Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [81]
There are no accounts of Lighntin’ ever having played other fraternity parties, and it’s likely after the experience that Dougherty described, if anyone presented the idea again to him, he would have declined. Nonetheless, in the folk world, Lightnin’ was more in demand than ever. Wherever he went, it seemed people wanted to hear him play and to record him. The word was out: he’d record for anyone who paid him a hundred dollars a song. There was no exclusivity; even if he signed contracts, he had no regard for them. Lightnin’ was his own man and he did whatever he pleased whenever it pleased him.
In February 1964, Strachwitz returned to Texas to meet Horst Lippmann from the Frankfurt-based Lippmann and Rau Company, who had come to Houston because his French promoter had said that he would not take on the American Folk Blues Festival again if he did not get Lightnin’ Hopkins to perform. Lippmann had started the American Folk Blues Festival in 1962 with Fritz Rau as an outgrowth of the jazz shows they had been promoting for more than a decade. They learned about Lightnin’ from his records and saw Strachwitz as a vehicle to booking him.14 “Horst had heard that I was the only guy he should deal with,” Strachwitz says, “and apparently it helped that I was German. And when I got there, we met with Lightnin’, who said he wouldn’t fly to Europe if I didn’t go with him. So Horst said he’d pay for my whole trip, hotel and all, to tour with Lightnin’ in October.”15
After Lippmann left, Strachwitz stayed in Houston for a while, and one day Lightnin’ told him that his oldest brother, John Henry Hopkins, had recently been released from the penitentiary, where he had been serving time for murder. “Lightnin’ said he was the best songster in the family,” Strachwitz recalls. “So I asked Lightnin’ if he wanted to make a family record that would include not only John Henry, but also his brother Joel, and he agreed.” At first Lightnin’ didn’t know the whereabouts of John Henry, but finally he located him in Waxahachie, Texas. They left Houston in two cars; Strachwitz, Joel Hopkins, and a folk singer from New Orleans (whose name Strachwitz could not remember) in one, and Lightnin’ and his mother in the other. Lightnin’ led the way, and eventually he found the shack where John Henry lived.
Once they got to Waxahachie, Strachwitz set up his equipment and managed to record about twenty songs, but it was difficult and frenzied. “It was horrible,” Strachwitz says. “We always had to get some little drink thing. ‘Got to get some toddie,’ Lightnin’ would say. So we took some along and got to the shack, and first it was real nice and friendly, ‘I haven’t seen you in many years,’ you know, all this kind of stuff, and it was going good, but they could never agree who was playing behind who. They were all not very good at playing together. None of them were quite in the same tuning.”16
The resulting LP that Strachwitz produced with the Hopkins brothers is intriguing; Lightnin’ hadn’t recorded with Joel since he accompanied him on “Short Haired Woman” in 1947, and he had never recorded with John Henry. John Henry hadn’t played guitar or performed in a long time, though the traditional lyrics he peppers into his songs evoke a strong sense of the rural tradition out of which the Hopkins brothers came. To Blind Lemon’s “Matchbox Blues,” for example, John Henry added the traditional verse:
I got the blues so bad, it hurts my feet to walk
I got the blues so bad, baby, it hurts my feet to walk
You know what it’s done on my brain, that it hurts my tongue to talk
In “Black Hannah,” Lightnin’ traded traditional verses with John Henry, but John Henry’s guitar playing was so weak that the song barely hung together with lyrics that were traditional, but only tangentially connected