of reaching something better with his music. Another documentary came at the following year, The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, which won a Gold Hugo Award at the Chicago Film Festival as the best documentary of 1970. These are one of the best blues based documentarys ever made.

He became less active after being injured in a car crash in 1970 that put his neck in a brace and initiated a steady decline in his health. Nevertheless, he maintained a compulsive work rate during the 1970s, touring the United States, Canada, and Europe. He travelled to Japan to play a six-city tour of in 1978.

He died of cancer of the esophagus on January 30, 1982 in Houston, Texas, at the age of 69. By the time of his death, Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins was likely the most recorded blues artist in history.
Remembering Hopkins, filmmaker Blank told Drust, "He was a clown and oracle, wit and scoundrel. Like Shakespeare, he had an understanding of all people and all their feelings. He [was] an eloquent spokesman for the human soul which dwells in us all."