Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [122]
Charters and Lightnin’ had not communicated with each other in years, and the animosity during this session was a potent indicator of not only how their relationship had deteriorated but also how they both had changed since their first meeting in 1959. Charters had definitely grown more cynical, and Lightnin’s resentment toward him built on the antipathy he already felt toward Folkways and other record producers. However, the five-thousand-dollar advance that Charters paid for the Sonet recordings not only exceeded the rates for most blues artists at that time but was also a sum that the LP could never earn back. In the end, the Sonet album turned out poorly. The songs contained bits and pieces of previously recorded material that were rehashed haphazardly and never seemed to gel like the lyrics he improvised years earlier. Lightnin’ played an acoustic guitar with an electric pickup, and was accompanied by drums and bass. Lightnin’ did play slide guitar on “Please Help Poor Me” and “The Hearse is Backed Up to the Door,” demonstrating some versatility, but ultimately the songs themselves sound fragmented. When the album was released in 1975, it didn’t sell very well.13
Despite Lightnin’s erratic performances, by the mid-1970s, he was a legend and he attracted a following. This audience likely knew relatively little about his early recordings or that his blues had become rote and predictable. Blues had arrived and was covered heavily in the popular media. Aging bluesmen like Lightnin’, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters were more revered than ever. Benson says he even once saw the renowned French American art collector and philanthropist Dominique De Menil, who lived in Houston, come to Lightnin’s house. “We’d played the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival [1976] and the weather was bad, so we couldn’t get back to Houston until late. We were going to meet Mrs. De Menil and her daughter, Christophe, who was very fond of Lightnin’ and wanted to find a way to sponsor him through some kind of arts grant. Well, by the time we got back, Mrs. De Menil was sitting in the parking lot in front of Lightnin’s apartment building, waiting for him to come home. And he asked her to come inside, where she sat around awhile, and then said she was tired. He told her, said, ‘Well, you can use the extra bedroom,’ and she went in and took a nap. So, think about it, Dominique De Menil, the empress of art of Houston, in the Third Ward, sleeping in Lightnin’s bedroom.’”14
While many of Lightnin’s performances during the 1970s were uneven, he still had the capacity to be completely engaging. Robert Palmer, in his review in The New York Times of Lightnin’s show at the Palladium on May 13, 1977, wrote that even though Lightnin’ was on stage for a little over thirty minutes, he “turned in a superb performance.” Palmer commented that Hopkins’s lyrics were largely unoriginal, drawing from “the common pool of folk and commercial blues lyrics,” and that neither his singing nor his guitar playing was virtuosic. However, Palmer felt “putting over the blues has always been a matter of timing and timbre, and these Mr. Hopkins handles with the assurance of a master. He doubles rhythms back upon themselves, drops bars of music for dramatic emphasis, and draws a stinging, acerbic sound from his guitar which is the essence of the blues.” Moreover, Palmer praised Lightnin’s accompanists, Charles Calamese and Willie Smith, bassist and drummer with James Cotton’s band, who had probably never played with Hopkins before, but who “followed his deviations from formal symmetry with unerring accuracy.”15
Lightnin’s reputation in New York was well established, and he could pretty much get booked there whenever he