Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [37]
Then I’ll hide my shoe somewhere near your cherry tree
Quinn had tried to salvage his business by issuing one final release from Lightnin’, “Jackstropper Blues,” but ultimately had to discontinue his blues series.61 Any hope that his December 1950 contract with Lightnin’ would reverse his fortunes and revive Gold Star as a blues label were dashed when he learned that Lightnin’ had already recorded with another producer, Bobby Shad. Shad had founded the Sittin’ In With label in New York in the late 1940s, and had come to Houston in 1950 to record Peppermint Harris, among others, but also met up with Hopkins. He asked Hopkins if he was under contract to anybody, and Lightnin’, as usual, said no. In 1951, Shad brought him to New York and recorded eight sides with him, including “Coffee Blues” and “Give Me Central 209,” both of which would become hits. When Quinn found out about this, he was furious and told Shad that Lightnin’ was under contract to him and that he had already been paid. To placate Quinn, Shad bought a bunch of old masters from him and proceeded to release them. Quinn was essentially powerless; his business was collapsing. When Quinn shut down operations, Shad seized the opportunity to record Lightnin’ in Houston and produced another fourteen sides with him. Some of these recordings were done with portable equipment that Shad brought with him, and others were done at Bill Holford’s ACA studio.62
Texas Johnny Brown recalled one such session at ACA: “They had a little recording studio out Washington Avenue…. And we used to go out there, and he’d sit and play…. And I remember Lightnin’ used to take a board, put a board down underneath his feet. And if he didn’t have a drum, he’d just pat his feet real hard—on that board—and play right along with it. It always amazed me how he did it, because his timing was his own timing as far as rhythm is concerned.”63
In the session that Brown described, Lightnin’ and Shad were clearly trying to emulate John Lee Hooker and his foot-tapping records, which were making the Billboard charts. Lightnin’ was in his prime, and he knew what he needed to do to compete. He was eager to record so long as he got his money up front. He refused to be paid on a royalty basis. “Itinerant blues singers like Lightning Hopkins,” Shad told Arnold Shaw, “used to hop on buses, perform, and then walk around with a cup. When we picked him up and talked a recording date, he wouldn’t sign a contract. He wouldn’t accept a royalty deal. He had to be paid cash. Not only that, he had to be paid after each cut…. Before he started a new one, I’d pay him a hundred dollars. He did another, I gave him another hundred. He refused to work in any other way.”64
Lightnin’ had no management; he knew that he was selling his songs outright, but didn’t consider the consequences. Certainly, if one of his records was a hit, it would have made him a lot more than one hundred dollars. As owner of the songs Lightnin’ recorded, Shad is listed as the songwriter on most of his recordings, though he often used a pseudonym. While such a practice is, by today’s standards, unethical and evidence of scams that record companies foisted on their artists, in the 1950s it was common practice. It was by no means unique to blues singers or to black musicians. Songs were sold as a commodity, and any future revenues that resulted from them were usually unforeseen. Certainly, whether or not musicians sold their songs outright often depended on how stable their financial situation was, or how much they understood the workings of the music business, or how much they trusted the person or company they recorded for. To somebody like Lightnin’, who could barely support himself and lived literally from song to song, it made much more sense to simply sell all rights to a particular composition for $100 than wait four to six months for the possibility of a royalty check. In 1951, one hundred dollars, adjusted to inflation, is the equivalent of about eight hundred dollars today.
Shad, in his liner notes to a 1971 reissue of some