Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [78]
On March 31, 1962, Robert Shelton, in his New York Times review of Lightnin’ and Sabicas at the Village Gate, alluded to the comparisons “many have drawn between the flamenco music of the Spanish gypsies and the Southern Negro folk blues for their emotional content, personal expressivity, and rhythmic vitality,” but pointed out that “there is really more to contrast between these two leaders in their fields.”1 Most notably, Sabicas played a seven-hundred-dollar Velasquez guitar with “an ordered consciousness of technique,” while Lightnin’ accompanied his “moody subjective songs” on a sixty-five-dollar Harmony. Moreover, Shelton observed that Hopkins’s demeanor on stage had changed since he appeared in three New York concerts in the fall of 1960. “Aware that his fame has spread far from his home in Houston,” Shelton commented, “Mr. Hopkins seems more expansive on stage, and the audience seems more receptive to his subtle showmanship and wry humor.”2
About three weeks later, on May 17, 1962, Shel Kagen supervised a live recording of Lightnin’ at the Second Fret, a folk club in Philadelphia. The resulting LP was called Hootin’ the Blues and was issued two years later by Prestige, which timed its releases in an effort to not oversaturate the marketplace with Lightnin’s recordings. Lawrence Cohn wrote the liner notes and recounted his meeting with Lightnin’ when he came to New York City to perform at Carnegie Hall in 1960. “A man of many, many moods (some of which must baffle even Lightnin’ himself),” Cohn wrote, “he can be sullen and brooding, pompous and sarcastic and yet, in his own way and to his own personal desire and satisfaction, charming and coy—possessed of an unbelievable naiveté in respect to many worldly considerations and matters.” Yet Cohn maintained the coffee-house setting of the Second Fret enhanced Lightnin’s music: “His sharpness and magnificent delivery have never been presented in better light and quite possibly, the atmosphere created by the live audience to which Lightnin’ can work is responsible.”3
Bobby Robinson, when he issued his LP Mojo Hand on his Fire label in 1962 with the recordings he had made with Lightnin’ two years earlier, took a different approach. In his liner notes Robinson wrote, seemingly in response to the intel-lectualism of folk and blues revival writers: “With so much having been said about the man, Samuel ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins … has been probed, by every important committee on un-musical activities, even an attempt at assassination by the Mafia’d of Snobdom, and each time came out completely exonerated—there is no room or need for additional dissertation on the great personable career of this titan of the blues. Lightnin’ stands today, as he has for more than a decade, a giant in the field of focus.”4 Robinson then went on to tout, tongue-in-cheek, the fidelity of his album and its presentation of “a new dimension in recorded sound … the aroma of his cigar, the open flask and the odors incident to and usually manifested as a result of the proximity of instruments and bodies, is evident and oozes up and out from every groove.”5 Robinson, based in Harlem for decades, understood his audience, and while the records he released had crossover appeal, judging from the charting success of not only Hopkins but Elmore James, Buster Brown, and others, he had a solid following in the African American community.
By the end of 1962, Lightnin’s recording career was going strong, and his recordings on the Fire label combined with those on Arhoolie, Bluesville, and Vee-Jay were garnering considerable sales and attention. He had demonstrated his vitality among white college-age audiences, who were part of the burgeoning blues revival scene. Lightnin’ even won the 1962 Down Beat International Jazz Critics Poll as “New Star, Male Singer,” probably as a result of his appearances at the Village Gate.
On March 21, 1963, the German filmmaker Dietrich Wawrzyn and his wife, Anna Marie, documented