Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [14]
Anna Mae said that her parents split up when she was five: “Mama left and went out to the country. We stayed with Daddy’s mother [Frances]. Daddy always loved his music. And he always let nothing or nobody keep him from it.”62 After Sam and Elamer separated, Anna Mae had very little contact with her father, “with him coming and going,” though she did say she always enjoyed seeing her grandmother, who was then living on Ike Dawkins’s farm.
“Folks were close-knit back then,” Ray Dawkins says. “Mama Frances was in Leona, Texas, down here. She got into some kind of debt and Daddy cleared it and moved her onto our farm. And she had a grey horse and a buckskin horse. We had two houses on the place. The big house was where we lived, and another house was down below. Daddy bought that farm in 1931. He give $900 for 80 acres, eight miles southeast of Centerville on the other side of Nubbin Ridge across Keechi Creek. I was a little bitty boy of five or six when I first remember meeting Sam—he was a tall, kind of slender man. I guess he was about nineteen or twenty, and he come back to help his mama. And in the evenings, he used to sit me on his knee and play and sing. I wanted to imitate everything that he did, but I couldn’t. So I became a dancer, and at house parties I’d tap or buck dance. Just about everyone had someone in the family who played guitar or piano. Not too many people could afford a radio. One or two had wind-up Victrolas. But playing music was the big entertainment. People would ride in a wagon if they had one. They go from one house to the next on Saturdays, and to church on Sunday. And if they didn’t have a wagon, they’d ride a horse or walk.”63
Sam didn’t spend much time with his mother because he was “always going off somewhere to play music or gamble,” Dawkins says, but he “did as much as he could to help her.” From the Dawkins farm, Frances Hopkins moved to Guy Store Prairie a few miles away. “They went to Herman Mannings’s place,” Dawkins says, “and when they left from there, they went to Ben Coleman’s place. Ben Coleman was white; Herman Mannings was white. Sam farmed down there, but he never did work too much. He played music all the time, and the white people had him playing music around the house, piano, guitar, organ. It didn’t make him no difference.”64
According to Dawkins, Sam stayed “some with his mother,” but also with Ida Mae, who lived about a mile and a half away from his father’s farm. “Ida Mae was a light-skinned girl,” Dawkins says, “and they lived together for I don’t know how long.” In Sam’s song “Ida Mae,” recorded for the Gold Star label in 1947, he sang, “Yes, you know that woman name Ida Mae/Folks say she good to me all the time,” but then implies that she was unfaithful, drawing upon a traditional blues verse that had been used by Robert Johnson, among others: “Yes, you don’t think cause Ida Mae got every man in town/Baby, you know ain’t doing nothing but tearing your reputation down.”65 However, Sam, on different occasions, said that Ida Mae was his wife, though there are no records that prove they were ever actually married. In another version of the song, Sam extolled her virtues and his devotion.
You know, Ida Mae’s a good girl
Folks say she don’t run around at night (x2)
Yeah, you know, you can bet your last dollar
Oh, Ida Mae will treat you right66
Ida Mae, identified by blues and jazz researcher Mack McCormick (who would later play a pivotal role in Lightnin’s career) as Ida Mae Gardner, appears to have been involved with Sam through