Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [66]
Boy, will you please stop by Arizona town (x2)
You know they won’t sell them Indians nothing to drink
And they don’t hardly allow them around
In “Got to Move Your Baby,” Lightnin’ sang about a sixteen-year-old girl who apparently found him irresistible, warning “if you got a young girl/you better keep her away from me.” In the end, the implication was ambiguous:
Just one more time before you leave me here
Baby, I know you love me somethin’
But you still in mama and papa’s care
Then, in “So Sorry to Leave You,” he complained about being homesick and his longing to be back home:
If I had wings like an angel
I want to tell you where I would fly
Whoa, I’d fly to the heart of Antoinette
That’s where poor Lightnin’ would give up to die
This was Lightnin’s first mention of Antoinette in a song, and while Lightnin’ was devoted to her, he was certainly known to have affairs with other women.
Perhaps the most moving song on the Last Night Blues LP was “Conversation Blues,” in which Terry sang, “Junior, I want you to tell old Sonny something to make him see,” to which Lightnin’ responded:
Well, you ask Po’ Junior to give you something
Whoa Lord, to make poor Sonny Terry see
You know I only got two eyes and I offer you one
Whoa, now yes, don’t you think well of me
On November 9, 1960, Hopkins recorded another LP for Prestige/Bluesville, produced by Cadena, titled Lightnin’, with accompaniment again by Gaskin and Evans and liner notes by Joe Goldberg.48 Highlights on this LP included Lightnin’s version of Big Boy Crudup’s “Mean Old Frisco” with a loose and fast swing in the guitar; a remake of “Shinin’ Moon” that he recorded for Gold Star and Herald; the slow and melancholy blues “Thinkin’ ‘Bout an Old Friend” about love “way out in the West somewhere”; and “Automobile Blues” (also an update of a Gold Star single) in which he pleaded with a kind of sexual innuendo: “Yes, your car so pretty, baby, please will you let me drive some time.” Billboard, in its review of this album, wrote, “Lightnin’ Hopkns is one of the great blues artists of the decade. Prestige’s recording of him captures his driving intensity and individualism.”49
On November 13, 1960, CBS Television Workshop taped Lightnin’ for his first television appearance in its production of A Pattern of Words, a program produced by Robert Herridge and advertised as a “lyrical entertainment” that was “an experiment in four elements of expression, all of which deal with basic experiences of human life—joy, love, birth and death.”50 Broadcast on Sunday, November 20, the program featured the “contrasting techniques” of four individuals: the talking blues of Lightinin’ Hopkins; the harmonica of John Sebastian, performing the works of Bach and his own original compositions; and the folk songs of nineteen-year-old Joan Baez.51 Little is known about how this television program took shape, but it is likely that Harold Leventhal was in part behind it, given the involvement of Hopkins and Baez, who had both performed at the Carnegie Hall hootenanny.
Two days after the taping of A Pattern of Works and Music, Nat Hentoff brought Lightnin’ to Nola Penthouse Studios in New York to record an LP for Candid, founded by Archie Bleyer, the owner of the Cadence label, who wanted another label to record the jazz and blues that he loved. Bleyer had approached Hentoff, and together they produced LPs until the label went out of business in 1962, not long after the release of the Lightnin’ in New York recordings.52 It’s surprising that Lightnin’ recorded for Candid, especially since he was under contract to Prestige/Bluesville, though apparently some kind of arrangement was made, given there is no evidence of any complaints or lawsuits.
In his liner notes, Hentoff said that Lightnin’ was relaxed during the session: “He had found out that Carnegie Hall was not all of New York and that maybe there were a few more whites than he’d imagined who relate to more of his hurting songs.”53 For the LP, Hopkins recorded seven guitar blues, and one on the piano, though at one point in the