Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [12]
Sam did the best he could to avoid working in the fields. With the little money he made from tips, he was able to support himself and help his mother, but he also got deeper into gambling. And it wasn’t long before he got himself into trouble: “I been on a chain gang four times. I was bridge gang. I wore ball and chain. That was in my young days. I used to didn’t stand no cheatin’. You ever heard ‘My baby don’t stand no cheatin’?’ I ain’t lying. That done growed up in me.”
No records have ever been found of exactly what crimes Hopkins committed to lead to him being sentenced to a chain gang. He did say, “The first time I went to jail … me and my little cousin and a guy got into it. Fact of the business, the man was older than we was, and he just thought he was going to knock us boys around. My cousin had a razor in his pocket and I hit the guy, and he had my cousin choking him, and I said, ‘Cut him.’ And he kind of slice him in the sides. Man, I tell you, that was a full Sunday.” Sam and his cousin left the man bleeding and took off, but they didn’t go very far. They were able to get work “choppin’ cotton” about twenty miles away. About a week later, they were arrested in the “cotton patch,” and brought to jail, but they stayed only one night because Sam’s brother Joel paid “the fine.” From then on, Sam said people called him “Jailbird” because he continued to get into trouble. “I went crazy,” he said, “Jail didn’t mean nothing to me then. You could put me in there every day.” But Sam knew, no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t run from the law. “If I do something,” he said, “I go give up. Because that learnt me a lesson. Don’t. Never know that you did something and try to run away from it. It may be twenty years [for them] to get you, and then it’s worse. So, just go on and give up.”51
As often as Hopkins expressed his disdain for the law, the time he spent “chained up” forced him to control his temper. He once spent two hundred days on a bridge gang, toiling from dawn to dusk on bridge construction and repair and chained to a post every night in his bed.52 Another time, after getting into a fight in Grapeland, he was sentenced to time on a Houston County road crew. He somehow managed to escape but was picked up in Leon County and returned to the chain gang.53 Sam knew that he had to change his ways. “Mess with me a little bit,” he said, “I’d start me a little fight in a minute. So they was throwing a rope on me and puttin’ me in the joint and going on. I had to calm down. Wearing that ball and chain ain’t no good.”54
Sam’s time in jail and on the chain gang became fodder for the songs he later performed. He recorded the first, “Jail House Blues,” in 1949:
Well, I wouldn’t mind staying in jail
But I’ve gotta stay there so long
Thirty days in jail
With my back turned to the wall
This rendition of “Jail House Blues” borrowed heavily from Bessie Smith’s 1923 song of the same title, and while Sam made it sound as if it conveyed his personal experience, only the final verse appeared to be his own:
Hey, mister jailer
Will you please sir bring me the key
I just want you to open the door
‘Cause this ain’t no place for me
Sam’s song “I Worked Down on the Chain Gang” was more of a talking blues, in which he recounted his experience with a ball and chain around his leg and emphasized the cold indifference of the guards: “I said, ‘Please don’t drive me too hard, I’m an old man.’/ They say, ‘We don’t pay no attention to the age.’” But he concluded by falling back on the refrain to “Jail House Blues” and reiterated his plea: “I says I just want you to open the door/ ‘Cause this