Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [19]
By the late 1930s, Hopkins and Texas Alexander had gone their separate ways. Sam was in and out of jail. He was still hell-bent on pursuing his own music career, though working the juke joints wasn’t easy. He ended up getting in fights over booze, women, and gambling that got him arrested and sent back to the chain gang. “I was getting cooped up and knocked around pretty good,” Sam said, “I always somehow or another, I’d be lucky and manage to get out. And one time, I run away.”
Sam made his way to Mississippi. “I went to Clarksdale. That’s right, hoboing with one dime in my pocket.”13 The details of what happened next are not entirely clear. In Clarksdale, Sam recalled that he met up with his “wife” and her brother, though it’s unknown whether or not it was the same wife [Elamer] he had left in Texas. But he didn’t stay in Clarksdale very long. He found a job “picking up those pecans. They was getting nice money … dollar and a half a hundred [pounds].” When he wasn’t gathering pecans, he went off to a place called the Bullpen near the place where his “wife” and her brother were living. The Bullpen was, Sam said, “a hobo jungle…. It was under a shed, like…. So, I’d go down there. They’d gamble and pick guitars and drink. They had plenty to drink. So, I’d go down and play that guitar for them and make me three or four dollars and sometimes [get] women, twelve, fifteen of them. I done good … [and] walked away.”
When Sam got back to Texas, he wanted to see his mother, but he was only in Centerville for a short time. He continued to ramble around. “I caught a freight train in Crockett going to Palestine, Texas,” Sam said, “but I had a little weak string on my guitar around my neck, and that wind hit that guitar, and I ain’t seen that guitar since. But that’s the only time I got a freight train; that’s right. I taken my sister with me. She was sitting up there with me when that guitar said, ‘Whoop!’ Gone, man. I ain’t joking.”14
Frank Robinson recalls meeting Hopkins when he came to his hometown of Crockett, Texas around 1935. “My uncle [Clyde Robinson] was running around with him,” Robinson says, “and he had a daughter, which is Anna Mae Box [who lived in Crockett]. We grew up together, and he would always come and visit. My uncle, he couldn’t play, but he loved guitar music, so whenever a guitar picker would come to town, he would always bring them by the house. My family loved to hear guitar music, and I grew up knowing him…. Well, they drank and gambled together, but my uncle, he couldn’t play. He could sing, but he couldn’t play at all.”15
Robinson recalled that Hopkins had a deep voice and that “he was real friendly, but he liked to drink, and when he’d get to drinking, well, he was quite outspoken…. But other than that, he was really nice. Me and him, we talked. He said never a hard word to me the whole time I knowed him. And I looked up to him just like I did my daddy and my uncle, surely.”
In 1939, when Robinson’s family went to Arizona to pick cotton, Hopkins went along, but he didn’t spend much time picking cotton. “He liked to gamble,” Robinson remembers. “Gambling was legal at that time, out there, and they would all go gambling. We’d peep at them and go on about our business. And at last one day, we didn’t see Sam no more.”
Where Sam went after leaving Arizona is uncertain, but it’s likely that he went back to Texas to stay with his mother in Centerville and play on the street for tips and in little joints and cafes. He may have gone looking for Texas Alexander, but around 1939, Texas Alexander got into trouble. According to bluesman Frankie Lee Sims, Texas Alexander committed a double murder and was sentenced to prison. Pianist Buster Pickens maintained that Texas Alexander served time in the Ramsey State Farm around 1942. However, there are no prison records to substantiate either Sims’s or Pickens’s claims.
Guitarist Lowell Fulson said Texas Alexander had told him that he had been sentenced to life in Huntsville Penitentiary, but said that he was only incarcerated “three months and twenty-one