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on October 23, in his first full concert at Art D’Lugoff’s Village Gate at 185 Thompson Street in Greenwich Village. The show time was 3:30 P.M., and once again, it attracted an enthusiastic audience and the attention of Robert Shelton, who, in his review in the New York Times, commented that Lightnin’ was more relaxed than in his Carnegie Hall appearance. “Although Mr. Hopkins’ sentiments are primitive,” Shelton wrote, “their expression is not. Trouble was treated sardonically, with broad humor and pathos. The blues form may seem simple and limiting, but at the hands of a master, they burgeoned into a subtle expression of moods.”43

Three days after playing at the Village Gate, Lightnin’ went to Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey on October 26, 1960, to record at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio (famous as the site for many Prestige and Blue Note jazz recordings). Ozzie Cadena, who had worked for the Savoy label as an in-house producer and A&R scout in the 1950s, produced the session, and Bluesville later issued the recordings. Bluesville was a subsidiary of the jazz label Prestige, which was founded in 1959 to focus primarily on older “classic” blues artists.44 Lightnin’ was a perfect fit for the Bluesville catalogue, and this album titled Last Night Blues featured him accompanied by Sonny Terry on harmonica and two New York area sidemen, Leonard Gaskin on bass and Belton Evans on drums. Both Gaskin and Evans were veterans of the jazz scene; Gaskin’s musical associations included Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and Eddie Condon, and Lovelle had worked with Earl Hines, Arnett Cobb, Teddy Wilson, and Buck Clayton.

For Last Night Blues, McCormick wrote the liner notes and discussed the parallels in the artists’ rural upbringings and their respective developments as individual stylists.45 McCormick posited that Hopkins and Terry eventually became aware of each other through their recordings: “Sam sat in front of Houston jukeboxes hearing about [Terry’s] ‘Hot Headed Woman’ and Saunders [Sonny’s given name] heard about a nappy-headed [Hopkins’s] ‘Short Haired Woman’ from one end of Lenox Avenue to the other.”46 While some of McCormick’s comparisons were a stretch, his fundamental premise was sound in that both were part of the same generation, born six months apart, and their music expressed the plight of their fellow African Americans, moving to the city to work as “mill hands, freight loaders, porters, and yardmen.” Moreover, both Hopkins and Terry were itinerant before they settled in urban areas, though “for all their similarities of heritage and experience, the men are direct opposites. Where Lightnin’ is leery of strange situations, dependent and suspicious, and the victim of his handicaps, Sonny is the strong one, a man on casual terms with his handicap—blind-ness—and one capable of warm, binding affection for the men he plays with.” Ultimately, however, McCormick saw their differences as deeply reflective of their personalities—“These personal qualities are reflected in the music heard here: Lightnin’s sly charms and innocence set against Sonny’s warm-hearted joy of life.”47

Musically, Terry’s harmonica was well suited as accompaniment for Hopkins; the production values were much more polished than the field recordings of Charters and McCormick. In a new version of “Rocky Mountain,” one of Lightnin’s first Aladdin recordings, Hopkins’s guitar and vocals were matched by Terry’s heartfelt response on harp. According to McCormick, the song was based on Lightnin’s travel to Arizona in the 1930s on a cotton-picking contract, though this contradicted what Hopkins had told Charters about how he wrote the song when traveling to Los Angeles with Lola Cullum. In any event, in this version, Lightnin’ did sing about going through Arizona. In one verse, he even expressed his contempt for the federal prohibition law and his compassion for the American Indians, who, McCormick said, Lightnin’ met when he got involved in bootlegging Mexican wine and whiskey into the Papago and Gila Indian Reservations.

If you ever go out in Rocky