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with a terse phrase or a swipe of his hand. In performance, the audience hung on to every word, from the moment he stepped onto the stage and tipped his hat to the instant when he picked up a guitar and began to play. And when he reared back and muttered a few words, or pulled out a flask of whiskey to take a long sip, no one was impatient. During his last years just about everyone who came to see him knew his songs, but they also knew what they were about to hear would take shape as it was performed. He rarely sang a song the same way twice, and the structure of his songs was often sprawling and rough. If the lyrics were ragged and the metaphors skewed, it rarely mattered; for his devotees, his blues were pure, and he was an oracle.

In the end, regardless of the myths, and the inevitable mix of fact and fiction, Lightnin’ was happy that his music had reached such a wide audience. “I don’t think in his younger days,” Benson said, “he even imagined that there would be so many young people, so many white people, who would have such a genuine appreciation of his sound. He thought it was naive, but it was genuine. By the end of his life, his music had become sonorous, more than it was an exemplification of a particular social context. It became almost nostalgic, even as it related to the suffering. He knew that the people who bought his records and came to hear him play genuinely cared. They loved it, but it was artificial to the extent that it had been disconnected and removed from the reality that had generated it.”

When asked once about what made him different than anyone else, Lightnin’ replied, “A bluesman is just different from any other man that walks this earth. The blues is something that is hard to get acquainted with. Just like death. The blues dwell with you everyday and everywhere.”104

Discography

Andrew Brown and Alan Balfour

The first attempt at compiling a Lightnin’ Hopkins discography was made by the pioneering blues researcher Anthony Rotante in 1955 for Discophile magazine in England. Lightnin’s style of blues must have seemed archaic enough at the time for Rotante to feel safe in referring to the subject of his piece in the past tense, unaware that a folk-blues renaissance was just a few years away. After a brief period of inactivity, Lightnin’ began recording in earnest again, and (in Colin Escott’s memorable phrase) “the world would never again want for a Lightnin’ Hopkins record.” By the time of his final studio recording in 1974, he had long since become established as one of the most recorded blues singers of the postwar era.

At the start of Lightnin’s career in 1946, recording sessions in the music industry usually followed a predictable pattern: musicians (often members of the musician’s union) would gather in a studio with a contracted artist and producer, and would, over the course of three hours or so, record two to eight masters. The musicians would get paid union fees for their work. If their contract called for it, the artist would repeat this scenario two or three times a year. Re-creating such sessions for a discography decades later can be challenging, but there was usually a logic that can be reconstructed without too much effort—particularly if session sheets and union files exist that can help identify dates, locations, and personnels.

None of this applies to Lightnin’ Hopkins, who ignored exclusive contracts, did not join the musician’s union until the latter stage of his career, and would record as many songs per session as he could get paid for. Session sheets and company files no longer exist for the majority of his recording sessions—and probably, in many cases, never existed in the first place. The chaotic and confusing nature of his discography is testament to the idiosyncratic nature of both Lightnin’ and the small, independent producers who recorded him.

How do you bring order out of chaos? We have taken a fresh approach that considers the nature of Lightnin’s recordings above the strict rules of discography, rules that sometimes don’t even apply to his sessions