Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [23]
Houston was rife with musical talent, and there were numerous orchestras and bands that, as early as the late 1930s, featured a mix of Texas-area performing artists, from Ivory Joe Hunter to Eddie Taylor, Henry Sloan, T. H. Crone, Giles Mitchell, Tack Wilson, Bob Williams, Jerry Moore, Joe Pullum, and the Prairie View Collegians. Pullum was one of the few to actually make records prior to World War II; most of these bands were ignored by the major labels recording in Texas at the time because company executives didn’t feel the music was commercially viable. Yet Pullum had a hit on Bluebird in 1934 with “Black Gal What Makes Your Head So Hard,” a song that Sam Hopkins covered and recorded in 1961.6
By the time Sam made his way to Houston in the early 1940s, the Third Ward was teeming with nightlife. But to middle- and upper-class residents of the Third Ward, Hopkins was probably invisible. He was one of the many poor rural blacks trying to get a foothold in the city, frequenting the lower-class bars, some of which, according to the Informer, were part of a bigger social problem. In a March 2, 1940, editorial, the Informer wrote: “County Judge Roy Hofheinz has announced a fight on honky tonks which sell strong drinks to minors…. There are Negro places that knowingly sell beer to minors…. There are some places which permit marijuana to be sold to minors in their places. Every Negro should endorse the campaign to close such places of business.”
Sam was not known to smoke marijuana, but he did play in the kind of honky tonks referenced in this editorial. In another article in the Informer, columnist Ted Williams gave a more visual description of the honky tonks, though he had a very condescending tone: “Yes Honky Tonks [sic], where one sees the other side of Houston’s nightlife. For these places are rendezvous for those who like the enjoyment in a crude way. Clothes are of the least importance. The men and women who frequent these places are usually in their work clothes…. Lacking in modern furnishings they make up for it with hilarity. The jocund strains of guitar music ringing from the nickelodeon sends the crowd there in to dances that crosses between the swing-out of today and the native dance of the dark continent. Women swing and shake their bodies, while the men do their numbers. Words of all description can be heard among the throng. Though somewhat primitive, it is an interesting spectacle.”7
During his early years in Houston, Lightnin’ also performed on the street and did whatever he could to eke out a living. “I stuck around there awhile,” he said, “and they come to find out that I was playing up and down Dowling Street there. So that began to get around, see, and I began to ride the buses free. The bus driver stopped and picked me up anywhere he’d see me with that guitar. And they’d have a big time on that bus…. I’d pick up quarters, halves, dollars. He’d even shill me a couple of dollars…. And one thing that the bus driver did—God in heaven knows that I’m not lying—he knowed that I drank, so he stopped at the liquor store on the corner of Dowling and Leeland at his own risk. Sent me in that liquor store and I got me a half a pint of liquor and he wait till I come back and then he takes on off. He brought me on back to Elgin and Dowling, and I goes on down to Holman, and I told him, ‘Now, I wants to get off here.’ And he say, ‘Well, I’m gonna let you off here…. But you try to catch me on my next round.’ And every day, I’d catch that same man. And that’s the way that I’d ride them buses and didn’t pay nary a dime. Just get on there with that guitar. And one night, I looked for us all to get arrested. They had a dance on the bus. I got to playing that ‘Little Schoolgirl’ [referring to John Lee ‘Sonny Boy’ Williamson’s ‘Good Morning, Little School Girl,’ recorded in 1937]. They all got up and went to swinging on the bus.