Alan Govenar (14 page)

On one of Charter's trips to California, he met Chris Strachwitz in Berkeley. Strachwitz (b. 1931), a Silesian German immigrant who listened to blues and jazz on British and American Armed Forces Radio in the years after World War II, came to the United States with his family in 1947. Once in California, Strachwitz began to actively collect records. In 1951 he enrolled at Pomona College, where, he says, “I remember hearing this amazing voice [on Hunter Hancock's radio show in Los Angeles] singing: ‘Hello Central, Give me 209/ I want to talk to my baby, She's way on down the line.' … I was just totally wigged out. I was a teenager, rebellious, insecure, skinny, couldn't speak English right. I thought this was paradise; this was heaven. And somehow this voice—that guitar style—Lightnin's sound just kind of haunted me and became really my favorite…. Certain sounds just grab you; that's all there is to it. I could just tell he must have just made this stuff up on the spot, at least that was my conviction. And I kept being a hound for this music, scrounging up 78s.”

After two years at Pomona, Strachwitz transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated after serving in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956. He got a job as a high school social studies teacher, but in his free time he read jazz magazines and continued to collect records. “I bought anything I could find that I had heard on the radio—blues, jazz, hillbilly, anything,” Strachwitz says. “I very rarely would buy a brand new R & B record because they were expensive. They were seventy-nine cents plus tax. But I had discovered Jack's Record Cellar in San Francisco and the Old Englishman on Eddie Street, also in San Francisco, and the Yerba Buena Music Store in Oakland, which specialized in traditional jazz and blues and several record shops in the black neighborhoods. This was a time when 78s had gone out of style and were being dumped because they were being replaced by 45s. Then there were the jukebox operators like the Tip Top Music Company and I had to go and see what they had to sell. They were real cheap and they would sell you records at ten to twenty-five cents a piece, sometimes only a nickel. There I would pick up anything that said ‘blues singer' and ‘guitar.' That's how I got to know that stuff. I was listening to KWBR out of Oakland and deejay Jumpin' George Oxford played people like Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Lightnin' Hopkins.”
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In early 1958, Strachwitz met Charters in Berkeley at a club where Charters had performed with a New Orleans–style jazz band; they started talking and realized they were both record collectors. “I would go over to his place, where he had a trunk full of these old 1920s records that he had picked up at junk stores in the South. Sam was primarily interested in prewar blues and New Orleans jazz. And Sam would in turn come to my place and listen to some of the current blues that I liked—Sonny Boy Williamson, and I played him Lightnin' Hopkins's records because he was one of my favorites. We were probably listening to some of Lightnin's Herald recordings.”
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Charters became more familiar with Lightnin's music, but felt that “something was being lost” as he “turned out more and more records that were simply designed to sell to the teenage rhythm and blues audience. He was using a loud amplified guitar and there were usually a loud bass drummer and bass player to do away with the subtle rhythm that made his earlier records so memorable.”
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At this point, Charters didn't seem to understand that virtually all of Lightnin's recordings had been made with an electric guitar, even those on Aladdin, Gold Star, Sittin' In With, and Jax that he liked the most, because they didn't have bass and drums. As Charters was writing his book
The Country Blues,
he started to feel that Lightnin' was “perhaps the last of the great blues singers,” despite the fact that “his professional career was a series of clumsy mistakes.” Charters believed that “Lightnin' was one of the roughest singers to come out of the South in years…. He was the last singer in the grand style. He sang with sweep and imagination, using his rough voice to reach out and touch someone who listened to him.”
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During the fall of 1958, Charters heard about McCormick from Frederic Ramsey at Folkways, who suggested that Charters contact McCormick in Houston and Asch in New York about recording Lightnin'. By then, Asch had already issued several blues LPs, featuring Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, and was in the process of producing others with Big Bill Broonzy, J. C. Burris, Sticks McGhee, and Memphis Slim.
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McCormick was interested in getting to know Charters and invited him to stay at his house in January 1959. Together they went looking for Lightnin'. One lead led to another, but they couldn't find him the first time they went hunting around the Third Ward. “Everyone was very guarded all the time,” Charters says. “But you could feel safe. No one was going to do anything to this white boy wandering around. I wasn't looking for drugs and I wasn't looking for sex, and so this meant I wasn't fitting into the categories in which I could easily be placed. I was just the right age and build to be a young cop. I was wearing a knit shirt and chinos. I was not prepossessing.”
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A pawnbroker who had two of Lightnin's guitars had an address for him in his files. When they got to the house, he wasn't home, though a young boy directed them to Lightnin's sister, who suggested they check two or three bars that Lightnin' was known to frequent, but he wasn't there either. Frustrated, they went back to McCormick's house, and the next morning, while McCormick was busy, Charters went to Dowling Street to look around. “And on that day, he found me,” Charters says. “Everyone was aware that I was moving around through the ghetto looking for Lightnin', and everyone was reporting this to Lightnin'. The cab drivers were watching me, and I'm sure they all knew where he was. But who was I? And finally the word was passed onto Lightnin'. So I was stopped at a red light in my coupe and a car pulled up beside me and there was a man with sunglasses saying, ‘You lookin' for me?' And I said, ‘Are you Lightnin' Hopkins?' And Lightnin' said, ‘Yeah.' So he found me. I had been checked out and the decision was that I was safe.”
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They both pulled over, and Charters told Lightnin' that he wanted to record him. Lightnin' was interested, but he had pawned his guitars, a fact that implied that he wasn't playing music at the time. “Lightnin' was wearing Salvation Army clothes, baggy, grey, no color at all,” Charters says. “He was poor.”
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When they got to the pawnshop, Lightnin' wanted his electric guitar, but Charters picked the acoustic because he knew that was what the white folk audience wanted to hear. As much as Lightnin' may have preferred the electric, he didn't object. He needed the money and certainly knew that he could play either instrument well. But the acoustic wasn't in very good shape, and apparently Lightnin' hadn't played it in some time. “I had to get him some strings,” Charters recalls, “but as we passed some school kids, Lightnin' began playing with the five strings, playing more guitar than I'd ever heard, playing ‘Good Morning Little School Girl.'” Finally, after getting some guitar strings, they went to Lightnin's rented room at 2803 Hadley Street, where Charters recorded him with a single Electrovoice microphone and his portable Ampex tape recorder.

