Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [26]
As early as 1940, Lola Cullum had organized a musical program for the Retail Beer Dealers Association, under the auspices of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, in the hope of getting radio station KPRC to “replace the music by records, now heard on the Saturday night programs for colored, with that of local talents.”18 According to the Houston Informer, the program included a public school teacher and a quartet featuring Novelle and Leonard Randle, as well as Percy Henderson and the young blues guitarist Lester Williams.
On March 26, 1946, the Houston Informer reported in a front-page story that Dr. and Mrs. Cullum were the hosts of W. C. Handy, who came to Houston for the first time in forty-eight years to perform at Don Robey’s Bronze Peacock Dinner and Dance Club with the Wiley College Log Cabin Theatre. While Cullum had helped to plan musical programs around Houston, her first foray into the record business was with Amos Milburn. She had heard Milburn in a San Antonio nightclub, and was so impressed with his vocal capacity that she asked him to come see her when he was next home in Houston. When they finally got together, she made “some crude paper-backed tapes” of his singing and sent them to the Mesner brothers at Aladdin Records, who invited her to bring Milburn to California.19 Cullum had probably heard about the Mesners from Houston blues pianist Charles Brown, who was already an established star on the Aladdin label by the time she found Milburn.
Guitarist Johnny Brown, who worked as a guitarist and sideman for Milburn, recalls, “Mrs. Cullum was a full-figured woman. She was light skinned. And she had them Indian features. She had straight, long hair. Mrs. Cullum must have been around five ten; she wore all kinds of fancy clothes. She was a fancy-dressing person.”20
Brown met Cullum in 1946, shortly after moving to Houston. Brown says, “One club in particular where I played at was Shady’s Playhouse [then called Jeff’s Playhouse] on Simmons Street in the Third Ward. It was the most popular club in the Third Ward at that time. And Mrs. Cullum kind of found out. She went looking for young musicians. She was the kind of person who took the young musicians and kept them busy, kept them working.”21
Lola Cullum also let Milburn rehearse with his band at her house in the Third Ward. “She had a beautiful home at that time,” Brown says. “She had one of the upper-class houses in Third Ward, and she would make sure everything was just right. And if they [the sidemen] weren’t wearing the right clothes, she get them something. She used to take the doc’s [her husband’s] white shirts and put them on musicians.”22
Milburn’s first session for Aladdin on September 12, 1946 was well received. Sid Thompson of the Informer said that when Milburn returned to Texas, he had “crashed the movie and musical capital with his particular brand of blues. He cut six sides for Aladdin Recording Company … and is back here for a rest.”23 A month later, Thompson wrote: “Amos Milburn, newest recording star to flash across the jukebox world, has really hit big time with his boogie woogie singing and piano playing…. He is under the management of Lola Ann Cullum. This brings to mind the little known fact this lady is a song writer of excellence with several hit numbers to her credit. ‘Twas she who got the lucrative contracts for Milburn, who is quite a youngster and just out of the Navy.”24
With the success of Milburn’s records, Eddie Mesner from Aladdin encouraged Cullum to look for more local talent. She found out about the scene on Dowling Street, where Sam Hopkins sometimes played on the sidewalk with his old partner from pre-war days, Texas Alexander. Cullum told blues researchers Mike Leadbitter and Larry Skoog in a 1967 interview that she liked Hopkins’s music and that she made some test recordings to send to Aladdin.
While country blues, performed by such artists as Big Boy Crudup and Big Bill Broonzy, was dying on the charts, the Mesners thought