Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [54]
One of the most talked-about songs on this LP was “Blues for Queen Elizabeth,” a rambling blues, which Lightnin’ actually introduced before he started singing. “This is a song I’m goin’ to make up for the Queen in England,” he said. “I think that it would be all right. My wife brought home a picture and she was very, very upset over it because she looked so good to her. She said she looked like a rose that just bloomed in May. So I got a little idea. And I’m makin’ this song for the Queen and her husband, which I don’t know. And I’m hopin’ some day I get to come over in England and play some blues for them.”
Lightnin’s explanation of why he wrote the song seems contrived, and one has to wonder if he was prompted by McCormick. And when he finally got around to singing, the lyrics were disjointed.
Whoa, you know the rooster crowed in England
Man, they heard him way over in France
You know, I’m prayin’ to the good Lord in heaven
Oh Lord, please give these people a chance
Finally, after a long interlude, with bluesy guitar runs answering each verse, Lightnin’ finally got back to the point of the song: “I’m gonna take my wife to England, tell me she was in Chicago a few days ago.” While Lightnin’s mixing of time periods between what is apparently a reference to World War II in France and the present of 1959 seemed random and disjointed, it was nonetheless representative of how he, and many other traditional singers, put together blues. As McCormick pointed out, “Many of his songs are spontaneous improvisations, made and forgotten in the time he takes to sing them,” and “Blues for Queen Elizabeth” was certainly one of those songs which, by the time he finishing singing it, barely made sense.51 Yet the song attracted immediate attention in the press. Phelan wrote in the Houston Post: “Lightning’s incredible spontaneity is equal to any occasion, it seems. Told that Queen Elizabeth II was in Chicago, the minstrel immediately composed ‘Blues for Queen Elizabeth,’ but when chided because he called the Queen of England ‘baby,’ Lightning flashed his gold teeth in a sheepish grin. ‘I wasn’t talking just to her,’ he said.”52
Around the same time that Dobell released The Rooster Crowed in England, McCormick leased Diane Guggenheim (a.k.a. Diane Hamilton) and her Tradition label enough material for two Lightnin’ LPs that were released in late 1959 or early 1960: Country Blues, followed by Autobiography in Blues.53 Musically, the recordings that McCormick was producing did effectively document the breadth of Lightnin’s traditional repertoire on acoustic guitar, even if he was in fact re-recording some songs, like “Short Haired Woman,” that had already been commercially released. Lightnin’s versions of such songs as “See, See Rider,” “Bunion Stew,” “Hear My Black Dog Bark,” and “When the Saints Go Marching In,” evoke a bygone era.
Country Blues received far greater attention than The Rooster Crowed in England had. About Country Blues, Robert Shelton wrote in the New York Times: “Despite a poor job of taping, it is a record of great interest. Although there are occasional flashes of wit, Hopkins’ mood here is generally more introverted and somber than it was on his Folkways release of a few months ago. One gets the feeling of listening to a sensitive man reflecting on a hard life with pathos, not sentimentalism, and meaning every word he says, an attribute rarely found in the rhythm and blues style.”54 Of particular interest to Shelton was the song “Go Down Ol’ Hannah,” in which Hopkins took a traditional work song and reshaped it into a blues.
During McCormick’s 1959 field sessions with Lightnin’, in addition to collecting blues, he unexpectedly recorded one selection, “The Dirty Dozens,” that he felt at the time would “never be placed on the open market.”55 But McCormick ultimately changed his mind and entered into