Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [101]
Phillips had hoped that Lightnin’ would teach her to play guitar, but he was fairly protective of his musicianship and guitar picking moves. “He did not go off somewhere to rehearse, nor did he rehearse his repertoire at all per se, but he was extremely open in allowing me simply to be present during his private music-making times. When he had some song, or verse, or guitar riff that he wanted to develop and fix in his mind and fingers, he would pick up his guitar and work on it completely unselfconsciously, while I would kick back and listen. Sometimes he would sing a line or verse directly to me as an ironic way of commenting on my mood or actions, or to express affection. Sometimes I had my guitar and we’d play a game with a succession of increasingly intricate riffs, and even though he would frequently show me his fingering, I was invariably left in the dust … and he was genuinely tickled when I studied his picking and fingering, and tried to copy his licks, though I was by no means a quick study.”32
Once in Los Angeles, Phillips says, “Lightnin’ and I were in Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset Boulevard. He was searching the shelves for a laxative; the food wasn’t agreeing with him because he wasn’t in Texas or the black part of L.A. and who should we look up and see but John Lee Hooker—looking for a laxative too. They both said, ‘Oh, the food here, man.’ They started groaning and commiserating about their indisposition.”33
Sometimes when Lightnin’ came to L.A. to play at the Ash Grove, he’d stay with two sisters, Jimmie and Tee, who “lived way down in south L.A. They had a soul food cafe downtown, ‘Jimmie and Tee’s’ near Seventh and Grand across the street from J. W. Robinson’s, and their clientele consisted of white professionals who worked downtown, as well as blacks. They were superb cooks from Mississippi. I don’t know when he met them, perhaps during his first trip to L.A. back in 1946, but they were old friends, and I’m sure that’s all they were. Jimmie and Tee were very conservative women, modest, soft-spoken, all about cooking, a bit plump and plain in dress, they wore white uniforms when they cooked and served in their restaurant. They were very traditional in a Southern sense; I liked them a lot.”34
When Lightnin’ was in town, Phillips would go over to Jimmie and Tee’s house to see him. “We’d sit around watching TV and eating food they brought home from the restaurant, or they’d cook just for us.” Surprisingly, “Lightnin’s favorite TV fare seemed to be old Amos and Andy shows, old B-grade westerns with Stepin Fetchit, and other stereotypical black sidekicks hamming it up to the hilt, and Charlie Chan movies. This, of course,” Phillips says, “will be extremely controversial to many, but I spent many a night, into the wee hours of the morning, sitting in their living room watching the worst old film and TV dreck imaginable (which I adore), including these racist films, and I’d be rolling on the floor at Lightnin’s comments. Jimmie and Tee didn’t like him to watch the films, but soon they’d be weeping with laughter, as well. I wish I could recall some of the cracks he made. I think that he had a keen sense of stereotype and the way in which it was deployed by African American actors in many but not all of these films as a transgressive weapon. And I appreciated that.”35
From the first week of April to the third week of October 1966, Lightnin’ played more than a dozen dates in California, dividing his time between the Matrix, the Fillmore, the Cabale, the Berkeley Folk Festival in the Bay Area, and the Ash Grove in Los Angeles. The crowds at the Ash Grove were diverse and sometimes included celebrities, some of whom would stop backstage to meet Lightnin’, but he wasn’t necessarily welcoming. “Once when I was with Lightnin