Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [57]
While McCormick wanted to help Lightnin’, he was not completely altruistic. Like Asch, McCormick was a complex individual who, though he may have shared Asch’s mission to “record folk music and people’s expression of their wants, needs and experiences,” also saw the potential for personal gain. By acting as Lightnin’s manager and promoter, McCormick probably didn’t make much money, but he was able to enhance his own reputation as a folklorist through his articles and liner notes that espoused the values of the folk revival. McCormick was smart to cultivate his own relationship with Lightnin’ and
Antoinette, but as hard as he tried, he was not able to control them. As time went on, Antoinette was to become a much more important influence upon Lightnin’ than McCormick probably ever realized.
While McCormick and Charters celebrated Lightnin’s “country” roots, they minimized the influence of the urban reality in which he lived and ignored the inherent social stratification within the African American community. Lola Cullum, for example, and to some extent Antoinette were from more financially stable backgrounds than Lightnin’, though the people who frequented the little dives where he played in the Third Ward were more like him, farm workers and day laborers who migrated away from the country hoping to find a better life in the city. Among African Americans, the appreciation of Lightnin’s music, whether for its expressive qualities or finesse, was rooted in a shared cultural experience, and in this way was significantly different from the perceptions of those associated with the folk revival.
Charters, McCormick, John Wilson of the New York Times, and many others writing during this period all denigrated Lightnin’s use of the electric guitar, yet it was this instrument that had propelled his commercial hits and contributed to his vitality in Houston’s Third Ward. By championing the acoustic sound, the folk revival perpetuated a misunderstanding of not only Lightnin’s earlier recordings, but the history of blues in general. Yet, at the same time, the folk revival created a context in which Lightnin’ and many of his contemporaries could reach new audiences and earn more from their performances and records than had ever seemed possible.
5
The Blues Revival Heats Up
While the blues revival overlapped with the folk revival, it had been incubating for years. Record collectors were among the first researchers of blues in the 1930s, if not earlier, compiling discographies to piece together the history of the music. However, for a long time blues was thought of as a basic building block of jazz. Sam Charters, Mack McCormick, and Chris Strachwitz first learned about blues from 78-rpm records, and like their colleagues in the United States and Europe, were arriving at an understanding of the blues from a jazz background.
Prior to the publication of Charters’s book The Country Blues, accompanied by the release of his Folkways recordings of Lightnin’ Hopkins in 1959, little had been written about the subject. Certainly McCormick’s research paralleled Charters’s quest, as did the pioneering record work of Paul Oliver, among others, in England and throughout Europe. The first attempt at a Lightnin’ Hopkins discography was compiled by New Yorker Anthony Rotante and published in the British magazine Discophile in 1955.1 Building on Rotante’s work, Strachwitz published a Hopkins discography in the British Jazz Monthly in 1959, with explanatory comments by McCormick.2 These discographies were crucial to the blues revival, which was