Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [48]
“One night, after he had finished a job, Lightnin’ said, ‘You guys, wanna come with me? Po’ Lightnin’s gonna wanna do some gambling.’ So we went to this house, totally dark. I forget which ward it was in and Po’ Lightnin’ banged on the door and sooner or later the lights went on inside. And this sleepy black man appeared at the door in a bathrobe. ‘What you all want?’
“And Lightnin’ said, ‘Man, you know what I want.’
“So, they sat down at a table and they played dice. And I thought the other man was half asleep, but as soon as Lightnin’ would roll those dice, this man’s eyes would just pop open and he would focus in on those dice and a couple of times Lightnin’ tried to grab them: ‘That’s me! That’s mine! I gots that.’
“But his eyes were just on it. ‘You muthafucka, that ain’t yours!’
“It was really something. The cockroaches were this big [three inches long] out there in Texas. I’d never seen creatures like that. They were wandering up and down planks on the side of the room, and it was hot. You know, the only time you could ever live was in the nighttime. There was no air conditioning in many places. By then, I was staying at Mack’s place and he had a fan, and you went to sleep and you woke up feeling just as tired in the morning. It was humid! I had never experienced anything like it. But I thought this was just great and I decided at that time that I wanted to start—literally started a record label because I thought I wanted to capture Lightnin’ Hopkins in his beer joints. And a year later, that’s exactly what I did. That was the beginning of Arhoolie Records.”22
While Strachwitz was enthusiastic about the raw power of Lightnin’s performance on electric guitar accompanied by bass and drums, that sound didn’t interest McCormick or Charters, who both knew that the folk revival audience wanted to hear the unaccompanied, unamplified solo blues. McCormick, of course, had seen Lightnin’ perform in the gritty juke joints of the Third Ward on numerous occasions, but Charters had not and had based his opinions about Lightnin’ largely on his interpretation of his records and his single meeting with him.
McCormick, in addition to recording Lightnin’, started promoting him in Houston and elsewhere. By the late 1950s, McCormick had become the chairman of the Houston Folklore Group, and had helped to organize a program called Hootenanny at the Alley at the Alley Theater in Houston on July 20, 1959, that was modeled after the hootenannies that musician, singer, songwriter, folklorist, and labor activist Pete Seeger and the impresario Harold Leventhal had organized for more than a decade in New York City.23 John Lomax Jr. performed on the same bill with Lightnin’, as well as with Howard Porper, Jim Lyday, Kyla Bynum, Jimmie Lee Grubbs, and Ed Badeaux, who were all folk revivalists. For the hootenanny, they each took turns singing traditional ballads and songs like “The Yellow Rose of Texas,” “Midnight Special,” and “Wayfaring Stranger,” accompanying themselves on guitar, autoharp, and banjo, interspersed with a choreographed script on folk music narrated by Ben Ramey. They were all active on the Houston folk scene, frequenting the Jewish Community Center when it was located at Hermann Park, and later, in the 1960s, the Jester (a small club off Westheimer), both of which featured local and nationally touring folk revival acts.
Bynum was a classically trained violist who performed with the Houston Symphony Orchestra, but was an active participant in the Houston Folklore Group. Her father played guitar and banjo and taught her traditional music as a child. “When I got to Houston from Oklahoma,” Bynum says, “my husband, Jim Lyday, and I went to the Unitarian Church and they had a program on folk songs that was presented by the