Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [71]
On July 26, 1961, Lightnin’ recorded a solo LP for Prestige/Bluesville, titled Blues in My Bottle and produced by the folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein and McCormick at ACA Studios in Houston. Surprisingly the guitar is poorly recorded, but Lightnin’ seemed completely at ease in the studio, judging from the way he was joking around at the session in his version of Stick McGhee’s 1949 R & B hit “Drinkin’ Wine Spodee-O-Dee,” calling out the names of his friends who were there: “Why if you a got a nickel, Mary, I got a dime/ ‘Nette [Antoinette], let’s get together, Mack, and bring a little wine.” In “Buddy Brown’s Blues,” he ended with an old melody he learned from Texas Alexander, and in “DC-7” he sang about the crash of a Braniff Airline DC-7 that exploded in the air above his mother’s home in Centerville in 1959.
I want to tell you the first time I taken a notion
To let the airplane take me off this earth (x2)
Look like the first time I begin to ride that DC-7
I remember the first day I was birthed
This particular plane crash haunted Lightnin’, especially since his mother and others he knew in Centerville were witnesses to the disaster. According to Joe Kessler, who years later acquired three of Lightnin’s guitars, Antoinette said that Lightnin’ kept a mental record of airplane disasters. “If someone asked him to travel somewhere,” Kessler says, “he often refused by saying on such and such a day, airline ‘x’ crashed.”76
Carroll Peery, an African American who managed the kitchen and bar at the Ash Grove in the early 1960s, recalls that Lightnin’ talked often about how much he hated flying. “He only flew if he had to,” Peery says, “and then he’d have to get drunk to do that. He liked to take the train. I met him at the train station several times. I was kind of amazed about how little, or how small his suitcases were, because he really packed a lot in them.”77
Peery and Lightnin’ became good friends at the Ash Grove and spent a lot of time together not only in Los Angeles, but also in the Bay Area, where Peery later moved to work at the Cabale. “The more we talked the more we saw how much we had common ground,” Peery says. “He was an extremely complicated man. He had very little formal education, but he had what they call ‘mother wit’ to a great degree. I remember laughing a lot. He could really turn a phrase.”78
One night, when Lightnin’ wasn’t working, Peery told him he wanted to take him to a quiet place, where everything would be relaxed so he could enjoy his time off. But as it turned out, the evening was anything but relaxed: “I took him to this coffee house called the Xanadu and … there was a big fight…. I was trying to keep everybody away from Lightnin’ and his guitar and so on.
And this one guy started cursing at Lightnin’. So I had to grab him and take him outside, and we got into a fight. And the guy had a knife and cut me, but I didn’t know it. He was a black guy. And Lightnin’ just sat there, and I’m really glad he did. But I didn’t know I had been cut until later when somebody asked, ‘Is that blood on the back of your pants?’ So I had to go to the emergency room and they fixed me up there. And when I came back, Lightnin’ says, ‘Little as you are, you don’t need but one ass hole.’ He could come up with things like that all the time.”79
On another occasion, Peery says he and Lightnin’ stayed up after hours with an Israeli dance group: “They were at UCLA, and Lightnin’ was at the Ash Grove. And so they thought, ‘Soon as we get off the show, we got to get over to the Ash Grove to see if we can see this guy,’ because they had all of