Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [27]
Sam told the story of how Cullum discovered him countless times, but with each telling, he tended to embellish the details. To Sam Charters, he recalled in 1965 that he was shooting craps at home when a friend told him that a lady outside was honking her horn wanting to speak to him. When he went outside, she identified herself as a talent scout and asked him to get his guitar and play one song for her, after which she offered him one thousand dollars to come with her to make records. Two years later, during the filming of The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sam exaggerated even further and said Cullum, after hearing him play, gave him ten one-hundred-dollar bills before he even got in the car to go with her. A thousand-dollar advance was astronomical in 1946, especially for an unknown singer.
Clyde Langford says that when he was a child in Centerville, he heard a radically different version of the story, not only from his parents, but also from Sam’s mother, Frances Hopkins: “That lady out of Houston [Cullum] first saw him in Centerville. He’d sit on the front porch and play his guitar sometimes. And he used to play on the street up there in town, on Highway 7, down toward the Lacy Grocery, toward FM 1119…. And that’s where he was picked up when he got his start…. He was sitting there thumpin’ an old, beat up guitar with a pair of run-over shoes on, no socks, overalls with all the tail ends of them tore out, an old, raggedy sundown hat, and she seen him and pulled over and stopped. And she asked him to get in and he got in and she drove off with him. He started to get into the front and she told him, ‘No, she didn’t want no trouble. He better get on the back seat,’ and that’s what he did…. And they went on into California and she bought him a gorgeous suit of clothes … and had that ole kinky hair, they call it conked. And he said she gave him a pocket full of money, it might not a been over fifty dollars … and he slipped away from her. She didn’t know when he left. He slipped away from her and went back to Houston and that’s where he made his home.”26
While Langford’s account is hard to believe, given it’s based on hearsay from the perspective of a child, it does underscore the way in which Sam had become larger than life in his hometown. Sam was a kind of folk hero in Centerville, and this rags to riches story, even if it does distort the facts, is nonetheless revealing about how he was remembered.
Cullum, in her interview with Leadbitter and Skoog, was adamant about the fact that she had discovered Hopkins in the Third Ward, though she never said how much he was paid. When they got to Los Angeles, Eddie Mesner decided to record eight sides in a session on November 9, 1946, four that featured Hopkins on vocals, and four with Smith. While they were in the studio, according to Cullum, one of the producers, presumably Eddie Mesner, dubbed Hopkins “Lightnin’” and Smith “Thunder.”27
Years later, Lightnin’ told different naming stories. To Dallas Morning News columnist Frank Tolbert, he maintained that “Blind Lemon said [in the 1920s] when I played and sang I electrified people. He was the one that started calling me Lightnin’.”28 But in the 1970s he told drummer Doyle Bramhall that he got his nickname when he was sitting on his porch and “got hit by lightning.”29 In many ways, how Lightnin’ recounted his life paralleled his approach to his music. He was free form, at once confiding, endearing, and deceiving, saying and singing whatever he felt. He was a man of the moment, and by changing his story or improvising a new verse or