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By Root 766 0

Dick Waterman recalled that Son House’s wife Evie approached him and asked, “Dick, do you know that Lightning Hopkins man?” Waterman was in a way shocked by the question; Evie was known to go to church three or four times a week and read the Bible at home. But she genuinely wanted to meet Lightnin’, who was “holding court … with processed hair and sunglasses, he was dressed in a shark-skin suit and held a cigar in one hand and a plastic cup of whiskey in the other.” And when introduced to Evie, Lightnin’ dropped his cigar and “drew her to his side and looked up at her: ‘Hello, sweet thing,’ he whispered. ‘What’s a young girl like you doing here all alone?’” Evie, Waterman wrote, “put her hand to her face and started to giggle,” and after a few minutes came over to him and said, “That Lightning, he sure does say some pretty things to the ladies.”47

Waterman had known Lightnin’ for a number of years, and sometimes took him to festivals and concert dates. On one road trip going to a gig in Santa Monica, Lightnin’ pointed to a liquor store in front of them. Waterman dutifully stopped the car, but when he asked for some money, Lightnin’ replied, “Aw, now Dick, I ain’t got nothing but a hundred dollar bill.” Waterman replied, “They’ll change it,” and Lightnin’ countered, “Dick, now you take a look at how Lightning is dressed tonight. Ain’t I looking sharp?” Hopkins was wearing a “white suit, black shirt with a bolo tie, and black and white saddle shoes.” Then Lightnin’ stroked himself from his ribs down to his knee, and said, “They goin’ to give me some big mess of dirty one dollar bills and five dollar bills…. See how smooth ol’ Lightning is lookin’? I can’t be having it, Dick. I can’t let them give me some big ball of dirty money because it would just mess up my line.” Waterman looked at Lightnin’ with amazement and went in and bought “the damn bottle again.”48

From Ann Arbor, Hopkins went to the Blossom Music Center in Cleveland, Ohio, where he appeared on a bill with B. B. King and the Staple Singers on August 8, and was featured at the Chicago Blues Festival on August 30. In the fall, he played dates mostly around Houston before going back out to the West Coast, where he recorded in Berkeley on December 8, and appeared at the Ash Grove from Christmas Day to January 4, 1970, on a program that included Firesign Theatre as well as Taj Mahal on New Year’s Eve.

On January 27, 1970, Lightnin’ was in a bad car wreck; the car in which he was a passenger was nearly totaled and he injured his neck. He was driving back from Austin or Dallas, and the person at the wheel didn’t see a barricade in front of him and drove off the road. Lightnin’ cracked a vertebrae in his neck and was lucky he wasn’t paralyzed, but he had to wear a neck brace for some time that restricted his traveling.49 In June, however, he did go to California, playing at Lincoln School Auditorium with Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Sandy Bull in San Francisco, and then went back to the Ash Grove, June 18 to 28. “He started coming back whenever he wanted to or whenever I wanted him to,” Ed Pearl says. “One of us would call the other. I didn’t work with anyone. There were no agents. When Lightnin’ came to the Ash Grove, he just introduced a whole new aspect of the blues, and people flocked to it. And he just set a standard and kept on top of it. His draw was as big as Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf. But to the Ash Grove crowd, Lightnin’ was there a lot and was never second to anyone.”50

While Lightnin’ was in Los Angeles, Pearl took care of him. Pearl had an apartment across the street from the Ash Grove where Lightnin’ sometimes stayed, but on other occasions, he’d go to a hotel or visit with his or Antoinette’s relatives. “My impression was that they [Lightnin’ and Antoinette] were married,” Pearl says. “I enjoyed being with Antoinette. She was shy, nice, gentle, and he treated her beautifully. And we’d have different social interactions. We had dinner together, and sometimes just sat around and talked.”51

The subjects of conversation varied, from Lightnin’s gigs and his