Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [46]
“Lightnin’ had a room in the back. It was a quiet street. The room was small, it had a bed, one chair, and it was in the back of the house…. I sat on the bed holding the microphone while Lightnin’ sat in the chair in the room, and we made the record that afternoon.” Charters says that Lightnin’ introduced him to his “wife,” named Ida Mae, but she didn’t say much. She was “watchful, and very aware that it was a complicated situation, and she made nice, as simple as that.”15 No one had ever come to Lightnin’s residence to record him. He had always gone to a studio, and the presence of this equipment crowded into Lightnin’s bedroom, with a white man holding a microphone in front of him while he played and sang, must have seemed very strange. Charters had had fieldwork experience, but for Lightnin’ and Ida Mae, the circumstances were completely new.
After a couple of songs, Lightnin’ thought he was done. “I had not only asked Lightnin’ to play the acoustic guitar,” Charters remembers, “but I was consistently asking him to play the old songs. This was new to him, and with that I could only give him three hundred dollars [the equivalent of about $2,100 today] to make a record, and the fact that I was doing an LP was just not in his comprehension. He was used to doing two songs for two hundred dollars, and I kept asking for more songs … but then I started asking him about people like Blind Lemon and he became interested. It was the first time anyone had ever asked him about these things. So he really went back into his memory. So finally we got what I thought was an extraordinary session. I did it all with a hand-held microphone. I could do the vocal and move it down to get the guitar solos, and keep him from popping the mike as he always did and could get a sense of balance. And as an old folkie myself, I kept insisting that he tune the guitar…. But we did have two or three hours of quiet time, and concentration.”16
The session was over by about four o’clock in the afternoon. Charters paid Lightnin’ the agreed-upon three hundred dollars in cash, and Hopkins signed a simple release. A hand-written memo by Charters to Asch described the difficulties he encountered: “This was a hard, mean session; so I had to be content with what I could get. ‘Lightning’ is used to much more than $300 for 9 tunes and he’s worth more than $300 for 9 tunes to a house like Atlantic or Riverside. To us, he’s worth $300. But it was a long, rough afternoon. I got him because I thought he could do us some good. I’m sorry I couldn’t get more or that I couldn’t have had some selection. For sure, we’ll never get him again at this price.”17 Lightnin’ consented to the recordings because he needed the cash. At that point in his life, given the opportunity to make money from his music, he couldn’t refuse, but he could hold back.
Lightnin’s recordings for Charters were a mix of a few up-tempo boogies—“She’s Mine,” “Come Go With Me,” and “Fan It”—and covers of tunes he’d already recorded earlier in his career, like “Bad Luck and Trouble,” “Tell Me Baby,” “Penitentiary Blues” (“Groesbeck Blues”), and the Blind Lemon Jefferson song “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” (“One Kind Favor”). One track is an excerpt from Charters’s interview with him, called “Reminiscences of Blind Lemon,” in which Lightnin’ talked about hearing Jefferson for the first time, meeting him, and playing with him in Buffalo, Texas.
Overall, the guitar playing is solid but rough and is evidence that Lightnin’ had not played an acoustic instrument in some time. The lyrics reiterated Hopkins’s established themes of unrequited love and how hard work and tough times were at the root of his blues. In “Goin’ Back to Florida,” one of his most poignant lyrics evoked the futility of the plight of the sharecropper:
I was gettin’ forty cents a hundred,