Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [63]
In the early 1960s, McCormick was extremely busy as Lightnin’s manager, promoter, and agent, in addition to “a number of other roles” that included picking him up, taking him to gigs, and bringing him home. As early as 1959, McCormick had been contacted by Harold Leventhal, a New York folk music impresario, who was the manager of Pete Seeger and the Weavers and wanted to present Lightnin’ in New York.
Leventhal had been “a song-plugger for Irving Berlin,” Seeger recalls, “and then he decided to take a job with his brother, who was a clothing manufacturer, but he met the Weavers and was interested. And he suggested to a friend of his that his friend become our manager. However, when the Weavers were finally blacklisted out of work [by McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities], we took a sabbatical, and as Lee Hayes said, it turned into a Mondical and Tuesdical.” 31
Blacklisted as communists by McCarthy and the House Committee for Un-American Activities, the Weavers were forced to disband in 1952, but Leventhal persisted in trying to find them an audience, and in 1955 he organized a reunion concert at Carnegie Hall. “Town Hall had turned him down,” Seeger says, “unless we would sign anti-Communist oaths, but he went to Carnegie Hall and they said, ‘We’ll rent to you. Just give us the money.’ And to everyone’s surprise, it was standing room only.”32 The success of this concert in 1955 led to others, and for the Hootenanny on October 14, 1960, at Carnegie Hall, organized as a benefit for the folk music magazine Sing Out!, Leventhal booked Lightnin’ as part of a program that included Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Bill McAdoo, Elizabeth Knight, Jerry Silverman, and the Harvesters.
John Lomax Jr. had corresponded with Irwin Silber at Sing Out!, and negotiated the terms for both Lightnin’ and him to perform not only at Carnegie Hall, but as part of another Pete Seeger concert in Philadelphia, as well as a Sunday afternoon show at Art D’Lugoff’s Village Gate. The fees agreed upon were: $250 for a 20 minute set at Carnegie Hall, $200 in Philadelphia, and $150 against 50 percent of the gross at the Village Gate.33
Leventhal worked with Silber to promote the shows, and in a letter dated September 23, 1960, to George Hoefer at Down Beat, wrote: “I am bringing Sam ‘Lightnin” Hopkins to New York for a limited period to do concerts and club work in the New York and Boston areas. This is the first time that Lightnin’ Hopkins will be appearing [in public] in the north, and should you be interested in interviewing him or getting a story, I would be glad to arrange this.”34
Leventhal’s promotion attracted considerable attention, and Robert Shelton devoted most of his concert review in the New York Times to Lightnin’, stating: “Although Carnegie Hall is hardly the ideal forum for this sort of musician, Mr. Hopkins was surprisingly effective in surmounting the size and impersonality of the auditorium. His voice is dark, supple and intense. In a half-dozen surging blues songs, derived and adapted from his own experience as field hand and rambler, he demonstrated some of the pain and some of the release that make the country blues such a strong vehicle…. His highly imaginative guitar work was impressive throughout.”35
For Shelton, the highlight of the evening was Lightnin’s “relaxed, verse-swapping number with Pete Seeger, the master of ceremonies, and Bill McAdoo, a 23-year-old folk singer from Detroit, [in which] Mr. Hopkins began to show those gifts of wit and flair and improvisatory skill on which part of his justifiable reputation rests.”36