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’ on KCOH in 1952,” McCaskill says, “Lightning Hopkins was one of my most requested singers. He was, in my opinion, a super talented artist who could really make a guitar talk. I also remember that when I was at KLEE that he was one of Trummie Cain’s favorite talents, too. Perhaps it was the advent of rhythm and blues and rock music that outdated his numbers as the requests for his songs dwindled down a great deal, but he was still one of the top music makers in the Houston area. I met him one time at the Club Matinee in late 1952.”50 In the summer of 1953 a group of black businessmen headed by Robert C. Meeker bought KCOH, making it the first black-owned station in Texas and the first station in Houston to target black listeners. KCOH was followed in late 1954 by KYOK. According to Texas Johnny Brown, once KCOH became a black-owned station, they rarely “aired any of Lightnin’s music. They were much more geared to the mainstream rhythm and blues of the day, which featured the Duke/Peacock sound.”51

Despite the limited airplay that Lightnin’ got on Houston radio stations after the mid-1950s, he had already become well known, especially in the segregated Third Ward where he lived and worked most of the time. Lightnin’s music had an edge that he had honed in the gritty juke joints of the Third Ward, and he had built his reputation by giving voice to the downtrodden. In fact, his first song to make it to a national chart was a very unlikely hit. The Gold Star release of Hopkins’s song “Tim Moore’s Farm” on February 12, 1949, went to #13 for one week on Billboard magazine’s “Most Played Juke Box Race Records.”52 Within weeks, Quinn had leased the record, called “a sleeper in the South” by Billboard, to the Modern label for national distribution.53 His strategy worked, and in many ways its success was unprecedented. It was a protest song unique to Texas and was one of the only unambiguous black protest songs to ever become commercially viable. Like his decision to release “Jole Blon,” Quinn was not guided by the usual commercial ideas that drove the record business, and this unpredictability is what makes Gold Star and other small regional labels like it especially interesting. A more experienced A&R man may have rejected “Tim Moore’s Farm” on the basis that few would know who “Tim Moore” was, or what exactly Lightnin’ was singing about, making it unfit for commercial release. Quinn was unintentionally oblivious to such considerations.

“Tim Moore’s Farm” was about the infamous Tom Moore, who owned a plantation in Grimes County, Texas, and was known for his cruelty to the blacks who toiled there. The song itself was traditional with as many as twenty-seven distinct verses that were added by the different singers who performed it. According to Mack McCormick, the song originated in the mid-1930s with a field hand named Yank Thornton who worked on the Moore plantation. McCormick first collected the song with Chris Strachwitz in 1960 from Mance Lipscomb, who at the time wished to remain anonymous on record because he feared reprisal from Moore. Lipscomb sang: “Tom Moore’ll whip you, dare you not to tell.” He believed that if Moore found out that “I put out a song like that I couldn’t live here no more…. ‘Goddam, you put out a song about me and you made a record of it—I’m gonna kill you!’ Or if he didn’t do it, he’d have it done.”

The song, McCormick wrote, was “a brutally truthful characterization of one particular hardened opportunist who has taken advantage and mistreated his laborers. It is a protest against ‘them bad farm’ where a farmer can get started with only a borrowed five or ten dollar bill, the ease of which dupes him into working against an ever increasing debt, his life circumscribed by fear of the big boss, and the bells which call him from the field to meals and then call him back to the field where the landlord stands with ‘spurs in his horse’s flank’ and ‘the whip in his hand.’”54

Lightnin’ said he had heard Texas Alexander sing a version of the song, and when he recorded it, he thinly disguised the subject by