Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [76]
Especially insulting to Lightnin’ was the way McCormick characterized his relationship with his mother and implied that he had neglected her needs. Lightnin’ was devoted to his mother and did his best to help her. Years later, Lorine Washington, a 105-year-old woman in Centerville who had been friends with Lightnin’s mother, remembers, “Sam used to come back to Centerville and bring money for his mother and his aunt.”95 Mabel Milton, another friend of Frances Hopkins, concurs, “He’d come with Nette. She was a beautiful woman. Lightnin’ liked good-lookin’ women. And they’d bring things to his mother.”96 In a 1960 interview with Dane on KPFK-FM in Los Angeles, Lightnin’ talked at length of the importance of his mother in his life. “She raised all us kids…. She’s a mother and father, because my father got killed when I was three years old…. So I think it’s my duty to stick around and do the very best I can for her until something else happens. That’s the way I feel about it.”97
In this context McCormick’s liner notes were likely intolerable to Lightnin’, who, from his point of view, had given to McCormick more than he ever received in return, though McCormick didn’t see it this way. McCormick’s frustration with Hopkins had been building over the years of his association with him. To Andrew Brown, McCormick said, “He became a lot less vigorous about what he was doing as he made more money…. He took a glee in giving the least of himself and still collecting greater sums of money than he’d made earlier…. I think he kind of felt like he was scamming people. ‘Here I come, I’m supposed to sing, I do mostly talking, and the people laugh,’ but it was often a slightly embarrassed laugh, because he was doing things that made people uncomfortable.”98
As much as McCormick blamed Lightnin’ for the problems that ensued, he nonetheless did what he could to control his affairs. As he pointed out in an undated letter to Prestige in 1963, “Lightnin’ Hopkins has been under comprehensive contract to me since 1959,” and acknowledged that Lightnin’ had signed a ten-record deal with Prestige, of which only four of the LPs had been completed with him as producer. McCormick complained that Prestige had not contacted him for nineteen months and had moved forward to continue recording Lightnin’ “in violation of the agreement.” Moreover, McCormick said that he was willing to “supervise what ever final sessions they should desire,” but they needed to be done quickly because “Hopkins’s poor health and arthritis” was “growing more serious.” This letter prompted an exchange of correspondence between McCormick, Prestige attorney M. Richard Asher, and Sam Charters, who was then working as recording director for Prestige in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.99 A deal was finally hammered out in November, and Prestige agreed to pay Lightnin’ through McCormick for “at least 50 strong potential selections” with an advance payment of twelve hundred dollars and a balance of eight hundred dollars to be paid out in eight monthly installments. However, McCormick never produced the recordings, and on December 18, Prestige stopped payment on the second one-hundred-dollar installment check to McCormick.
On January 24, 1964, Charters made arrangements for funds to be transferred to the Homestead State Bank in Houston for the purpose of Lightnin’ being paid five hundred dollars for each LP recorded at “the studios of Mr. J. L. Patterson, Jr.” (who had purchased Gold Star Studios from Bill Quinn).100 Lightnin’s last three Prestige albums, starting with Goin’ Away from June 1963, were recorded at Gold Star and overdubbed with bass and drums in Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey.101 Prestige severed their working relationship with McCormick, who had disappeared and appeared to have taken the advance payments sent to him. McCormick later wrote to Charters from Jocotepec, Mexico, where he had gone to get away from “Houston’s dampness and cold for health reasons,” stating that Lightnin’ had received no royalty payments and questioned whether or not the check sent had in fact ever been