“Lightnin' had a room in the back. It was a quiet street. The room was small, it had a bed, one chair, and it was in the back of the house…. I sat on the bed holding the microphone while Lightnin' sat in the chair in the room, and we made the record that afternoon.” Charters says that Lightnin' introduced him to his “wife,” named Ida Mae, but she didn't say much. She was “watchful, and very aware that it was a complicated situation, and she made nice, as simple as that.”
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No one had ever come to Lightnin's residence to record him. He had always gone to a studio, and the presence of this equipment crowded into Lightnin's bedroom, with a white man holding a microphone in front of him while he played and sang, must have seemed very strange. Charters had had fieldwork experience, but for Lightnin' and Ida Mae, the circumstances were completely new.

After a couple of songs, Lightnin' thought he was done. “I had not only asked Lightnin' to play the acoustic guitar,” Charters remembers, “but I was consistently asking him to play the old songs. This was new to him, and with that I could only give him three hundred dollars [the equivalent of about $2,100 today] to make a record, and the fact that I was doing an LP was just not in his comprehension. He was used to doing two songs for two hundred dollars, and I kept asking for more songs … but then I started asking him about people like Blind Lemon and he became interested. It was the first time anyone had ever asked him about these things. So he really went back into his memory. So finally we got what I thought was an extraordinary session. I did it all with a hand-held microphone. I could do the vocal and move it down to get the guitar solos, and keep him from popping the mike as he always did and could get a sense of balance. And as an old folkie myself, I kept insisting that he tune the guitar…. But we did have two or three hours of quiet time, and concentration.”
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The session was over by about four o'clock in the afternoon. Charters paid Lightnin' the agreed-upon three hundred dollars in cash, and Hopkins signed a simple release. A hand-written memo by Charters to Asch described the difficulties he encountered: “This was a hard, mean session; so I had to be content with what I could get. ‘Lightning' is used to much more than $300 for 9 tunes and he's worth more than $300 for 9 tunes to a house like Atlantic or Riverside. To us, he's worth $300. But it was a long, rough afternoon. I got him because I thought he could do us some good. I'm sorry I couldn't get more or that I couldn't have had some selection. For sure, we'll never get him again at this price.”
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Lightnin' consented to the recordings because he needed the cash. At that point in his life, given the opportunity to make money from his music, he couldn't refuse, but he could hold back.

