Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [140]
Lightnin’ understood his importance as a bluesman, though he was sometimes prone to gross exaggeration. During the shooting of The Blues According to Lightinin Hopkins, he stated that not only had he “learned B. B. King the notes that he make. He learned them off Po’ Lightnin’,” but that “the last of the blues is left here and the ones that’s trying to do it right now they … after Po’ Lightnin’ Hopkins.”97 A decade later, Lightnin’ reiterated this point in an interview in the New York Times and maintained that “the last of the blues is almost gone … and the ones who doin’ it now got to either get a record or sit ‘round me and learn my songs, ‘cause that all they can go by.”98
Throughout his career, Lightnin’ mythologized himself, especially when he began to have a white audience, in part because he wanted to impress his listeners with the vast scope of his experience, but also due to the fact that certain myths were nurtured and fueled by collectors and the media. The perpetuation of misinformation as it relates to Lightnin’s life underscores the complexities and difficulties in separating the myth from the man. On one hand, Lightnin’ wanted to please those around him, whether his family, girlfriends, wives, friends, or record producers or blues fans, but at the root, he was a survivor. If survival meant leaving town, violating a contract, or not showing up for a gig, he did what he needed to do. “He didn’t really care,” Harold recalled. “He’d always say, ‘Let him sue me, Doc.’”99
He often referred to himself as “Po’ Lightnin’” in his songs to elicit sympathy as he carried on in a talking blues about anything that came into his mind. But he wasn’t just speaking for himself. He was every man who had suffered and struggled and fought to make a living and to find some joy in the midst of the hardships of daily life. The songs he wrote gave voice to the swirling emotions of the world around him, the fears, anxieties, and aspirations of his generation of American Americans. He soaked up what was around him, whether it was what people said or what he heard, and he put it all into his blues. The lyrics spoke with a raw honesty and a bitter irony about the foibles of everyday life, but imbedded in the words there was at times a humor and genuine compassion for what he knew his listeners might be faced with and going through.
Lightnin’s music accentuated the social injustices and intense emotions that informed the civil rights era, although Lightnin’ himself was not known to participate in rallies or marches. Few of his songs were topical in nature, although “Slavery” and “Tim Moore’s Farm” were protest songs, and he did sing about World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Principally, Lightnin’ voiced the yearnings and adversities of African Americans who moved away from the sharecropper farms and boll weevil-ravaged cotton fields of East and Central Texas to Houston’s Third Ward. But by the late 1960s, when his audience had become predominantly white, it was difficult for him to gauge what his white listeners were feeling. They didn’t whoop and holler and call out to him in the way people in a juke joint in the Third Ward might have done. White listeners may have misunderstood some of the metaphors and subtlety in his songs, and perhaps missed the innuendos and humor, though they were nevertheless captivated by his on-stage presence—his spiffy suits, polished shoes, gold-capped teeth, and Ray-Ban sunglasses.
When asked why he wore sunglasses all the time, he simply said, “I’m a hidin’ man. I been hidin’ all my life.” He sometimes said he wore sunglasses because of a “lazy eye,” but he told others that bright lights bothered him. However, he knew that sunglasses made him cool; other musicians