Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [69]
By the time Lightnin’ returned to Houston, he had spent about six weeks in New York City. How he traveled to and from New York is unknown, though Strachwitz speculates that he probably went by train or bus, because Lightnin’ hated to fly. However, Art D’Lugoff at the Village Gate remembers that he sometimes used to pick Lightnin’ up at the airport and take him to his hotel, but he wasn’t sure exactly when. Lightnin’ played the Village Gate numerous times during the 1960s because he was paid well and one gig led to another.65
Lightnin’ had stayed in Harlem the first time he traveled to New York in 1951 to record for Bobby Shad’s Sittin’ In With label and had seemed to like it, not only because of the money he made there. In one of his interviews with McCormick, he said, “That time I went to New York to make records … I stayed across the street from where Count Basie was. Count Basie, Joe Turner, Preacher Williams, they was all there. I had me some fun dancing there two–three nights.” But when Lightnin’ got to New York City in 1960, the room that was booked for him was, according to Hentoff, in a “depressing, run-down Harlem hotel.” Hopkins asked to be moved and was taken to “an even grimmer, gloomier hotel in the Village.” Lightnin’ told Hentoff, “There’s no light down there,” and during his first morning in the room the darkness made it hard for him to wake up, and he was late for an appointment. “There’s no sun,” Hopkins said, “so I didn’t know what time it was. I just sat down on the bed and played my box a while.”66
Lightnin’, however, didn’t stay in that hotel very long. Hentoff reported that he moved into the apartment of Martha Ledbetter, the widow of Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, and that “was one warm place in the city.” How Lightnin’ met Martha is unclear, though it’s possible that she attended the Carnegie Hall concert. Leadbelly had performed on different occasions with Pete Seeger as part of hootenannies and labor union rallies. In any event, according to David Benson, who traveled as a road manager for Lightnin’ in the 1970s, Martha Ledbetter gave Lightnin’ a ring that he showed off to people he met—“A gold ring with a black face with a gold S on it. He wore it all the time.”67 After 1947, Lightnin’ was far better known among black audiences than Leadbelly ever was.
Lightnin’ had now firmly established himself on the folk and blues revival scene, but to say that he had been “rediscovered,” as John S. Wilson did in the New York Times in 1959, is misleading. His career was continuous, and to some extent he straddled both white and black audiences, though his popularity ebbed and swelled on the Billboard and Cashbox jukebox and retail charts. He may have stopped recording between 1954 and 1959, but his music was not only available, it was also re-packaged and promoted during those years. Herald issued 45 rpm singles of Lightnin’s recordings every year from 1955 to 1960, and the Mesners produced a compilation of Aladdin singles intended for the growing LP market on the Score label in 1958.68 However, for the Score LP, called Lightnin’ Hopkins Strums the Blues, their marketing strategy catered to the folk audience. The unsigned liner notes on the back of the LP reads: “Lightnin’ Hopkins is a true folk singer. His songs are the heart of the South, the very essence of his people, their joys, their triumphs, their difficulties, their oppression. But Lightnin’s music too, like that of every great artist, has a universal quality…. Like all great folk artists … Hopkins improvises easily