Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [9]
Langford says that in addition to playing guitar and singing at country dances, Sam was a dancer too. “Sam had one step that was out of sight, an extraordinary mixture of tap and the buck dance. Sam was also good at hambone [a style of dance that involves stomping as well as slapping and patting the arms, legs, chest, and cheeks] and Joel [his brother] was good too. One be on the guitar, one be doin’ hambone. And if someone said Joel was better, it would be fist city.”29
In the Hopkins family everyone played some kind of music or sang. Gabriel even recalled Sam playing the pump organ when he came by the church, though he didn’t remember him singing church songs. Yet Sam said that he not only played the pump organ but also that he participated in church services. “I come up in Sunday school too. I played organ in Sunday school, and I played piano in Sunday school. It was fine…. I opened up the church [service] with the piano…. They didn’t teach me them songs. They made ‘em up. Fact of the business, they sing ‘em. I played ‘em…. All they do is give me the tune…. But you see I wouldn’t be singing, I just be playing it. When my chorus come in, I just play it.”
Sam said that he learned to play the piano by sounding out the notes on that pump organ in church. “My piano playin’ … just come into life after I got out of church playing them songs about ‘Jesus Will You Come by Here’ [“Now Is the Needy Time”] and ‘Just Like You Treated Your … By the Water’ and all them songs…. Piano, you got to kinda thump it. But organ you pump it.”30
Sam learned to play the guitar as a child by watching his older brothers John Henry and Joel, as well as other musicians in his community. His mother’s cousin, Tucker Jordan, played the fiddle, and his wife was a guitarist, and they often played together at house parties and square dances. Albert Holley was a blues musician Sam remembered singing a song to his mother: “I heard him play, he was sitting on the foot of the bed. He was saying, ‘Baby, come sit down on my knee. I got something to tell you that keeps on worrying me.’ And he was saying that to Mama. I just listened. I just picked up on what he was saying. The song appealed to me and made me feel good…. So that give me some ideas how to sing too.”31
The first guitar Sam played belonged to his older brother, Joel, though he said he’d also made his own instrument out of a cigar box and screen wire.32 One day, when he was playing Joel’s instrument, Sam got caught, but Joel was impressed with his ability to play. Sam recalled, “I was too little to chop cotton. They come out the field and I was pickin’ the guitar one day—[Joel] give me that guitar…. They come in for dinner, and I’m sittin’ down with that guitar across my lap pickin’ it, and he wanted to know what I was doin’ with his guitar. I told him I was pickin’ it. He told me, ‘Let me see what you do.’ And I went on and played songs better than him. He said, ‘You can have that [guitar]. I’ll get me another one.’”33
Sam learned the guitar quickly, and when he was still only eight years old, he met the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was playing at the annual meeting of the General Baptist Association of Churches, commonly referred to as “the Association,” in Buffalo, Texas, about sixteen miles northwest of Centerville. In attendance at the Association were people from the surrounding communities, who brought their children each day for about a week for worship and fellowship. “That’s where all the delegates, preachers—they’d get there and they’d have a wonderful time,” Sam said. “Well, they’d have church in the tabernacle. And they’d sell sody water out on the grounds.”34
Ray Dawkins recalled that his father, Ike Dawkins, was on the board of the Association, and that in addition to “preaching and singing three times a day,” there were barbecues and social events. One of the primary goals of the annual meeting, Dawkins says, was to raise money for Mary Allen College, which was founded in 1886 on ten acres of land in Crockett, Texas, as a two-year school. It