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the 1950s, even though their relationship was at times tumultuous. By some accounts they had a vicious fight around 1937, and Sam stabbed her. But when Sam was sentenced to two years in the Crockett County jail and served his time on the chain gang, McCormick maintains she “got a job cooking for the prisoners in order to be close enough to Lightnin’ to attend to his wants and at the same time pay off his fine.”67 However, Dawkins says that he knew Ida Mae for many years and that she lived out her life in Guy Store. To his knowledge, she never married, and when asked about these contradictions, Dawkins speculated that there might have been more than one Ida Mae. Certainly, Sam’s loose attitude toward the term wife is a complicating factor in trying to sort out the women in his life. He often bragged about how many women he had over the years. “They just be around,” he liked to say, “don’t you know, I’m some bad man?”68

Sam’s exploits with women were well known in the African American community of Leon County. People recognized that he was gifted as a guitarist and singer who carried forward the musical culture in which he was raised, but many disapproved of his behavior. Dawkins and Langford were among the many who marveled at his capacity as a performer, but understated his reckless and at times violent conduct. As a person, Sam was scurrilous. He was affable and sharp-witted, but introverted; wary, but sly. He was a backslider by church standards, a drinker and a brawler who lied and gambled, doing anything he could to stay away from the chain gang and the cotton field. Yet he was apparently never completely ostracized, and over the course of his life, he never forgot his country roots. Sam’s blues gave voice to the hardships and foibles that he and so many in his community were experiencing, but by the early 1930s, he had gotten himself into enough trouble that he had to move on.

2

Travels with

Texas Alexander

Sam Hopkins was about twenty years old when he met Alger “Texas” Alexander at a baseball game in Normangee, about seventeen miles southwest of Centerville. Normangee was playing against a team from Leona, but off to the side of the field, Hopkins heard someone shouting the blues. “So, I got down there,” Sam said, “and I seen a man standing up on a truck with his hand up to his mouth, and man, that man was singing…. He like to broke up the ballgame. People was paying so much attention to him. They was interested in him.”

Baseball had been a popular sport among African Americans in Texas since the late 1880s. The numerous attempts to organize a viable, professional black baseball association culminated with the formation of the Lone Star Colored Baseball League of Texas in 1897 with clubs representing Galveston, Palestine, Beaumont, Lagrange, Temple, Austin, and Houston.1 The Normangee and Leona teams were not formally part of this league. They were likely amateur, or, in a sense, semi-professional, where the players aspired to advance their careers, but were not necessarily paid. Local teams got some local sponsorship to help defer the costs of equipment, and the games attracted people from the surrounding communities. A blues singer, like Texas Alexander, seized the opportunity to perform for tips.

Sam claimed that Alexander was his cousin, but no direct kinship has ever been established. Sam had a very loose definition of the term “cousin” that he tended to use more as an expression of endearment than a statement of fact. Texas Alexander was born on September 12, 1900, in Jewett, Texas, in Leon County, about seven miles from Centerville. He eventually settled in Normangee, a small town that grew up around the railroad stop on the Houston and Texas Central Railway established in 1905 at the intersection of Farm Roads 39 and 3. He was raised by his grandmother because his own mother was “rowdy” and “runnin’ around.” Growing up he toiled as a field hand, but by 1927 he had moved to Dallas, where he worked as a store man in a warehouse and made “spending change” by singing in cafes and on the streets