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to accompany him could do so. Alexander didn’t play the guitar himself, and Sam picked up the instrument and showed him what he could do. “He come … ready with that singing. He couldn’t play no music,” Sam said. “Never played an instrument in his life. But he’d tote a guitar; he’d buy a guitar. But he’d tote it in case he’d run up on you or me or somebody could play, and he’d sing. And he kept a guitar because if he asked could you play a guitar and you say ‘Yeah.’ Well, he got one, see. And then y’all tear it off.”6 Before long, Hopkins was traveling with Texas Alexander and accompanying, or following, him on guitar. Given that Alexander often broke time, Sam must have struggled at first to keep up, but was apparently able to eventually learn his songs sufficiently to play with him. Clearly, Alexander was not that particular when he showed up at a little juke joint or cafe in East and Central Texas ready to perform.

Texas Alexander showed Sam that he could make a living singing blues. By the 1930s, Sam was fed up with farm work. “I didn’t make too much picking cotton,” he said. “I’m telling you the truth because they wasn’t paying but fifty cents a hundred [pounds of cotton picked]. Man, I’d make me two dollars and something. I was picking four and five hundred [pounds]. But you know, man, I’m telling you the truth, if you just know what it takes to get two dollars out of that cotton patch…. But I wasn’t on that farm much longer. I left.”7

While Sam was used to performing for tips, he was beginning to figure out how to get paid for his music. “I commenced to playing for dances,” he said. “See, when I got good, and when I went to finding them there places where they barrelhouse [drinking and dancing], I didn’t know. I just had to run up on them places, see, around Jewett, Buffalo, and Crockett. And they had little old joints for Saturday nights, you know. But what you gonna do through the week? I found Mart and out there and around Coolidge and where they had one every night, man, I did all right for myself because that was my business. Those joints, cafe joints, you know, where they’d get back in this part and they’d do a little dancing in there, and they’d drink a little. And I was getting three and a half [$3.50] in Coolidge, Texas. Got pretty good, and so they raised it to around six dollars to go to Mart, making six dollars a night.”8

With Texas Alexander, Hopkins was able to even earn more. Alexander was known as a recording artist, so he tended to attract bigger audiences wherever he went. Hopkins followed Texas Alexander through the East and Central Texas towns of Crockett, Grapeland, Palestine, Oakwood, Buffalo, Centerville, Normangee, and Flynn. For Sam, Texas Alexander became a kind of mentor, who, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, who played novelty songs and country tunes, in addition to blues.

Once Prohibition ended in 1933, juke joints and barrelhouses on the outskirts of little towns, which had essentially functioned as speakeasies, became more public. However, the laws related to the sale and consumption of liquor varied from county to county, and bootlegging was still rampant. The little joints where Sam and Texas Alexander performed were likely not licensed to sell liquor and probably served booze illegally. They were places where sharecroppers and day laborers alike found some reprieve from the hardships and suffering of the Great Depression, proffering booze, women, music, dancing, and gambling. It was in these gritty, smoke-filled shacks that Sam honed his skills as a guitarist and singer, composing and performing the blues that gave voice to what those around him were feeling and experiencing. While he ventured off on his own at times, he often played with Texas Alexander.

While Sam never recorded with Alexander, he was influenced by his songs, which not only evoked a poignant sense of what life and work must have been like at that time, but also expressed a bitter sense of irony. In “Levee Camp Moan,” Texas Alexander’s extended hums and moans drawn out over unevenly spaced measures punctuated the lyrics.