Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [143]
Our methodology is as follows:
Session dates. All sessions have been listed chronologically in the order in which they were recorded. Educated guesses and estimates are required for nearly everything Lightnin’ recorded before 1959, and quite a few dates in the 1960s are speculative as well. We have broken down the sessions to a suggested chronology, but it should be emphasized that the 1946 to 1954 period is only suggested. Some singles sessions in which we have listed two songs to have been recorded may have been longer, etc. More difficult questions about longer sessions (such as those for the Sittin’ In With and Herald labels) are addressed within the discography.
Location. We have tried to establish the city and studio in which Lightnin’ made each of his recordings. It’s well documented that the majority of them were recorded in Houston at Gold Star or ACA Studios. In other cases, we only know the city.
Personnel. Precisely who plays on Lightnin’s recordings was largely pinned down by researchers in the 1960s. Some unknown musicians remain, however, and are unlikely to be identified at this point. We have corrected and updated the known personnel of earlier discographies as much as recent (and recently discovered) research allows. To cite one example: for the past forty years it has been written that Frankie Lee Sims plays slide guitar on Lightnin’s 1949 “Jail House Blues,” but we now know from the unpublished research of Laurence Schilthuis that the instrument heard on this session is a steel guitar, played by Harding “Hop” Wilson.
For the album era, each session has been considered individually in relation to the album. Where an album was recorded over different sessions, and featured different personnel, we have either listed the collective personnel, or, when it made more sense, specified which song a particular musician was playing on.
Instrumentation. Long-held misconceptions in popular writing about when Lightnin’ started playing electric guitar have, we feel, made it necessary to establish whether he was playing acoustic or electric guitar on his sessions. Most of his early sessions feature Lightnin’ playing a hollowbody electric guitar. After he became established as a folk-blues artist in 1959, he would often record with an acoustic guitar, or (especially live) an acoustic guitar outfitted with an electric pickup. In some cases, the aural differences between acoustic guitar sessions and acoustic-electric ones are not noticeable enough to make a definitive judgment.
Song Order. The exact song order for most sessions is not known. Therefore, we have arranged sessions to reflect the chronology of songs as they were issued, rather than by master numbers (which serve no purpose in this context). For singles, this means clusters of two songs per side of a 78 rpm or 45 rpm record. In the case of albums, the song order reflects the sequencing of side one and side two of the original albums. Titles in italics represent songs originally unissued from the particular session.
Song Titles. A great deal of what Lightnin’ recorded was later reissued with altered song titles—by accident or design. (To give only one example, generations have been listening to a song titled “I Can’t Stay Here in Your Town,” unaware that they are actually hearing the original “Rocky Mountain Blues.”) Other songs were mistitled upon release. A complete list of such titles super-cedes the purpose of this discography; we have only noted when his singles were reissued with altered titles during his early (1946–1954) singles period.
Releases. Only original issues (or reissues from the same era, in the case of the earliest singles) are listed. We have not tried to address the hundreds of configurations in which these songs have been reissued (and