Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [91]
For blues revivalists, the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, like that of his contemporaries, Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, needed to be preserved and documented. In London, John Holt helped to found the Lightnin’ Hopkins Appreciation Society with “its aims to publish articles, photographs, etc. and to promote record sales.” In a letter to Folkways Records, dated June 13, 1965, Holt requested details concerning recording dates, personnel, localities, and matrix numbers for not only the first Folkways release, but “any other items released, and of any unissued materials.”59 Six months later, the newly formed Texas Blues Society published a special issue devoted to Hopkins with a discography compiled by Holt and essays by Frank Scott and Paul Oliver.
Holt’s discography was the most thorough to date, and provided a detailed catalogue of about four hundred of Hopkins’s recordings. In so doing, Holt drew from Anthony Rotante’s groundbreaking work published in the December 1955 issue of Discophile, Serge Tonneau’s discography that appeared in the December 1964 French R & B Panorama, as well as the efforts of Simon Napier-Bell of the British Blues Unlimited magazine and numerous collectors, including Tony Russell and Mike Rowe, among others. While these discographies may not have directly benefited Hopkins, they did serve to boost record sales and fuel the interest of concert promoters who sought to book Lightnin’ for live shows.
The general disarray of his contracts and the lack of a royalty structure, other than with Prestige and Arhoolie, were complicated further by the fact that he sold most of his songs outright, and thus was not entitled to any royalties. Lightnin’s approach hadn’t changed since the start of his career; in other words, since he received one hundred dollars a song from Bill Quinn, he used that as his fee whenever making new albums. Lightnin’s newest records on Prestige, Jewel, and Arhoolie were competing with reissues on labels like Imperial and Time that were packaged like they were new (but were in fact just re-releases of 1947—1953 material, often with reverb added to make them sound more modern). Essentially, Lightnin’s style hadn’t changed, so many buyers probably thought they were indeed new albums by him.
Paul Oliver, in his essay in Holt’s compilation, made clear that even though Lightnin’ was by then “known throughout the United States and in Europe, too,” what mattered most to him was Dowling Street and the grid of narrow streets that spoke out from it: “He lives himself in a pleasant house just off the street. It has a ubiquitous wooden porch but the roof that shades it is supported by brick piers…. Lightnin’ sits out on the porch most of the time, talking with friends who gather around him or sit on the steps…. The clubs where Lightnin’ plays are small places, ‘juke joints,’ hardly advertising their character from outside…. They are wooden frame affairs, white painted once and furnished with metal chairs and tables … the clubs are noisy, the crowd comes and goes, sits and talks and drinks…. Every so often a few couples get up to dance, and many men dance alone to the music.”60 It was in this environment that Lightnin’ honed his skills and to which, as Oliver suggested, he “thankfully returns” when he has finished a tour. While Oliver made it sound like it was the music that kept Lightnin’ going back to the Third Ward, at this time in his life, the allure of Houston likely stemmed more from his affair with Antoinette Charles, who had occasionally traveled with him. McCormick had written in the notes to the Smokes Like Lightnin’ LP that he believed their relationship may have started as early as 1948, but the details are sketchy and the extent to which they were spending time together at