Alan Govenar (2 page)

Years later, in the mid-1980s, Chris Strachwitz and Les Blank, two giants in the field of American roots music, talked to me at length about Lightnin's importance as a bluesman and his significance in each of their lives. Chris, after hearing Lightnin' in Houston, decided to start Arhoolie Records and he has since released hundreds of recordings of blues and American roots music; Les, after seeing Lightnin' at the Ash Grove in Los Angeles, was inspired to make his first full-length documentary film. And for both of them, Lightnin's passing marked the end of an era. They recognized the need for a biography, but they weren't going to do it themselves. Les offered me the use of his interviews and outtakes from his films
The Blues According to Lightnin' Hopkins
and
The Sun's Gonna
Shine.
Chris made himself available for countless conversations, sharing what he remembered and introducing me to people he thought I should interview.

Initially I was reluctant to begin work on a biography. Dr. Cecil Harold, who was Lightnin's manager for more than a decade, and Antoinette Charles, who was his long-time companion, refused to be interviewed. I called Dr. Harold on several occasions but was repeatedly rebuffed. The first time he asked me to make a financial offer and said that “Mrs. Hopkins” might accept ten thousand dollars, but he then recanted. The next year he told me that “Mrs. Hopkins isn't doing any more interviews,” and two years later he reiterated that “Mrs. Hopkins isn't interested.” Three years after that, he explained that “it's too painful for Mrs. Hopkins,” and in my last attempt, he asked me to write a letter in which I explained that I was completing a biography of Lightnin' Hopkins and asked what terms for a conversation and/or interview might be acceptable. A few weeks later, I received a hand-written reply that stated: “Mrs. Hopkins … declines further interviews. She wishes to simply say … no more reviews of life with Lightnin'.”
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Then it occurred to me that I needed to see Lightnin's probated will, and when I finally got a copy it all began to make sense. Antoinette was never Mrs. Hopkins. She had an affair with him that lasted an estimated thirty-five years, and during much of that time she was married to someone else with whom she had children. What mattered most to Antoinette was her privacy.

Finally, in 1995, after studying and writing about Texas blues for nearly two decades, I started talking to people in Centerville, Texas, where Lightnin' grew up. I was trying to get a handle on how Lightnin' was remembered where he grew up. At Ellis's Drive-In on State Highway 7, near the intersection with U.S. Highway 75, eighty-three-year-old Estelle Sims leaned on the front counter with her elbows and smiled when asked about Lightnin'. The light from the street shone on her bristly white hair and the deep wrinkles of her face as she spoke in a solemn tone. “I remember hearing him play at a black-eyed pea festival not too far from here back in the thirties. He was good, but it's been so long that I forget what it was that he actually played.” Then she looked up and pointed across the street. “I suspect that man over there might be able to tell you more. He's a Hopkins.”

I thanked her and walked across the street, the July heat drawing a sticky asphalt smell from the pavement. Oland Hopkins was sitting in the shade of a post oak tree beside a rusty pick-up truck filled with hay and a few watermelons that he was casually trying to sell to passersby. As I got closer to him, he stood up abruptly and asked, “Can I help you, sir?”

I explained that I was looking for information about Lightnin' Hopkins, and he muttered, “I'm a distant relation of his, but I don't know too much. I used to hear him play at church association picnics and suppers, but that's about it. You ought to talk to J. D. Kelly. Now, he should be able to tell you more.”

The pay phone next to Ellis's Drive-In was hot and clammy. I dialed Kelly's number quickly, and he answered after the second ring. Kelly had a hoarse but friendly voice and was eager to share what he knew. “That's right,” he said, “I growed up with him. We just went from place to place to play all over this countryside. He had a guitar slung on his shoulder, and he picked and sang at ring-play parties. He was a playboy. All he wanted to do was pick.” He told me if I wanted to find out anything else, I should give Oscar Davis a call. He was a cousin of Lightnin's and his last remaining kin in Centerville.

