Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [43]
In 1958, Sam Charters, a music historian, writer, record producer, musician, and poet, contacted McCormick. Both Charters (b. 1929) and McCormick (b. 1930) were originally from Pittsburgh, and their careers had in some ways paralleled each other, especially in terms of their interest in blues, jazz, and other styles of folk and traditional music. Both believed blues was the bedrock of jazz, echoing the thinking that informed such writers as Frederic Ramsey Jr. and Charles Edward Smith in Jazzmen (1939), Hugues Panassie in Real Jazz (1942), and Alan Lomax in Mister Jelly Roll (1950). Moreover, both McCormick and Charters had written numerous articles for jazz journals, though Charters was also a musician who had been playing and leading his own New Orleans–styled groups since 1948. Charters was also a more accomplished writer. He was college-educated; after being kicked out of Harvard because of his political activism, he attended Sacramento City College and the University of California at Berkeley, where he finally received a bachelor’s degree in economics in 1956. Charters had started listening to jazz early on, and when he moved to New Orleans at the age of twenty-one, he began to absorb the history and culture he had only read about, and he studied jazz clarinet with the legendary George Lewis. A year later he and his wife Ann Charters began making field recordings for Folkways Records.
Folkways Records and Service Corporation had been founded by Moses Asch in 1948 to document musical and spoken-word traditions from around the world. Among his earliest releases on ten-inch, 33⅓ rpm records were Square Dances with Piute Pete and His Country Cousins, Who Built America with Bill Bonyun on guitar, Darling Corey with Pete Seeger on five-string banjo, Take This Hammer with Leadbelly and his twelve-string guitar, and Songs to Grow On with Woody Guthrie. Asch’s tastes in music were eclectic and reflected not only the values of the burgeoning folk revival, but also included gospel, traditional jazz, blues, and different musical styles from around the world. Asch had been heavily influenced by John Hammond’s 1938 “Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall, which set the stage for Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, and others to crossover into playing for white folk/blues audiences. Frederic Ramsey (the producer of Leadbelly’s “Last Sessions” for Folkways), introduced Asch to Charters, who was beginning to gain a reputation as a jazz scholar. Charters’s first Folkways release was a recording of the Six and Seven-Eighths String Band from New Orleans and was followed by numerous other albums of traditional New Orleans bands, notably the Eureka Brass Band that had been formed in the 1920s.3
Shortly after the publication of Charters’s first monograph in 1958, Jazz: New Orleans 1885–1957, Nat Hentoff interviewed him on a radio show in New York City, and asked him what he wanted to do next.4 When Charters told him about his deep interest in blues, Hentoff gave him the name of his editor at Rinehart, and within days after dropping off a sample text, Charters had a contract and a five-hundred-dollar advance to write a book on country blues.5 At this point, there had been numerous articles published on blues in small magazines, but never a full book devoted to the subject.
Charters first learned about Lightnin’ Hopkins in 1954 when he heard one of his records, “Contrary Mary,” which had been recorded for the Jax label three years earlier. “It was still around town on the jukeboxes,” Charters says. “And a musician I knew heard it and got a copy up on Rampart Street.” Mistakenly, Charters thought Lightnin’ was accompanying