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himself on an unamplified acoustic guitar, when in fact he was playing electric, but the song made a lasting impression. Lightnin’ was singing “a mean, unhappy blues in the long, irregular rhythms of a man who learned his singing in the fields or along dusty southern roads.” Charters tried to find Lightnin’, but to no avail. Then, one day, a cook overheard Charters talking about Lightnin’ in a small restaurant on Bourbon Street and identified himself as Lightnin’s cousin. He told Charters that Lightnin’ was in Houston, but didn’t know how to contact him. “I was in and out of Houston the next five years,” Charters wrote, “recording, interviewing musicians, and asking about Lightnin’ Hopkins. When I’d come from California to Houston, I’d find out Lightnin’ had gone back to California, and when I’d get to California, I’d find out Lightnin’ was back in Houston.”6

On one of Charter’s trips to California, he met Chris Strachwitz in Berkeley. Strachwitz (b. 1931), a Silesian German immigrant who listened to blues and jazz on British and American Armed Forces Radio in the years after World War II, came to the United States with his family in 1947. Once in California, Strachwitz began to actively collect records. In 1951 he enrolled at Pomona College, where, he says, “I remember hearing this amazing voice [on Hunter Hancock’s radio show in Los Angeles] singing: ‘Hello Central, Give me 209/ I want to talk to my baby, She’s way on down the line.’ … I was just totally wigged out. I was a teenager, rebellious, insecure, skinny, couldn’t speak English right. I thought this was paradise; this was heaven. And somehow this voice—that guitar style—Lightnin’s sound just kind of haunted me and became really my favorite…. Certain sounds just grab you; that’s all there is to it. I could just tell he must have just made this stuff up on the spot, at least that was my conviction. And I kept being a hound for this music, scrounging up 78s.”

After two years at Pomona, Strachwitz transferred to the University of California at Berkeley, where he graduated after serving in the United States Army from 1954 to 1956. He got a job as a high school social studies teacher, but in his free time he read jazz magazines and continued to collect records. “I bought anything I could find that I had heard on the radio—blues, jazz, hillbilly, anything,” Strachwitz says. “I very rarely would buy a brand new R & B record because they were expensive. They were seventy-nine cents plus tax. But I had discovered Jack’s Record Cellar in San Francisco and the Old Englishman on Eddie Street, also in San Francisco, and the Yerba Buena Music Store in Oakland, which specialized in traditional jazz and blues and several record shops in the black neighborhoods. This was a time when 78s had gone out of style and were being dumped because they were being replaced by 45s. Then there were the jukebox operators like the Tip Top Music Company and I had to go and see what they had to sell. They were real cheap and they would sell you records at ten to twenty-five cents a piece, sometimes only a nickel. There I would pick up anything that said ‘blues singer’ and ‘guitar.’ That’s how I got to know that stuff. I was listening to KWBR out of Oakland and deejay Jumpin’ George Oxford played people like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Jimmy Reed, and Lightnin’ Hopkins.”7

In early 1958, Strachwitz met Charters in Berkeley at a club where Charters had performed with a New Orleans–style jazz band; they started talking and realized they were both record collectors. “I would go over to his place, where he had a trunk full of these old 1920s records that he had picked up at junk stores in the South. Sam was primarily interested in prewar blues and New Orleans jazz. And Sam would in turn come to my place and listen to some of the current blues that I liked—Sonny Boy Williamson, and I played him Lightnin’ Hopkins’s records because he was one of my favorites. We were probably listening to some of Lightnin’s Herald recordings.”8

Charters became more familiar with Lightnin’s music, but