Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [8]
Lorine Washington was also a friend of the Hopkins family, but she didn’t remember any fiddles at the square dances that she went to in the area around Leona and Centerville. “There’d be two guitars,” she says, “sometimes one, and they did flat-foot dancing.”24
While Washington and Gabriel differ in their memories of the square dances, it seems clear that the music performed depended on the musicians who were available. The square dances were often held outside or in the front room of someone’s house, Washington says, and “they’d have to move the furniture out into the yard or into a back room.” Frequently, Sam recalled, the square dances were family gatherings that were organized around “country suppers,” where everyone brought a dish.
Musically, the country suppers mixed blues with a kind of music that Sam described as “fast old stomp time.” “That’s dance,” Sam said in 1967. “You get out there and dance. You see Scruggs [Flatt and Scruggs TV Show] and how they get to jumpin’ that hillbilly thing they get stompin’? That’s the way everybody dance when you get to playing ‘Oh, my baby, take me back’ or ‘Old Stomp Time.’ You be two or three out there dancing against one another … and the one [who] out dances the other get a quarter, four bits, sometimes a dollar if it’s well off white guys be down there…. Buck dancin’, they called it. Buck and wing … and them people dance on Saturday night, Sunday they go to church, Monday they go to the field.”25
Sam loved the country suppers and square dances, and, as he got older, he started bringing his guitar. “I’d go from farm to farm,” he said. “They have them dances why, because they been workin’ hard all the week, makin’ them big crops…. There were singers and players, quite a few … because near about everybody around them square dances could near about play for them. All you had to do was rap on your guitar and they’d pat and holler. Ole sister would shout, ‘You swing mine and I’ll swing yours!’ and all that. And sometimes they would have the blues played, but they mostly was really dancin’ you see. Have fast songs like ‘Oh, my baby, take me back’ and ‘You swing mine and I’ll swing Sue, We’re goin’ down to the barbecue….’ That’s jumpin’ at that time.”26
The square dances that Sam described were organized in a way that was quite similar to those of their white counterparts. Historically, African American musicians had played for the white balls in the big plantation houses in the years before emancipation, and this tradition continued. Moreover, black fiddlers, guitarists, and banjo players performed at barn dances or on the corn-shucking grounds of plantations and farms for what were called “Saturday night frolics.” They played the tunes for the quadrilles, cotillions, and set dances that were popular in white rural communities, and the musical repertory of black musicians influenced their white counterparts. In the 1920s white musicians like the Texan Eck Robertson, Riley Puckett, Fiddlin’ John Carson, and Gid Tanner made commercial recordings of country dance music, though relatively few black musicians playing this style were ever recorded. 27
Henry Thomas, an East Texas guitarist and quill player who often used a banjo tuning, was a rare exception, and his 1928 recording for Vocalion of a song called “Old Country Stomp” featured his singing of couplets and single lines that evoked the spirit of the square dances for which he had undoubtedly performed.
Get your partners, promenade
Promenade, boy, round and round
Hop on, you started wrong
Take your partner, come on the train I’m going away, I’m going away 28
While Thomas’s recording does not illustrate the particular dance forms associated with his music, it does create a kind of composite picture of the instrumental accompaniment. Clearly, in performance, some of the dances were structured and patterned after established sets and quadrilles; others were more individualistic and rooted in