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be “pensive, remote, reluctantly responsive, even after his regular breakfast of two bottles of beer, which are always supported during the day with similar sustenance.” By most accounts, Hopkins often appeared on stage with a flask of gin, which he liked to pull out of his pocket and take a sip from in between songs. Kyla Bynum described Lightnin’ as a “lush,” and said that on the day of his performance at the Alley Theatre, “somebody had to stay with him all day and keep him sober or he wouldn’t show up for the show. Ed Badeaux [a folk revival singer who worked for Folkways] might have helped us out with that because it was a matter of just sort of babysitting him, talking to him, keeping him happy until the eight o’clock show time came…. It was well known he had a real drinking problem as we say these days.”35

When Phelan followed Lightnin’ into the “magic milieu of one of his dance halls [in Houston’s Third Ward] where he is surrounded by a crush of intense and voluble admirers,” she observed that he rejected an acoustic guitar in favor of an electrically amplified instrument, ignoring “the expressed objections of McCormick and other purists. Lightning makes his point about needing amplification: ‘It gets so noisy, my sound is taken away from me. I can’t hear myself.’”

Apparently McCormick never mentioned Charters to Phelan, because neither Charters nor his recordings for Folkways are discussed in the article. McCormick, as Lightnin’s new manager, was interested in getting his own publicity, and was careful about what he told Phelan. But McCormick also promoted himself by announcing his own recordings and the discography he was compiling, adding that he had received a letter from Harold Leventhal, the impresario and manager of the folk revival group the Weavers, who was interested in possibly bringing Lightnin’ to New York to perform at Town Hall or Carnegie Hall. 36 Overall McCormick wanted to emphasize and secure his role in Lightnin’s “rediscovery.”

Despite the fact that Lightnin’ lived in a segregated, urban neighborhood in Houston and had pursued a commercial career for more than a decade, McCormick focused on his rural and oral culture roots as the basis for his authenticity. In keeping with John Lomax Sr.’s pastoral ideal of black folk singers, McCormick believed that Lightnin’ was a “genuine folk artist,” whose “roots are not the motley impressions of phonograph records but the distinct heritage of his birthplace.”37 For McCormick, Hopkins was a “strangely innocent man, isolated and oblivious to much of contemporary life, and ignorant in some astounding ways.”38 In his liner notes and articles, McCormick liked to quote Hopkins’s stories of cotton picking, singing in church, and playing blues in East Texas to bolster his argument that “beneath the sharp urban manners,” Lightnin’ was “pure country” and that East Texas “is a magic spring from which the great blues minstrels have flowed in an unbroken line.”

Folklorist Patrick Mullen suggests that while the dichotomy that McCormick set up between the modern world of recordings and other technological developments on one side and the traditional oral world of the isolated, rural folk community on the other was widely accepted by folklorists and folk revivalists of that period, it was ultimately flawed. Mullen maintains that “the traditional and the modern, oral and media transmission, are not isolated entities, they have always interacted with one another because tradition is a concept of the past that is always constructed in the present.”39 Lightnin’ may have personally interacted with Blind Lemon Jefferson and Texas Alexander, for example, but he also heard their recordings and the recordings of others like John Lee Hooker, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Big Joe Williams, and others who were performing rhythm and blues and had nationally known commercial hits.

McCormick, as historian Benjamin Filene points out, was one of several mid-century researchers who responded to “what they perceived as bourgeois culture’s corrupt materialisms