Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [25]
However, he claimed, “Every time I get ready to go, I just throw the divorce money up on the table and the paper’s already signed. I’m gone. I done bought about seven divorces. I love these women. You know what I mean? But if they make me mad, I’m gone. Good-bye, honey, because there’s another somewhere else, just like the saying goes, ‘For the flower that blooms, there’s another of a different color.’ White flowers, blue flowers, I can pick any kind I want. And if I got a blue one that makes me mad, I go get me a red one. I kind of like to pick my flowers, and if I get hot, I pick a good one.”14
No records of any of Sam’s “divorces” have ever been found. His daughter from his first wife, Anna Mae Box, had in her possession the marriage certificate for Hopkins and her mother, Elamer, but wasn’t sure whether or not they were ever legally divorced, which might explain why there are no records of any of Sam’s other “marriages.”15 Hopkins did his best to avoid the judicial system by moving around, and his desire to play music, gamble, and carouse trumped being a responsible father and raising a family. Once Sam moved to Houston, Anna Mae lost contact with him.
During his first year in Houston, Sam mainly played in the little cafes and honky tonks, like those ridiculed in the Houston Informer, near where he lived in the Third Ward, though he did venture off into the Fourth and Fifth Wards as well as the surrounding areas. “I used to sing on Dowling Street,” he explained, and then “go to Fourth Ward and Fifth Ward, and back to the Third Ward. That was my run. I’d get money. They would give it to me. Sometimes two dollars, just to hear one song and all that. I was doing pretty good at that time. Sometimes, I’d make a round from Third Ward to Fourth Ward. I’d go on a bus out there and back and I’d have seventy dollars. See the people that were living there, they didn’t know how much I was making with them little fifty cents and two bits and dimes. All you have to do is keep working, and then go count your
money.”16
Generally Sam worked by himself, but sometimes he’d make his rounds with a friend. “I had a friend play with me by the name of Luther Stoneham. We was playing on the corner of Pierce and Dowling. We walked to Harrisburg [Boulevard] and every joint we play they want us and we get in that joint and play. When we got back from Harrisburg, we counted up on the corner Pierce and Dowling a hundred and eighty-one dollars. And that was just from that corner. But when we put out all that money on the concrete, here come a load of cops. They want to know where we got this money. That’s the only time I was ever questioned on Dowling Street. We had it down on the concrete. We had to divide it, you see. I had to call a man [to tell them] that I played in his cafe for them to know that we made that money like that. They thought we had done robbed something. I told them it would be silly for me, if I had robbed something, to count my money down on the street. I was talking to the cop and they called two more carloads of cops. I wasn’t intending for them to take it. So they told us, ‘Y’all get that money off the street and go to your house and count it.’ They knowed I was a musician.”17
Sam never played at the El Dorado Ballroom or any of the more “respectable” clubs in the Third, Fourth, or Fifth Wards. His talking blues spoke to the experiences of the people who listened to him on the street and in the cafes or bars that he frequented—the day laborers, the domestics, the custodians, and others who toiled long hours for low wages. He was building a reputation for himself, and in 1946 word of mouth about him attracted the attention of Lola Ann Cullum, who was married to the respected dentist Dr. Samuel J. Cullum