Lightnin' Hopkins_ His Life and Blues - Alan Govenar [94]
Phillips was born April 2, 1944, and grew up in a progressive African American family in Los Angeles. “My immediate family was assimilated, atheist, and were for all intents and purposes indistinguishable from Caucasians in visage and speech. My immediate family was also neither ‘color struck’ nor class bound. My mother’s family came to Los Angeles from Austin, Texas, and the Kansas prairies in the 1880s. My mother attended UCLA, and taught elementary school for 60 years in the public school system. My father was a claims examiner for the State Department of Employment. His father, who knew Classical Greek and Latin, had been a professor of Belles Lettres and Modern Languages around the turn of the twentieth century at Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute, a historically black college, where he received his education. In the early 1920s, he moved his family to Pasadena, California, and became that city’s first African American attorney and real estate developer, and he was active in the early civil rights community. I grew up in a neighborhood that was quite diverse as to ethnicity and class, and consequently, from early on I was exposed to varieties of cultural expression, including dress, food, music, languages, dialects, idiolects, ways of looking at the world and inhabiting it.”1
Phillips became interested in black roots music while she was a freshman at Immaculate Heart College in Los Angeles in 1962: “That year, the musicologist Peter Yates came to the Art Department to give a series of lectures on American music. In addition to introducing us to the music of Charles Ives, John Cage, Harry Partch, and other avant-garde American composers, Yates played old Southern music, white and black, including African American work and prison chants and shouts, as well as the music of Leadbelly, and other kinds of music that predated the blues. I loved it all, but was especially drawn to the chants and to Leadbelly’s music. It grabbed me. I was living in the dorm. The folk music scene was burgeoning at that time; we all listened to Baez and Dylan, Odetta, old country bands, wailing women from the hollows of Appalachia. Several of us got guitars and tried to play along, I among them. I took a few lessons in basic folk guitar and tried my hand at various styles.”2
That summer after completing her freshman year, Phillips traveled to Raleigh, North Carolina, to join the civil rights movement. She worked on a voter registration campaign administered by the National Students Association, and later joined a CORE-sponsored sit-in at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant. She was arrested and sentenced to thirty days in the county jail. Once she was released, she flew back to California, and as the fall semester geared up, the nuns at Immaculate Heart College saw her as a problem. “My life had not been consciously touched by racism,” Phillips says, “until I came to Immaculate Heart, and I was ill-equipped to handle it. Even then, the school prided itself on being liberal and progressive; and I could not compass the fact that I’d gone to Raleigh to help eradicate racism, I’d gone to jail and I’d been a passenger in a car that was chased by the Klan—I literally put my life on the line for my convictions, only to return to Los Angeles to be done in by the very beast I had gone South to slay—at the very institution I had naively put my trust in. In despairing rage and frustration, I was driven to repudiate everything I had previously known and aspired to.”3
In reaction to what had happened to her, Phillips says, “I consciously began to explore African American culture, and as I delved more into black roots music, I came across Samuel Charters’s book, The Country Blues. I cannot remember whether or not this was the first time I had ever heard of Lightnin’ Hopkins, but it was the first time he caught my attention, and after reading Charters’s description of him, I was immediately captivated, both by the man Charters