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By Root 638 0

and the good times and bad men he met along the way. In his songs he could be irascible, but in the next verse he might be self-effacing. He prided himself on his individuality, even if it meant he was full of inconsistencies. He often poured out his feelings in his songs with a heart-wrenching pathos, but it could be hard to tell if he was truly sincere. He peppered his lyrics with few actual details about his own life, but he was at once raw, mocking, extroverted, sarcastic, and deadly serious. Most of the time, Lightnin’ appeared to trust no one, yet he knew how to endear himself to his audience. While he voiced the hardships, yearnings, and foibles of African Americans in the gritty bump and grind of the juke joints of Third Ward Houston, he could be cocky and brash in his performances for white crowds at the Matrix in San Francisco, or at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, or a concert hall in Europe, where he was in complete control and was adored.

Lightnin’s down-home blues did not adhere strictly to a traditional, three-line, AAB verse form, but rather he improvised a form that suited the song he was singing or composing on the spot and expressed what he was feeling at that moment. If Lightnin’ held a line for one or two extra beats, if he abbreviated the musical time between lines, or if he lost his place during an instrumental riff, he was never fazed. But this is what made it so difficult for bassists and drummers to play with him, and his timing got more erratic as the years went by. He wasn’t schooled in the complex harmonic structures and precision of rhythm and blues, but instead stayed with a basic three-chord (tonic, subdominant, dominant) guitar pattern to accompany his vocal phrasing. In doing so, his vocal lines did not always agree metrically with his guitar lines. But for Lightnin’ the basis of his songs was rarely structure. It was the essence of the blues that he was after. “I come along, long about the time that the people first put the blues on this earth for the people to go by,” Lightnin’ said. “Well, I’m one in the number and the rest of them is dead and gone. I got in that number at a young age … and I just keeps it up ‘cause the blues is something that the people can’t get rid of. And if you ever have the blues, remember what I tell you. You’ll always hear this in your heart: That’s the blues.”2

Lightnin’ played both acoustic and electric guitars and was steeped in the Texas country blues tradition. From Blind Lemon Jefferson and Alger “Texas” Alexander, Lightnin’ absorbed stylistic and repertoire elements that included a melismatic singing style rooted in the field holler, mixing long-held notes with loose, almost conversational phrasing.3 Musically, “Short Haired Woman,” which Lightnin’ recorded for the first time around May 1947, established the signature sound that he used in just about every song, whether it was a fast instrumental boogie/shuffle or a slow blues. In his guitar playing Lightnin’ had an open and fluid style with his right hand, using a thumb pick and his index finger. He kept his right hand loose so he could move from playing sharp notes near the bridge to playing wider open chords up near the fingerboard.

Lightnin’ usually tuned his guitar in the key of E, though not necessarily to a concert pitch. He utilized what ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons has called “that turnaround…. It’s a signature lick…. He’d come down from the B chord and roll across the top three strings in the last two bars. He’d pull off those strings to get a staccato effect, first hitting the little open E string then the 3rd fret on the B string and the 4th fret of the G string. He would then resolve on the V chord after doing his roll. It’s a way to immediately identify a Lightnin’ Hopkins tune.”4

Lightnin’ was tremendously appealing for aspiring blues guitarists to emulate because his signature turnaround was relatively easy to learn, but it was extremely hard to replicate his sound because of his distinctive held notes, pauses, string bending, and shortened and lengthened measures. Sometimes,