Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [49]
Bynum didn’t know McCormick, though she did have a vivid memory of the event. “This was the old Alley [on Berry Street, not the current theatre in downtown Houston],” Bynum says. “It used to be a barrel factory, and there were four entrances, four ways to come in. It was theater-in-the-round; people were all around you. We had to use their set that had been built for a production of The Iceman Cometh and we couldn’t change anything. So we just had our hootenanny on top of The Iceman Cometh set. We all came in with our guitars and banjos strapped to our shoulders, singing, ‘Father and I went down to camp …’ Lightnin’ Hopkins came out later.”25
McCormick introduced Lightnin’ to the Alley audience, but didn’t know what to expect. “I was apprehensive,” McCormick wrote, “because I knew the audience had come to hear the familiar ballads and songs popularized by book-trained singers. Here, in its habitat, there has never been any interest in the blues.”26 Clearly McCormick was expressing his feelings about the local folk crowd vis-à-vis local blues, even though Leadbelly, Big Bill Broonzy, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry were by then relatively well known among folk revival audiences across the country and abroad. In Houston, McCormick understood the limitations of his audience.
For Lightnin’, the Alley Theatre hootenanny was a completely new experience. While he had recorded for white producers, he had never performed for a predominantly white audience in a formal concert. “Yet,” McCormick remembered, “within seconds of the time he came out to prop his foot by me and begin ‘That Mean Old Twister,’ he’d begun to steal the show. By the time he sang [the verse] ‘the shack where I was living really rocked but it never fell’ the audience was hanging on every nuance of his voice. When his face stretched in pain, the guitar ringing bitterly, as he cried, ‘Lord! … turn your twister the other way!’ the theater filled with the taut gasp of an audience caught and held in the grasp of a single man.”27 McCormick said that he encouraged Lightnin’ to re-create the way he played on the streets of the Third Ward.28 The two-hundred-seat theatre was sold out, and when Lightnin’ sang John Lee Hooker’s “Hobo Blues,” the audience went quiet out of respect for the performance.29 But Lightnin’ was confused, and at one point in the middle of a song, McCormick recalled that Lightnin’ said, “‘Well, a preacher don’t get no amen in this corner,’ meaning people are clapping, but they’re not saying anything during the song.”30 Lightnin’ didn’t hear any of the banter he was accustomed to when he played in the little joints in the Third Ward, which may have made it more difficult for him to improvise, as so much of the improvisation in blues stems from a call-and-response exchange with the listener. In the case of Lightnin’s performance of “Hobo Blues,” there was, however, an added level of irony, in that it was probably the same song he had recorded as “Freight Train Blues” for Sittin’ In With in 1951, but also represented some stagecraft on the part of McCormick to have him sing a song that implied he was a hobo who rides trains, when in fact he only once rode a train as a hobo, decades before.
The day after the Alley performance, two articles appeared in the Houston press, and were likely the first in a Houston paper to ever mention Lightnin’. Frank Stack of the Houston Post reported, “Lightning Hopkins, a Dowling Street Negro folksinger who makes up his own songs, in the grand old ballad tradition from his own experience, overshadowed everybody else on the program with an easy personable style.”31
In the Houston Chronicle, Bill Byers was more evenhanded in his review, but he was especially moved by Lightnin’, who appeared on stage “with dark glasses, shined