Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [67]
In “Lightnin’s Piano Boogie,” he demonstrated his prowess as a pianist, playing a hard-driving instrumental, mixing tempos with a resolve and humor reminiscent of the barrelhouse sound he might have heard back in the 1930s. In “Mighty Crazy,” Lightnin’ struck a humorous chord. The song was up-tempo, combining a fast shuffle on his guitar with a foot-tapping rhythm and talking blues about the foibles of doing laundry, where each verse ends with the line: “It’s crazy to keep rubbin’ at that …” punctuated by a high-pitched, single-string run.
Yeah … sister got a rub board, mother got a tub
They gonna around doin’ the rub, the rub, ain’t they crazy
Get up in the morning, take a little toddy
Take in washin’ for each and everybody, ain’t they crazy
Billboard heaped praise on the Lightnin’ in New York album, giving it a four-star rating for strong sales potential: “This is an in-depth musical portrait of Lightnin’ Hopkins, not as a popular blues singer, which he has been for many years, but as a serious singer of serious songs.”54
After completing the Candid session, Lightnin’ went to Massachusetts to perform at a date booked by another folk revival promoter, Manny Greenhill, at the Agassi Theatre on the campus of Harvard University, where he appeared on a bill with Cisco Houston. Harold Leventhal had been in touch with Greenhill and helped to facilitate Hopkins’s work in the Boston area.55 The Harvard show was a joint presentation of Manny’s Folklore Productions and the student group Radcliffe Harvard Liberal Union, and was the beginning of an ongoing relationship with Greenhill, who managed and booked Lightnin’ until about 1966. “I couldn’t say how long my dad represented him,” Mitch Greenhill, Manny’s son, says. “I think it might be hard to pin down. My dad was always extremely loyal to the people he represented, and if they went off and found what seemed like a better deal and come back a couple of years later, he’d always take them back.”56
Mitch recalls that when Hopkins came to Massachusetts, he stayed with him and his parents at their house in Dorchester. “My dad liked him more than my mom did,” Mitch says. “My mom found him kind of a prickly house guest, because one time she made him some eggs for breakfast, I guess they were scrambled eggs, and they were too soft or too hard, or something, and he spit them out all over a wall in the kitchen. It didn’t endear him to her.”57
Then, when Mitch went to see Lightnin’ perform, it was not what he had expected. “He was such a showman,” Mitch says, “He had this big smile, and he would do what I would call gimmicky show things. One of the things that got me interested in traditional music was I wanted things to be more real. I kind of maybe expected him to show up in work clothes, or something like that. He was dapper and natty.” During intermission Mitch saw the singer/songwriter Eric von Schmidt, and when he started to tell him how he was surprised by Lightnin’s presence on stage, “Eric kind of wringed me out and said, ‘You’re missing the whole point. Listen closer to what he’s doing. It’s a very brave performance he’s putting on here.’ And I listened and he was right.”58 Lightnin’ was an entertainer, and he had learned how to engage a white audience.
From his concert date at Agassi Theatre, Lightnin’ went back to New York City, where he met the African American producer Bobby Robinson of the Fire label. “Well, I looked him up,” Robinson told John Broven in an interview. “He was playing at a little club in the Village somewhere. I went out to the club. I asked him to record. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll do it, give me $400, I don’t want anything else in my life,’ he said. ‘It’s your record, you got it…. I don’t want no royalties, I don’t want nothing, it’s your record.’”59 Lightnin’ knew he was violating the contract McCormick had negotiated with Candid, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. Apparently Lightnin’ was never faithful to any contract, a fact that makes his later complaints about