Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [11]
It was not uncommon for blues singers to compare themselves to preachers, though Sam rarely played religious songs. In fact, the only spiritual he ever recorded as a solo artist was identified as “Needed Time” on RPM.44 The actual title is “Now Is the Needy Time,” and had been recorded by the Wiseman Sextet for Victor in 1923 (unissued) and later by two other artists in 1928 and 1930, though it’s likely that the spiritual was traditional and predates any recordings. Sam did not record another spiritual until the 1960s, when he teamed up with Barbara Dane on “Jesus, Won’t You Come by Here” (which was actually “Now Is the Needy Time” under a different title) and with Big Joe Williams and Brownie McGhee on “I’ve Been ‘Buked (and Scorned).” In other recordings, such as “Prayin’ Ground Blues,” “Devil Is Watching You,” “Sinner’s Prayer,” and “I’m Gonna Build Me a Heaven of My Own,” there are passing references to religion, but the songs are not spirituals.45
Sam, like so many blues singers, believed that “when you born in this world, you born with the blues. Upset is the blues. Worry is the blues. The blues come by what you love…. You have the blues by anything. You can have a car and wake up in the morning and have a flat. You get to walking and nobody helps you; you ain’t got nothing like the blues. You gonna walk until you find somebody who says they’ll try to help you. Trouble is the blues. You can have the blues about being broke, about your girl being gone. You can have the blues so many different ways till it’s hard to explain. But whenever you get a sad feeling, you can tell the whole rotten world you got nothing but the blues.”46
Sam often bragged that he started writing his songs at an early age: “I been making up songs all my life, ever since I was eight years old when I got out on my own.”47 He never identified any songs he wrote at that age, but he did have a gargantuan memory.
Lightnin’ said that the first time he got paid for performing was when he had just turned fourteen years old, and he met up with Jabo Bucks about two miles from the Association grounds in Buffalo. Bucks was a fiddler who agreed to go with him into town and play for tips in front of a cafe, and they were soon invited inside. From Buffalo, he and Bucks headed on to the nearby towns of Oakwood and Jewett, stopping when and wherever they could to play for pocket change.
People in the black parts of town in the rural areas of East and Central Texas responded well to Lightnin’s guitar picking and singing. But if he got the chance, he said, he “would go around to the white people’s houses,” where they might invite him inside to play the piano for them and pay him ten or fifteen cents, or even a quarter. 48 While the laws of separate accommodation in Leon County were viciously enforced, black musicians were sometimes welcomed into the homes of white families to entertain them, a tradition that dated back to the years of slavery. The History of Leon County, Texas, mentioned a group called the Serenaders, usually consisting of a fiddler, guitar player, and mandolin player, who walked through the streets of Centerville. “About the first Serenader I heard,” one unnamed resident recalled, “was Rob Dunbar, a left-handed Negro fiddler and a guitar accompanist [who] came to our house about Christmas time, and that was the sweetest music I had ever heard.”49
Mabel Milton, who grew up in Centerville, remembered that Lightnin’ also liked to visit the homes of the black