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through his sensitivity and it came out creative.” But Lightnin’ was impatient and impulsive: “There’s a lot of times when he used to get angry, especially when he was hitting the bottle too much. He drank constantly and started first thing in the morning…. He always had his little half-pint in his back pocket. And when he could get pretty mean, irascible, he would feel like he was being taken advantage of.”12 This was especially apparent at the end of the film where he looked disheveled. Apparently Antoinette’s cousin had been staying with them in their apartment and had forgotten to lock the door when he left. When Lightnin’ got home, he was furious; he had some valuable guitars in the apartment, which could have been stolen. He cussed out the cousin, and the cousin took offense, and they “had some words and Lightnin’ threatened to shoot him, and the cousin packed a loaded gun and threatened to shoot Lightnin’.” And when Blank showed up to film Lightnin’ that night, he told him the story and said that “his wife Antoinette had gotten so mad at him for badmouthing her cousin that she went home to her mother. And that’s the occasion at the end of the film where his hair’s messed up, singing a song … the closing song for the film. It was that night, and he was drunk and angry…. Lightnin’ had a long 38 revolver tucked in the front of his pants the whole time he’s singing that song, it’s stuck inside his belt.”

Months later, however, Blank had a rough-cut of the film and wanted to show it to Lightnin’ to see how he responded. “And he liked everything,” Blank said, “but the scene that I described before where he was improvising a song on film right before our eyes…. He had his hair messed up. And when I finished showing him the film, he said that I had to take out that scene because his hair was messed up. He didn’t like the way he looked. And I tried to tell him that it was an important scene, maybe one of the best scenes in the whole film, and he said he wanted it out. I had to struggle with his wishes and with my gut feeling that this song needed to be in the film. And then finally, I decided to go with it and finish the film with the scene with his hair messed up. And when I finally showed him [the completed documentary] I dreaded to see his reaction to the film with that scene still in there. And I showed it to him, and when it got to the part with Billy Bizor, who has a scene early in the film where he plays on the harmonica and sings and cries into a pillow, Lightnin’ got very moved, said, ‘Oh, there’s Billy,’ because Billy had died since the filming … and he was so happy to see Billy Bizor alive on the screen that he totally overlooked the scene at the end with his hair messed up.”13

The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins is not a documentary in a conventional sense, and as such it has been both praised and criticized. The viewer learns few specifics, but instead is left with an impression of Lightnin’ as a rural blues singer, when in fact he had been living in Houston for more than twenty years. The film opens with a shot of farmland and cows before the camera shifts to Lightnin’, blues singer Mance Lipscomb, and harmonica player Billy Bizor, playing together on a dirt road. The scene is intercut with shots of chickens and a rooster, and there is little sense of the urban world of Houston and the Third Ward neighborhood where Lightnin’ lived and worked. Most of the film was shot in Centerville and is structured as a kind of homecoming, where Lightnin’ jokes around with people in town, rambles on about his life and music, and wanders off by himself to an empty, weather-beaten church in the middle of a field. The only recognizable Houston scenes, aside from his apartment, are some of the facades of small businesses, from the office of the NAACP in the Third Ward to Wesley & West Beauty Salon and Leroy’s Tavern in the Fifth Ward and a rodeo at the Diamond L Ranch on South Main Street on the outskirts of the city. But there is no indication of the relationship of these places to the freeways that divide the black neighborhoods