Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [90]
A song that Lewis called “Fishing Clothes” was actually a misnomer because he misunderstood the line “ain’t got sufficient clothes.” The tune was hardly a blues at all and had a country tempo, refashioning the melody of “Midnight Special,” though some of the lyrics draw from the traditional “Doggone My Good Luck Soul.” Lightnin’ twisted the core lyric and sang, “Dog gone my bad luck soul, this old world down here is a big bad luck to me.” In many ways, the song typified the problems with the recordings. Lightnin’ was doing whatever he wanted, and his accompanists could barely keep up.
Lewis described Hopkins as a “real humble, nice guy … a man of his own in the way he wanted to record and more or less, wanted to do his own thing.”54 Apparently Lewis didn’t know much about Lightnin’s earlier recordings, given the mish-mash of songs he produced, including yet another version of “Short-Haired Woman” that he called “Wig Wearing Woman.” The last verse of “Wig Wearing Woman,” however, was updated with a strange, though disjointed, comment on topical events:
She seed the Beatles, they liked to run her blind
That the reason she keep on asking me for that little money of mine
You know, I don’t want no woman I got to buy wigs all the time55
In the end, the most successful single to be released from the first Jewel session was “(Letter to My) Back Door Friend,” which Lewis says sold “fairly well.” More interesting, however, is the Demon Music (Westside) reissue, which included a strong sense of what it must have been like trying to record Lightnin’ and included the banter between presumably Robin Hood Brians and Hopkins before the song was recorded. At the beginning of the track, Hopkins shouted, “What?” And the engineer replied, “I had to get out there and set your mike up on your guitar,” to which Lightnin’ answered, “Oh, you should have told me, man.” “Ah, you see we would have been able to get it straight,” the engineer said, “When you started playing, I thought you were just practicing. You never did stop,” to which Hopkins muttered, “But you come out here and set up ah … go ahead … I ain’t tell you nothin’ now. I’m gonna play it different all the way now.” “All right, it’s rollin’,” the engineer said, and Hopkins began playing.56 The song itself hung together musically, but the lyrics were highly repetitive.
What you going to do with a married woman
When she got a back door friend
She prayin’ all the time for you to move out
So her back door friend he can move in57
Other tracks on the Jewel LP were more problematic. “Move on Out,” for example, was a weak revival of an instrumental he had recorded with much greater authority and drive during the Herald sessions.
While Lightnin’s first Jewel session was at times messy, he may have been paid more than what he’d been getting from the folk revival labels. Lewis says that he gave Lightnin’ $2,500 for eight songs, a figure that seems unlikely given how much he was paid by others. At that point, Lewis was a relatively small independent producer, and was working to build his catalogue.
In the fall of 1966, Prestige released Lightnin’s Soul Blues LP, which had been recorded more than a year earlier and showcased a more polished side of his music than what Lewis was able to record. On this LP, Lightnin’ sang a tribute to “The Howling Wolf’ and covered Big Bill Broonzy’s “Too Many Drivers,” but also performed one of his own more poignantly ironic songs, titled “I’m Going to Build Me a Heaven of My Own.” It began with a spoken word dedication to “the whole world” and “the womens especially” that was followed by a talking blues about how he was going to build a heaven of his own (albeit a small one) so that he could provide “all these loving womens” a place to live. But then he implied that he might not be able to follow through: “I ain’t gonna call myself Jesus, poor