Davis, however, was more suspicious than the other two. He stammered, “Who are you? And what do you want?” I tried to answer, but before I could finish my sentence, he grumbled, “Talk to my wife. I'm hard of hearing.” When his wife got on the telephone, she was even more suspicious than he had been. “Sure, I remember Lightnin' Hopkins. What's it to you? I remember Lightnin' Hopkins. He come to our house. He was my husband's first cousin, but I didn't really know him. You need to talk to Oscar's brother and he's right here beside me, getting ready to go to Houston.” There was a short pause, and then the brother got on the phone and said, “I'm too young. I didn't really know Lightnin'. Sorry, I can't help you. Thank you and good-bye.”

I hung up and walked back to my car, and I saw Oland Hopkins was staring at me. “May I have your card?” he asked in amicable way, “I'd like to help you if I can. If I find out anything more, I'll call you.” I handed him my card and told him he could call me collect if he wanted to, but I've never heard from him. At that point in 1995, it appeared all that remained of Lightnin' in Centerville were spotty recollections. I decided to set the idea of writing a biography of Lightnin' Hopkins aside, though I did continue to collect stories about him whenever I got the chance. I interviewed Paul Oliver, the British blues aficionado who had traveled to Houston to meet Hopkins with Chris Strachwitz in 1960, as well as Francis Hofstein, the French psychoanalyst who had met Lightnin' when he appeared with the American Folk Blues Festival tour in Strasbourg in 1964. I spoke with John Jackson, the Piedmont bluesman who was at the Newport Folk Festival a year later when Lightnin' performed.

In 2002 the musician and impresario Pip Gillette called me and asked me if I wanted to give the keynote speech at the dedication of a Lightnin' Hopkins memorial statue created by the sculptor Jim Jeffries. I agreed, and much to my surprise, more than three hundred people came to the event on Camp Street in Crockett, Texas, where Lightnin' had performed in the 1930s and ‘40s. Pip introduced me to Lightnin's daughter, Anna Mae Box, who lived in Crockett, and to Frank Robinson, who had played with Lightnin' in the 1950s. I also had a chance to meet Wrecks Bell, who had played with Lightnin' in the 1970s, and David Benson, who had been Lightnin's traveling companion and road manager during the last decade of his life. Benson helped me to get a clearer sense of his personal life, especially as it related to his relationship with Antoinette and Dr. Harold during a period when he performed less, got paid more, and failed to produce any new recordings.

After speaking in Crockett, my work on the Lightnin' biography had a new momentum. I went to Centerville to meet Clyde Langford, whom I had read about a couple of years earlier.
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Clyde had grown up across the road from Lightnin's mother, Frances Hopkins, and had learned to play guitar from his brother Joel. Clyde lived in a small wood-frame house on FM 1119 and was eager to tell his story and what he knew about Lightnin'. When I asked Clyde about other people who might know something about Lightnin' he was uncertain, but one time he mentioned Ray Dawkins. Dawkins, born in 1928, is eight years older than Langford, and his memories of Lightnin' were vivid. Lightnin's early years were coming into clearer view. I was beginning to cut through the hearsay to get a stronger sense of what actually transpired over the course of his life. But each time I returned to Centerville, I came away with a slightly different impression. I realized that it was in those varying perceptions that the truth about Lightnin' Hopkins lies. Inconsistencies about the details of his biography abound, fueled as much by the idiosyncrasies of his own memory as his capacity to reconstruct his past to meet his more immediate needs.

For most people, Hopkins was simply known as Lightnin', but he was sometimes called Lightning. However, he didn't get his nickname until November 1946, when an Aladdin Records executive (probably one of the Mesner brothers) decided during his first recording session to dub him “Lightnin'” and his accompanist, Wilson Smith, “Thunder” to enhance their presence in the marketplace. In discussing Hopkins's life prior to 1946, I refer to him by his given name, Sam, for clarity.

Hopkins often referred to himself as Po' Lightnin' in his songs, not only to elicit sympathy, but to identify himself with the plight of those who were listening. Lightnin' was the lifeblood of his own myth. In this book, the stories he told and the accounts of others provide a base for understanding how myth and memory merge into the blues that ultimately defined the man.

1

L
eaving Centerville on Leon County Road 113, midway between Dallas and Houston, the landscape of Sam Hopkins's early years comes into view. Patches of mesquite interspersed with red bud trees and groves of hickory, elm, and oak spread through the rolling hills and grassy plains. The ranches are small, and longhorns graze in pastures abutting subsistence farms, which yield to rockier soil that is parched and cracked, even in the cool January sun. The road is still unpaved, and loose gravel rattles against the wheel rims as we near Warren's Bottom, where Hopkins was born.

