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the tight three-piece band sound of his Decca and Herald recordings, when he played locally, he was looser and more idiosyncratic. He played whatever he was in the mood for, and he’d sometimes let people he knew from the neighborhood sit in. Houston bluesman Rayfield Jackson, who grew up in the Third Ward, said he got interested in Lightnin’ when he was in high school in the 1950s. “I used to go over to his house,” Jackson said, “and we’d play on his guitar and laugh and talk. He would show me all he knowed, and a lot of times on the weekend, I’d go on a gig with him and sit in, play right along with him…. Mama knowed where

I’d be going, when I’d get out of school, so she didn’t fuss at me…. I played some

gigs with him, sure did. Right here in Sunnyside, up and down Cullen [Blvd.]…. And we was playing in little old joints with about three or four tables in them, and when you got five or six people in there, you had a crowd…. I’d go in there and play a little while, sit up there and back him up with the guitar, what he taught me how to do…. Wouldn’t have no drummer, just two guitars—and Lightnin’ stomping his feet. That’s it. He’d have them big old shoes on and one of them Big Apple hats, big old wide hats with a feather stuck up in it—looked like a peacock.”79

Why Lightnin’ didn’t travel more at the height of his popularity in the R & B market raises difficult questions about his deep-seated inhibitions. Certainly, if he had a manager to coordinate his bookings and touring, he could have sold more records and made more money from his performances. It’s likely, however, that in many ways, he was unappealing to reputable mangers who knew that he never adhered to the exclusive terms of any record company contract. Lightnin’ was fiercely independent and intensely private. He didn’t have a telephone, either because he couldn’t afford it or he simply didn’t want to be easily found. Moreover, he was a heavy drinker and gambler who lived day to day, following his whims without any apparent long-term ambition. Travel was treacherous for any African American during the years of segregation, and for Lightnin’, the perceived danger associated with unfamiliar places was no doubt frightening. Clearly, his experiences in jail and on chain gangs had imbued him with a deep distrust of law enforcement, the judicial system, and to some extent the white world in general. Yet his record producers were white and helped him achieve a stature and income that was unprecedented in his life, even if he didn’t trust them. Lightnin’ knew what it was like to work for white people. Certainly, the landowners in Leon County where he grew up were predominantly white. Lightnin’ did what he needed to in order to survive, and once he started earning more than subsistence wages, he was content to not take unnecessary risks by venturing too far from home.

When McCormick asked Lightnin’ why he turned down the opportunities for travel that had been presented to him, Lightnin’ explained that he stayed in Houston because he was “treated so nice. Everybody know me and I don’t have to get acquainted with too many people ‘cause they already know me. And in that way, it make me feel like I’m at home. Knowing I’m treated well—not much reason to get up and leave it.”80

As Lightnin’s recording career seemed to be slipping away from him and his income from his music was declining, a new audience of jazz and blues fans, writers and folk music enthusiasts, Europeans and intellectuals, were becoming increasingly aware of him. Lightnin’s records had made him a legend, but his whereabouts to people outside of his community in the Third Ward were largely unknown.

4

Rediscovery

Lightnin’ Hopkins first met Mack McCormick around 1950 through McCormick’s mother, who was then working as an X-ray technician at the Telephone Road office of a doctor whose patients included Bill Quinn of Gold Star Studios.1 McCormick supported himself by doing part time and intermittent jobs as an electrician, short-order cook, taxi driver, and record librarian at KXYZ, but in his free