Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [64]
Nat Hentoff, writing in the Reporter, described the Carnegie Hall show and its audience in greater detail: “At most ‘folk’ events, the audience was predominantly young, very young. They looked like—and some were—the intense questioners at meetings of the Young People’s Socialist League and the Saturday picketers at Woolworth’s. The folk music they prefer consists largely of ballads and novelty songs they’ve learned from records by Pete Seeger and the Weavers. They are most moved by traditional songs with new lyrics that condemn Jim Crow and the Bomb.”38 Hentoff went on to praise Hopkins as “the only real folk singer on the program as distinguished from singers who ‘interpret’ folk material,” noting that he made “some contact with audience … avoiding his harshest songs and focusing instead on women, those lost and those invited back. The applause was loud but dutiful.”39
Lightnin’ impressed the audience with his authenticity; he was an intrinsic part of the African American culture that he sang about, and in this sense he was a true folk singer, not a singer of folk songs, like the members of the Weavers, who were revivalists. Yet his performance at Carnegie Hall was still staged and lacked the direct interaction with the audience that he was accustomed to in Houston. In the little joints of the Third Ward, Lightnin’ engaged in a kind of running dialogue with his audience, who sometimes shouted out to him and interrupted his singing so that he could respond in kind. At Carnegie Hall, the audience was much more polite, applauding after each song.
Pete Welding, writing in Coda, also praised Lightnin’ and pointed out that he had already released over two hundred sides on a variety of labels, but his recent recordings, made by McCormick on both American and British labels, have “served to introduce Lightnin’ to a wider audience and to establish his reputation as the finest of the unalloyed blues singers still performing.”40 However, Welding also voiced the concern of many writers “as to whether Lightnin’ will be able to weather the adulation of the ‘folkniks’ who now comprise the bulk of his audience…. Will success spoil Lightnin’?” Welding didn’t think so, and acknowledged that Lightnin’ was actually quite sophisticated in his understanding of his different audiences. “Lightnin’ is aware of the sharp dichotomy that exists between the fare he offers his concert audiences and the powerful, impassioned and fiercely introspective blues he sings for his friends on Houston’s Dowling Street. ‘I stay with my own people,’ he says. ‘I have all my fun and I have my trouble with them.’ Since his songs reflect this situation, he reserves the full force of his artistry for them—and they’ll always serve as a touchstone for him.”41
Welding was essentially right, though what he didn’t seem to fully understand was that even in his own community, Lightnin’ catered to his different audiences. McCormick had observed, “In his finest moments Lightnin’ becomes a dramatist with an incredible knack for spontaneous rhyme and crisp, scene-setting narratives. He’ll state an experience in the first-person present-tense, picking some intimate memory and bringing it completely forward to the moment—while the guitar suggests shifts of mood and underlines the action.”42
In performance, Hopkins might slump back, rambling on about his day until he found an up-tempo boogie to suggest coming awake, and then fade into a more religious tone that evoked a different mood, singing “When the Saints Go Marching In.” While these shifts kept the audience engaged, they also reflected a sensitivity to what the people listening might be feeling, though Lightnin’ usually did exactly what he wanted to and expected those around him to keep up with him.
After Carnegie Hall, Lightnin’ appeared