Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [10]
While Blind Lemon had only recorded two Christian songs for Paramount under the pseudonym Deacon L. J. Bates, anecdotal evidence suggests that he was, in fact, well known for his capacity to sing both blues and religious music.36 “That was one thing about Lemon,” Wortham postmaster Uel L. Davis told a Waco Tribune-Herald reporter. “He’d be singing in church one day, singing at a house of ill repute the next.”37 Sam didn’t say what song Jefferson was playing when he approached him, but he did emphasize its significance: “I run up on Blind Lemon Jefferson. He had a crowd of peoples around him. And I was standing there looking at him play, and I went to playing my guitar, just what he was playing. So he say, ‘Who is that playing that guitar?’ So, they say, ‘Oh, that’s just a little boy here knocking on that guitar.’ He say, ‘No, he playing that guitar.’ Say, ‘Where he at? Come here, boy.’ And I went on over there where he was, and he was feeling for me. And I was so low, he reached out, say, ‘This here was picking that guitar?’ Say, ‘Yeah.’ So, he say, ‘Do that again.’ So, I did a little note again, same one he done. He say, ‘Well, that’s my note.’ He say, ‘Boy, you keep that up, you gonna be a good guitar player.’ So, he went on and then commenced to playing, so I went to playing right on with him. So, I was so little and low, the peoples couldn’t see me. And we were standing by a truck. They put me up on top of the truck, and Blind Lemon was standing down by the truck, and me and him, man, we carried it on. And the excitement was me, because I was so little. And I was just picking what he was. I wasn’t singing, but I was playing what he was playing. That’s right.”38
Sometimes when Sam told the story, he said that Blind Lemon was displeased when he heard him play and shouted, “You got to play it right!” But when he realized the musician was only eight years old, he hoisted the child onto the truck and let him play. In another version, Sam said the meeting occurred in 1925, which would have made him about thirteen years old, not eight. It’s likely that Sam had his dates mixed up, but the fact that he had met Blind Lemon was important to him. By linking himself to Blind Lemon, who was the most successful male blues singer to record in the 1920s, Sam was able to elevate his own stature and lay a cornerstone in the myth he was creating for himself.39
Interestingly enough, Sam said that by the time he met Blind Lemon, his brother Joel had already left home and was staying with the Jefferson family. “That was in Mexia, Wortham, Waxahatchie, Buffalo, and another little old place I can’t ‘call the name. Blind Lemon Jefferson played at those places. He had a brother named Marcella Jefferson, George Jefferson, and the old lady … well, they used to dance and play.”40
In researching Blind Lemon’s life and career, there are no other accounts of either Marcella or George Jefferson. Nevertheless, Sam claimed that after meeting Jefferson he left home and did his best to follow him, going from town to town in East Texas. “People would see me ‘cause I traveled when I was young with a guitar all over them areas,” Sam said, “Buffalo, Oakwood, Palestine, Ben Hur, and all. Mama didn’t think nothing about it. She just know it was all right ‘cause I taken care of my mama all my life. From a kid up I taken care of Lady Frances. I buried her. Out of all the kids she had, I’m the one.”
What is clear is that Sam wanted to find a way out of the sharecropper life. “It wasn’t nothing on the end of the hoe handle for me,” Sam said. “Choppin’ cotton for six bits a day. Plowin’ the mules … that wasn’t in store for me. I went on with what the good lord gave me.”41 Once on his own, Hopkins’s musical skills evolved rapidly. As a child, he saw the influence