Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [47]
When I learned my lesson, you don’t know what I had to do
And I couldn’t do nothin’, whoa, man, keep that sack on the scale
Charters was looking for Lightnin’s songs that evoked his rural past and what he perceived as the core of his country blues. But when Charters returned to McCormick’s house and played the recordings he had made earlier that day, McCormick was disappointed. “He just thought it was terrible,” Charters says. “He really said, ‘It doesn’t sound like Leadbelly.’”18
Soon after completing his recordings, Charters sent Strachwitz a postcard saying, “I found Lightnin’ Hopkins; he lives in Houston, Texas. A guy named Mack McCormick is trying to be his agent. Here’s Mack’s address.” Strachwitz quickly contacted McCormick and made plans to visit Houston in the summer. “That was like the Holy Grail to me,” Strachwitz recalls. “Nobody knew where Lightnin’ was or even if he was still alive.” 19
Once Charters left Houston, McCormick went and recorded Hopkins himself. Although he didn’t admit it at the time, the recordings that Charters played for McCormick must have given him a different perspective on Lightnin’. Like Charters, McCormick felt that Lightnin’s commercial recordings obscured his “true identity” as a bluesman. Both McCormick and Charters wanted to record Lightnin’s “old” songs, the ones that he remembered from his early years growing up in Leon County. These songs, McCormick and Charters believed, were the wellspring of the blues form.
Between February 16 and July 20, 1959, McCormick, somehow overcoming the difficulty Charters had encountered, recorded forty-six songs with Lightnin’ in six different informal sessions. In a discography by Strachwitz in Jazz Monthly, McCormick commented that the sessions were “held in either Lightnin’s bedroom or mine. No time limitations were imposed and selections range from one to six minutes in length, most averaging four or more. Many begin with Lightnin’s speaking some explanation or comment, talking himself into the song. He was encouraged to choose material he felt inclined toward…. His choice of material strides from unique impressions of jukebox records he’s vaguely heard to the intensely autobiographical narrative-blues.”20
McCormick enjoyed corresponding with Strachwitz, and when Strachwitz got to Houston in June 1959, he took him to see Lightnin’ play. “I had taken a bus to Texas,” Strachwitz recalls, “and was staying at the YMCA when Mack took me to meet Po’ Lightnin’ that afternoon. Po’ Lightnin’ always lived in this boarding house; it had a room he rented.” For Strachwitz, Lightnin’ had “a neat existence; he didn’t give a shit about what was going to happen. If he needed a few dollars, he’d go play that night.”21
Once Strachwitz heard Lightnin’ perform, he was even more entranced. “I remember very vividly us walking in there to Pop’s Place that night,” Strachwitz says. “It was a little tiny joint, and when we came in, Lightnin’ was standing to the left of the door about twenty feet away. He was just moaning some blues. He was playing a highly amplified electric guitar, with Spider [Joe “Spider” Kilpatrick] on drums…. Well, Lightnin’ was singing about how his shoulder was aching that day and how he hardly got to the job that night because of the water. It had been raining, and the rain covered the chuckholes in the road and his car would hit these holes, and he needed a BC pill [an over-the-counter medication for muscle pain]. But I thought he would be doing songs that he had recorded, but that wasn’t the case at all. What he was singing was a wonderful mishmash of totally improvised material and lines from his records. And since he’d seen us walking in, he suddenly pointed his long finger in our direction and sang, ‘Whoa, this man come all the way from California just to hear Po’ Lightnin’ sing,’ and then he went on singing to some gal who was standing in front of him. And he’d be hollering at her and I mean I had never seen anything like that. I was just in blues heaven. This was just ferocious, and the whole scene was