Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [121]
The Houston city directories indicated that Lightnin’ lived by himself in unit 14 at 3124 Gray Street in 1967 and 1968, but shared a residence with Antoinette from 1969 on. While it is clear that Lightnin’ and Antoinette were never married, there is a Houston court record dated November 19, 1973, granting a divorce to Antoinette Stout Charles from Leonard Charles. However, Benson could not confirm whether or not this was the same Antoinette. When he was with Lightnin’, there was never any discussion of divorce, though it was clear that Antoinette had a family in the Fifth Ward.
Benson sometimes spent the night in a guest room at Lightnin’s, though when he finally moved back to Houston after finishing his doctorate in social work, he got his own place. “Lightnin’ pretty much seemed like an uncle to me,” Benson says, and “Miss Nette would say, ‘Oh, that’s such a nice boy, Lightnin’.’ And she kind of became my play mother…. And every time he would play, I would go with him; he always wanted somebody to drive his car for him, so I’d drive for him. And he started trusting me to collect the money. I became kind of the enforcer, so to speak. He’d always say, ‘Anything that have to do with business,’ he’d say, ‘go talk to David.’”10
Even though they often traveled together, Lightnin’ was still his own man, and if he wanted to play a gig and Benson was not available, he’d find someone else to drive him. During the 1970s, Lightnin’s recording tapered off. The market was saturated with his records, but people still wanted to see him perform live. He toured less but got paid more. In 1972 he played club dates in Chicago, as well as a benefit sponsored by the River City Blues Project at Municipal Auditorium in New Orleans. In 1973 he was booked for a five-night gig at the Egress Nightclub in Vancouver from February 19 to 23, then he jetted off to Carnegie Hall for a concert on March 4 that also featured Bonnie Raitt and Muddy Waters. And in the fall he taped a television special for broadcast on Channel 31 in New York City. “Everywhere Lightnin’ went,” Benson says, “people crowded in to see him. How much money he was making at this point is difficult to say, but it was definitely a lot more than he had ever earned before.” According to Harold, his minimum fee for a club date was six hundred dollars for two forty-five-minute sets, though for concerts in bigger venues, he asked for more and usually got it.11
Sam Charters returned to Houston in 1974 to record Lightnin’ for Volume 12 of the Legacy of the Blues series he was producing for the Sonet label in Stockholm, and found that Lightnin’s musicianship had declined. “His singing and guitarwork was more sloppy,” Charters says. “I did the best I could. I knew … it was not going to add one iota to what had been done, or hadn’t been done over and over again.”
Given the dispute of money and royalties surrounding Charters’s first recording for Folkways in 1959, Lightnin’ was suspicious, even though he had dealt with Charters since then when he was working with Prestige/Bluesville in the 1960s. To make matters worse, Harold was extremely difficult. “He started with the point of view that I was a white motherfucker,” Charters says, “that I was going to rip off every black man that I met…. And how much money was I going to pay? I will temper my language, but he insisted, because of his distrust for whites, that he had to be paid in cash a five-thousand-dollar advance, but I wasn’t going to pay him until I did the recording. So as the session wore down in the studio we were using in the ghetto, we began to attract the usual people, and various gang members were hanging around outside. And I really had had enough, and as we were leaving, people were looking in the window, I said quite loudly, ‘Here’s the $5,000 you asked me for’ and I handed him the $5,000 in small bills. And he and Lightnin