Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [24]
Sam didn’t move to Houston until about 1945. He was living in Grapeland, about 130 miles north of Houston in January 1940, when he filled out his Social Security application, but it is unclear exactly when he left. He did say that Lucien Hopkins, a family friend, lent him the money to buy a new guitar and urged him to go to the city. In interviews, Sam often jumped between time periods for the sake of telling a good story. One time, Sam said he got on a bus in Houston around 1940 and played a song that he said he had made up called “Play With Your Poodle,” but the girls listening to it didn’t know what he meant. However, Tampa Red actually composed “Let Me Play With Your Poodle” and recorded it on February 6, 1942. But for Sam it didn’t matter. He wanted to talk about those girls who apparently didn’t understand the lasciviousness of his song. “I’d see them little school girls come by,” he recalled, “and I’d say, ‘I want to play with your poodle.’ And they’d say, ‘Listen to that man. That man saying that.’ ‘I wants to play with your poodle. I mean your little poodle dog.’”9
As much as Sam bragged about the tips he made from his music during the early 1940s, it was barely enough to support himself, and he often went back to Leon County to stay with his mother. “She’d always take him in,” Clyde Langford says. “He might bring her a little something, maybe help buy a few groceries. He’d do what he could, though in those years, my daddy said it wasn’t much.”10
Sam never served in World War II, though he did say he was drafted. But on the night before his induction, he said, prior to moving to Houston, he was stabbed in a fight after winning all the money in a crap game, and his injuries made him unfit for military service.11 However, if he had indeed served time in jail or on a chain gang, he would never have been drafted in the first place. It’s likely he invented the stabbing story during the 1940s. It was another way for Sam to cast himself as a victim to elicit the sympathy of his audience. Moreover, it was means for him to save face; a man of his age and generation who didn’t serve in the armed forces was looked down upon.
Sam did sing “European Blues,” apparently about World War II, but he didn’t record it until 1949.12 In the first stanza, the tone was at once a lament and an admonition.
Yeah, you know there’s people raidin’ in Europe
They’re raidin’ on both sea, land, and air (x2)
Yes, you better be mighty careful, little girl
Your man might have to go over there
But then, in the second stanza, Sam admitted:
You know, my girlfriend got a boyfriend in Europe
That fool’s already crossed the sea (x2)
You know, I don’t hate it so bad
That’s a better break for me
In the last stanza, he alluded to what might have been a draft notice, and even if it wasn’t his, he sang in the first person: “Yes, I got a letter this morning/Sayin’ practically all these boys got to go,” and then ended the song by advising those who don’t want to serve to move away (so that Uncle Sam doesn’t catch them): “Yes, if you’re goin’ live bad, son, don’t live here no more.”
The fact that Sam never served in the military during World War II probably contributed to his decision to move to Houston, where he could get away from his past and build a new life for himself. He rented a room in a boarding house in the Third Ward.13 While Sam said he was married at the time, he never identified which of his “wives” was with him. Years later, he liked to boast that he’d written songs about “practically every wife” he ever had and often named Ida Mae, Katie Mae, Mary, and Glory Be, even though he was never legally married to any of them. In most instances, he referred to these women as common-law wives, though it appears that he used the title wife in the same sense that men use girlfriend today, meaning somebody he was sleeping with but not married to. Certainly, at that time living with a woman out of wedlock was considered sinful, and his use of the term wife was probably just a ruse to