Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [68]
Robinson had a record shop in Harlem called Bobby’s Happy House, which he opened in 1946 at the corner of Frederick Douglass Boulevard and 125th Street, and over the years he began to produce his own records. He established several different record labels, some in partnership with his brother: Red Robin Records (1952), Whirlin’ Disc Records (1956), Fury Records and Everlast Records (1957), Fire Records (1959), and Enjoy Records (1962). 60 By the time Robinson met Lightnin’, he had had considerable success with his recordings of Buster Brown, Wilbert Harrison, and Elmore James, among others.
When Robinson brought Lightnin’ into the studio, he recorded him solo, but he wasn’t sure what to do next. He felt he needed to have a band sound to make the recordings more commercial, but he knew Lightnin’ was “so unorthodox, you never knew which way he was gonna go.” So he decided to bring in a drummer named Delmar Donnell, who “was one of those little local guys” and wasn’t a professional. In the studio Robinson told Donnell, “Listen, all I want you to do, wherever this guy goes you follow … just keep the beat going and follow whatever he does.” And once the session was underway, Donnell “got the feel of it, he put a book on his drums for a muffled sound and played with the brushes.” Lightnin’ sat down, Robinson said, “cigar stuck in his mouth, crossed his legs, and I set a mike on his acoustic guitar and another mike for him to sing. I sat him on a tall stool so that his vocal mike was above the other one. We didn’t have an amplifier so I had to set the mike at an angle right near the box, that way we could divide it with the drums, and we ran it down and I put it out, it was like an instant [hit] record.”61 By the time they were done, Lightnin’ had recorded enough material for an LP, which Robinson called Mojo Hand after the title song, though the album was not released until after the single “Mojo Hand” scored big in the marketplace, charting in Cashbox magazine’s “Top 50 in R&B Locations” for five weeks.62 While the “Mojo Hand” single didn’t make the Billboard charts, it was a “Pick Hit” and did get a positive review: “Hopkins is at his very best with these two monumental efforts. Top side [“Mojo Hand”] is up-tempo blues—a story of women, love and superstition. Flip [“Glory Be”] is a slow dirge-like blues also spotlighting drums and the singer’s own guitar. Two great sides.”63
Strachwitz recalls that when McCormick found out about the session with Bobby Robinson, he was furious, even more so after “Mojo Hand” became a hit when it was released as a single in 1961. “Mack called,” Strachwitz says, “and he asked me, ‘Chris, do you have any idea how and where that was made?’ And I told him, ‘That’s a New York label. Bobby Robinson runs that,’ And so, he finally confronted Lightnin’, ‘When did you … I hear you recorded for …’ And Lightnin’ said, ‘Well, lookie here, I needed to make me some money, and this boy come up and said, ‘We’ll make you some records.’”
Lightnin’s “Mojo Hand” built on the success of Muddy Waters’s cover of the song “I’ve Got My Mojo Working,” written by Preston Foster, though it also may have taken its inspiration from the numerous blues songs that had used the line “I’m going to Louisiana to get me a Mojo hand.” These include Ida Cox’s “Mojo Hand Blues” (1927), Texas Alexander’s “Tell Me Woman Blues” (1928), Little Hat Jones’s “Two Strings Blues” (1929), Tampa Red’s “Anna Lou Blues” (1940), Muddy Waters’s “Louisiana Blues” (1950), and Junior Wells’s “Hoodoo Man Blues” (1953). Mojo hand refers to a magical charm used in hoodoo, but also to sexual potency. According to Strachwitz, “Lightnin’ apparently believed it. His ‘wife’ [Antoinette] was a Creole from southwest Louisiana and was probably very aware of those cultural traditions.”64 However, prior to “Mojo Hand,” Lightnin’ had only recorded one song on the subject, “Black Cat Bone.”
Lightnin’ had made a name for himself in New York, and judging from the response to “Mojo Hand,” he still had an audience among urban