Lightnin's recordings for Charters were a mix of a few up-tempo boogies—“She's Mine,” “Come Go With Me,” and “Fan It”—and covers of tunes he'd already recorded earlier in his career, like “Bad Luck and Trouble,” “Tell Me Baby,” “Penitentiary Blues” (“Groesbeck Blues”), and the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (“One Kind Favor”). One track is an excerpt from Charters's interview with him, called “Reminiscences of Blind Lemon,” in which Lightnin' talked about hearing Jefferson for the first time, meeting him, and playing with him in Buffalo, Texas.

Overall, the guitar playing is solid but rough and is evidence that Lightnin' had not played an acoustic instrument in some time. The lyrics reiterated Hopkins's established themes of unrequited love and how hard work and tough times were at the root of his blues. In “Goin' Back to Florida,” one of his most poignant lyrics evoked the futility of the plight of the sharecropper:

Charters was looking for Lightnin's songs that evoked his rural past and what he perceived as the core of his country blues. But when Charters returned to McCormick's house and played the recordings he had made earlier that day, McCormick was disappointed. “He just thought it was terrible,” Charters says. “He really said, ‘It doesn't sound like Leadbelly.'”
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Soon after completing his recordings, Charters sent Strachwitz a postcard saying, “I found Lightnin' Hopkins; he lives in Houston, Texas. A guy named Mack McCormick is trying to be his agent. Here's Mack's address.” Strachwitz quickly contacted McCormick and made plans to visit Houston in the summer. “That was like the Holy Grail to me,” Strachwitz recalls. “Nobody knew where Lightnin' was or even if he was still alive.”
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Once Charters left Houston, McCormick went and recorded Hopkins himself. Although he didn't admit it at the time, the recordings that Charters played for McCormick must have given him a different perspective on Lightnin'. Like Charters, McCormick felt that Lightnin's commercial recordings obscured his “true identity” as a bluesman. Both McCormick and Charters wanted to record Lightnin's “old” songs, the ones that he remembered from his early years growing up in Leon County. These songs, McCormick and Charters believed, were the wellspring of the blues form.

Between February 16 and July 20, 1959, McCormick, somehow overcoming the difficulty Charters had encountered, recorded forty-six songs with Lightnin' in six different informal sessions. In a discography by Strachwitz in
Jazz Monthly,
McCormick commented that the sessions were “held in either Lightnin's bedroom or mine. No time limitations were imposed and selections range from one to six minutes in length, most averaging four or more. Many begin with Lightnin's speaking some explanation or comment, talking himself into the song. He was encouraged to choose material he felt inclined toward…. His choice of material strides from unique impressions of jukebox records he's vaguely heard to the intensely autobiographical narrative-blues.”
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McCormick enjoyed corresponding with Strachwitz, and when Strachwitz got to Houston in June 1959, he took him to see Lightnin' play. “I had taken a bus to Texas,” Strachwitz recalls, “and was staying at the YMCA when Mack took me to meet Po' Lightnin' that afternoon. Po' Lightnin' always lived in this boarding house; it had a room he rented.” For Strachwitz, Lightnin' had “a neat existence; he didn't give a shit about what was going to happen. If he needed a few dollars, he'd go play that night.”
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