Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [80]
“Blues in New York City came into the picture through the [white] folkniks,” Morgenstern says. “New York hadn’t really had a blues scene. Harlem was not a blues center. In Harlem, it was jazz. Even in the 1920s when Ma Rainey came to New York, she was not a hit. And she was a tremendous hit down south. People like Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, and so on brought the blues to New York. But it was the folk thing, it was very much a left-wing thing…. There was a consciousness about the plight of black people.”10 Politically, many of those who came to hear Lightnin’ were supporters of the civil rights movement and were active in protest marches and even traveled to the South to help the Freedom Riders. Lightnin’s blues were not good-time dance music; his lyrics focused on his failed relationships with women and the hardships he and other African Americans of his generation endured. The white people who came to hear Lightnin’ were looking for a meaningful alternative to the superficialities of pop music.
When Lightnin’ went to California in the fall of 1963, he had just as much appeal, if not more than he had had in New York. Radio broadcast specials in Los Angeles—first on September 2 on KRHM-FM 94.7 with a show called “Blues with Lightnin’ Hopkins”; and second on October 13 on KCBH-FM 88.7 with “Walking This Blues Road by Myself”—aired to a folk-oriented audience. The following week Strachwitz booked Hopkins for performances at the Berkeley Community Theater (October 18) and at Jenny Lind Hall in Oakland, where he was accompanied by the great jazz bassist Pops Foster. From the Bay Area, Lightnin’ went back to Los Angeles to appear (October 29 to November 10) at the Ash Grove before returning to the Cabale in Berkeley (November 11 to 14) and the Continental Club in Oakland (November 15 to 17).
In Texas, Lightnin’ still played the local joints in Houston, but not as much, and was more willing to leave when opportunities were presented to him. According to music critic Joe Nick Patoski, “If you gave him enough money, he’d play in your apartment living room, as he did for [concert promoter] Angus Wynne III at his pad in Dallas in 1963.”11 Lightnin’ was even invited to perform at an afternoon party at a University of Texas fraternity’s lake house. Gordon Dougherty, who was then a senior and a member of a different chapter of the fraternity, went to the party thinking there was going to be some kind of jam session, but when he got there, his “heart sank.” There wasn’t a jam session. “It was your standard 1963 college scene,” Dougherty said. “Sorority goddesses with bouffant hair, guys in regulation BMOC casual, not an authentic folkie in the bunch. Everyone was out on a large patio and Lightnin’ was over in a corner, together with a bass player and drummer…. He had this beat-up guitar with a cheap pickup jammed into the sound hole and connected to a small speaker.”
Dougherty had been familiar with Lightnin’s music and thought he looked like the pictures on his albums, but up close he saw that “he had a wizened, wrinkled face and was sitting on a chair with a mike in front of him. He was skinny and his clothes were loose and baggy,” and “to those who didn’t know who he was, he probably looked completely out of place.”12
As the afternoon progressed, the party went from bad to worse. The bass player and drummer hired for Lightnin’ couldn’t keep up with him. “The bass man bravely trying to follow standard 12-bar form was constantly behind chord changes that came too early or too late,” Dougherty said, “and both he and the drummer were often off-beat … endings were a catastrophe … several people complained they didn’t like his music … lacking a steady beat at the right tempo, the kids couldn’t dance to Lightnin’. They were constantly off step, speeding