Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [28]
For Lightnin’s first release on Aladdin 165, he played guitar accompaniment for Thunder Smith, who sang “West Coast Blues” and “Can’t Do Like You Used To.” Aladdin 166 was attributed to only Thunder Smith, and for Aladdin 167 Lightnin’ accompanied himself on guitar and sang “Katie Mae Blues” and “Mean Old Twister.” On Aladdin 168, Lightnin’ sang “Rocky Mountain Blues” and “I Feel So Bad.” For this session Lightnin’ played acoustic guitar, which he would record with only a few more times until 1959.
Of these recordings, “Katie Mae Blues” was one of Lightnin’s favorites, and he performed it often. Katie Mae was one of Lightnin’s “wives,” and while he extols her virtues when he sings, “Yeah, you know Katie Mae is a good girl, folks, and she don’t run around at night,” he admits that even though, “she walks like she got oil wells in her backyard,” she isn’t quite as good as what people think: “Yeah, you know some folks say she must be a Cadillac, but I say she must be a T-Model Ford / Yeah, you know she got the shape all right, but she can’t carry no heavy load.” The mixing of metaphors related to oil, cars, and sexual innuendo was traditional in blues, and in this song, Lightnin’ seized the opportunity to give the lyrics his own twist by establishing a solid call and response with the guitar, accompanied by Smith on piano and an unidentified drummer. Smith’s barrelhouse sound, however, is almost incompatible with Lightnin’s country flair, and it’s not surprising in future recordings that the piano is rarely ever used as accompaniment to his guitar, though he sometimes liked to have a bass and drums. Lightnin’ was not a finger-style guitarist like Mance Lipscomb and other country bluesmen. He tried to play bass and melody runs simultaneously with a thumb pick and a finger pick on some recordings in the 1960s, but nearly everything he played was single-string guitar style, without a slide, whether he was using an acoustic or electric instrument.
It’s difficult to say how well the first Aladdin records sold, since nothing from the session ever charted. But the fact that Lightnin’ was not invited back to record for nearly a year is a good indicator that they didn’t do very well. By contrast, Amos Milburn was back in the studio after only three months. Still, when Lightnin’ returned to Texas he was proud of what he had accomplished, and he went back to Centerville as soon as he could to tell his mother and friends that his records were going to be issued soon. Ray Dawkins recalled, “We was there at Jack Marshall’s farm. Everybody wanted to hear him play. And he told us about how he made up that song ‘Rocky Mountain’ after he saw someone being buried when they were passing through West Texas. And he told us how it was going to be hitting the deck in the next two weeks, how they were putting it out and how he had finally made it.”30
After Hopkins and Smith returned to Houston, they essentially parted ways. “Lightnin’ never tied himself down too long with anybody,” Brown says. “He was kind of freelance.”31 Brown got to know Hopkins at Lola Cullum’s house in the Third Ward. “I remember when he started doing tunes [after his first session],” he says. “I remember the times we’d be sitting there in her den, and Lightnin’ would be going through some of the things that she and Lightnin’ put together.”32 Cullum helped Lightnin’ write out his songs and corrected his bad pronunciation of words that she transcribed.
Brown wasn’t sure if Lightnin’ could actually read or write, but it’s likely that he was mostly illiterate. Lightnin’ bragged that he left home at age eight, and there was never much indication of how much schooling he actually had. He was able to sign his name, as evidenced by some of the contracts he agreed to—though his distrust of contracts that persisted throughout his life no doubt related to the difficulty he had in understanding them. No contracts with
Aladdin have ever been located;