“Yes sir, the closer you get to the Trinity River, the terrain is rough. This was sharecropper land,” Ray Dawkins explains.
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In his denim overalls and flannel shirt, Dawkins emanates a bygone era. For a man of eighty, he has few wrinkles and still seems physically active. He drives a pickup truck and lives in a small apartment in town.

Between 1870 and 1960, 40 percent of the residents of Leon County were African American, but by 1980, the percentage dropped to 20 percent, and in 1990 to 12.8 percent. Dawkins says it's difficult keeping young people in town. There are more job opportunities in Dallas and Houston, and the population of Centerville has continued to decline, from 961 in 1950 to 903 in 2000.

“Back when Sam was a boy,” Dawkins remembers, “black folks didn't have opportunities. You did what you had to, that is, to get by.”

Little is known about the details of Sam's early years. Even his birth date is disputed. In his Social Security application, dated January 24, 1940, Sam stated that he was born on March 15, 1912, a date that he reiterated in his song “Going Home Blues (Going Back and Talk to Mama),” as well as in numerous interviews over the course of his life.
²
However, the Social Security Death Index lists his birth date as March 15, 1911, and his death certificate says it was March 12, 1912. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the Texas Birth Index recorded the birth of a Sam Hopkins on March 15, 1911, in Hopkins County, which is in northeast Texas, nowhere near Leon County. It's possible that this was a clerical error, but it may also be a coincidence that another man named Sam Hopkins was born on that day. It's difficult to say which date is actually correct; no birth certificate has ever been found. Still, by all accounts, Sam spent the first years of his life in Warren's Bottom. Today all the sharecropper shacks are gone, and a chain link fence with a
NO TRESPASSING
sign posted on its gate blocks our way.

Outside the car, the dust subsides. The land appears relatively fertile, but clearly Warren's Bottom was in the flood plain, and much of the loamy topsoil has been washed away. Historically there were more small subsistence farms in Leon County raising vegetables, hogs, and cattle than large plantations, but once the cotton culture took hold, the number of slaves grew rapidly from 621 in 1850 to 1,455 in 1855. “Slave property was the most important possession of the majority of Leon County citizens,” Frances Jane Leathers wrote in
Through the Years: A Historical Sketch of Leon County
(1946). In 1855, slaves had “a value of $757,296, which was $300,000 more than the assessed value of all the taxable land in the county.”
³

During the Civil War, this area of Central Texas was a stronghold of the Confederacy, and local historian W. D. Wood wrote in 1899 that “Leon County furnished 600 soldiers for the Confederate armies…. The fact is that everybody in Leon County, men and women, were doing their best in some way, to hold up the hands of the soldier, and sustain the Confederate cause. Even the slave at home, not only nobly protected the family of his soldier master, but was industriously engaged in making meat and bread for the soldier on the firing line.”
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Emancipation brought promise and hope, but the advances of Reconstruction were short-lived. Racism was rampant. J. Y. Gates and H. B. Fox wrote in A
History of Leon County
(1936) that a “lynching occurred in Reconstruction days when a negro was hanged on the tree [called “The Tree of Justice”] and allowed to swing two nights and a full day. Old timers can recall how the negro, swollen from long hanging, ‘bounced when he hit the ground,' when he finally was cut down.”
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In 1910 the
New York Times
reported that Frank Bates was “lynched by hanging in the jail at Centerville” after trying to escape his jail cell where he was awaiting trial on a murder charge.
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In 1915, according to G. R. Englelow, writing in a Centerville newspaper called the
Record,
another man, suspected of murder, was tracked down and arrested without resistance, but the next day he was found with a noose around his neck, hanging from the limb of a large oak tree in the square in front of the Leon County courthouse.
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In 1919 a black preacher was hung for reputedly killing a white farmer after delivering “a sermon Sunday night…. The two had an argument the previous Saturday over cotton. A posse sought the Negro a week along the bottom lands … before he was found and brought to jail. When the sheriff was out of town, a mob made a key and opened the jail and hanged the Negro to the tree.”
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