Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [58]
As the blues revival evolved, it became a kind of romantic movement, as Jeff Todd Titon suggests, among “idealists of all ages, involving a love for blues as a stylized revolt against bourgeois values.”3 Blues revivalists idealized African American life and music, especially as it related to the apparent rejection of the conventions of work, family, worship, and sexual propriety. The blues singer appeared to embody what many blues revivalists lacked—the confidence to express his or her innermost feelings and desires in music without reproach.
In the context of the early years of the blues revival, Lightnin’ became a focal point of discussion, documentation, recording, and, to some extent, controversy among those who sought to advance their own careers by championing his. McCormick was trying to manage all of Lightnin’s affairs. However, concurrent with McCormick’s promotional efforts, John A. Lomax Jr. also tried to help Hopkins advance his career. Lomax Jr. was not a professional musician, though he did like performing and sometimes appeared on stage with Lightnin’. McCormick disapproved, and, in an interview with researcher Andrew Brown years later, commented, “John and he [Lightnin’] started playing a game that can best be described as ‘The Nigger and the White Man.’ And that really started getting to me, because it was like old times have come again. Lightning was perfectly willing to play it. And they ended up with some dialogue on stage, little set routines, that were like Amos ‘n’ Andy, and even worse. Just patronizing little exchanges: ‘Yeah, boss, yeah.’ So some of the Lightning Hopkins/John Lomax Jr. concerts I was hearing about—and a few I attended—turned into these essentially offensive exchanges. That aggravated me.” 4 At the time, however, McCormick also imposed his views about how Lightnin’ should perform, though he did not appear with him on stage in such a patronizing fashion. Both McCormick and Lomax wanted Lightnin’ to recreate his past for an audience hungry for what they thought was a “pure” sound, though in fact it was contrived. During this period, Lightnin’ was changing sharply. He was more self-conscious and aware of himself as an entertainer. He played along with the wishes of McCormick and Lomax because the money was good, but he also held out for more. “Lightning had this habit of doing as little as possible musically on stage,” McCormick said, “and talking as much as possible. The story that led into ‘Mr. Charlie’ got up to twenty minutes at one point. If you’re on stage and you got an hour-and-a-half, two hours, you get a restless audience pretty quickly that way.”5
Lightnin’ liked to perform the song “Mr. Charlie” about the man he remembered who ran the mill in Centerville. “See, that child, little old boy,” Lightnin’ recalled, “he couldn’t talk, he stuttered. He went to Mr. Charlie … but Mr. Charlie didn’t figure that he could work.” But one Sunday, he “run on up to Mr. Charlie’s house…. He tried to tell Mr. Charlie that his mill was on fire…. He tried to tell him but he stuttered so. Mr. Charlie said, ‘You back again, boy, I got my work to do.’ And the boy kept trying, but couldn’t get the words out, ‘Y … Y … Y …’ And Mr. Charlie said, ‘If you can’t talk it, just sing it.’ And the little boy sang, ‘Ohhhh, Mr. Charlie, your rollin’ mill is burnin’ down.’”6 Lightnin’ loved to tell this story, and it became a kind of prologue, which varied in length, before Lightnin’ started singing.
Lomax didn’t want to interfere with Lightnin’s performance on stage and tended to let him ramble on for as long as he wanted to. Despite the criticism leveled against him, Lomax was not deterred in his efforts to bring Lightnin’ to a wider audience, and he didn’t want any financial compensation for helping him. Lomax was a successful builder and real estate developer who headed a construction company in Houston and participated in the activities of the Houston Folklore Group