Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [165]
16. Helen Oakley Dance, Stormy Monday: The T-Bone Walker Story (New York: Da Capo, 1987), p. 96.
17. Alan Govenar, Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), p. 416.
18. Mack McCormick, “A Conversation with Lightnin’ Hopkins,” Jazz Journal (January 1961), pp. 16–19.
3. The Move to Houston
1. www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/HH/jch4.html.
2. Beginning in 1893 the Texas Freeman was published by Charles N. Love, with the help of his wife Lilla, in issues of four pages, later expanded to ten or twelve. Love advocated the annulment of the Jim Crow laws, equal pay for black teachers, the hiring of black postal workers, and the Carnegie Library for Negroes in Houston, completed in 1912. A weekly paper known as the Houston Informer was published by C. F. Richardson, Sr., from 1919 until January 3, 1931, when the paper was acquired by attorney Carter W. Wesley and two business partners and merged with the Texas Freeman to form the Houston Informer and Texas Freeman. Wesley expanded the paper into a chain of Informer newspapers in Galveston, Beaumont, Dallas, and Austin, Texas, and New Orleans and Shreveport, Louisiana, and Mobile, Alabama, and circulated a statewide edition in small Texas towns, including Groesbeck and Crockett. The Informer acquired a printing company, employed fifteen hundred people at its peak, and is credited with starting many black writers in their careers. The paper was subsequently published as a weekly and semiweekly that changed its name alternately to the Informer and Informer and Texas Freeman. In the 1990s the paper was known as the Informer, was published and edited by George McElroy. For more information, see www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/HH/eeh11.html.
3. Alan Govenar, Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound (College Station: Texas A &M University Press, 2008), p. 245.
4. “El Dorado” is spelled as two words in the text instead of the more common “Eldorado” because it was always spelled as two words in the Informer during the early years of its existence.
5. www.artshound.com/venue/detail/58 and http://projectrowhouses.org/El Dorado-ballroom.
6. Lightnin’ Hopkins, Walkin’ This Road By Myself, Bluesville 1057.
7. Ted Williams, “Serenading the News,” Houston Informer, October 10, 1942.
8. Sam Hopkins, interview by Sam Charters, My Life in the Blues, Prestige LP 7370.
9. Interview outtakes from The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1969.
10. Clyde Langford, interview by Alan Govenar, September 30, 2008.
11. Mack McCormick, “A Conversation with Lightnin’ Hopkins, Part 3,” Jazz Journal 15, no. 2 (February 1961), p. 19.
12. “European Blues,” Gold Star 665-B.
13. Samuel Charters, Walking a Blues Road: A Blues Reader 1956–2004 (New York: Marion Boyars, 2004), p. 221.
14. Interview outtakes from The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1969.
15. Anna Mae Box, interview by Alan Govenar, January 29, 2002.
16. Interview outtakes from The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, 1969.
17. Ibid.
18. “Mrs. Lola Ann Cullum’s ‘Radio Aggregation’ Entertains at Glendale,” Houston Informer, September 14, 1940.
19. Mike Leadbitter, “Mrs. Cullen Rediscovered,” Blues Unlimited 46 (September 1967), pp. 7–8.
20. Johnny Brown, interview by Alan Govenar, July 22, 2008.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Sid Thompson, “Yer Nite Lifer,” Houston Informer, September 12, 1946.
24. Ibid., October 5, 1946.
25. Mike Leadbitter, “Mrs. Cullen Rediscovered,” Blues Unlimited 46 (September 1967), pp. 7–8.
26. Clyde Langford, interview by Alan Govenar, February 7, 2008.
27. Leadbitter, pp. 7–8. There was a comedy team named “Thunder and Lightnin’” (not Smith and Hopkins) that had worked as an opening act for Milton Larkin and his Harlem Swing-Apators performing at the “Big All-Colored Midnite Show” at the Majestic Theatre in Houston in September 1939. Nothing is known about this comedy team and whether or not the naming of Smith and Hopkins had anything to do with them. However, a black