When Lightnin’ (Hopkins) Struck

On the first year of Sirius’ excellent Buried Treasure Radio Show, Tom Petty spun Lightnin’ Hopkins’ “Don’t Embarrass Me, Babe” then remarked, “No sir. Don’t embarrass poor Lightnin’ Hopkins. This is an interesting song because he mentions in here ‘The next time I shoot you is going to be with my .44’ so apparently Lightnin’ has shot his woman before with a lower caliber pistol. But he’s not someone to trifle with, Lightnin’ Hopkins.”

Les Blank, who directed The Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins, recalled: “I asked Lightnin’ to tell me what the blues meant to him. He picked up his guitar and started to sing about a woman named Mary who had left him. Earlier that evening, his wife had left him after an argument that caused her cousin to attempt to shoot Lightnin’. While the song was being sung, the cousin was lurking outside the apartment door with a loaded pistol. Lightnin’ also had a large, loaded gun stuck down the front of his pants.”

Many of Hopkins’s sardonic and over-the-top songs would make for great music videos directed by Quentin Tarantino. In “Bring Me My Shotgun,” Lightnin’ discovers his significant other has been “fooling around with too many men.” He confronts her with his weapon, then shows he’s a softie by letting her live, citing: “I said the only reason I don’t shoot you, little woman, my double-barrel shotgun, it just won’t fire.”

But for all his (hopefully) fictional acts of violence, Lightnin’ was said to be a friendly sort and quick with the quip (as well as more than a few nips): “If you’re gonna play the blues, you shouldn’t even be able to stand up.”

When asked to explain the origin of the blues, Lightnin’ wisecracked, “They’re somewhere between the greens and yellows.”  And when a frustrated bandmate wanted to know what key they were playing in, Hopkins calmly answered, “In the key of Lightnin’ Hopkins.”

When Hopkins was a lad of eight living in Leona, Texas, his first guitar didn’t have any keys because it was a cardboard cigar box.  He remembered: “I cut me a round hole in the middle of it, take me a little piece of plank, nailed it onto that cigar box, and I got me some [chicken screen] wire. I made me a bridge back there and raised it up high enough that it would make a sound inside that little box, and got me a tune out of it. I kept my tune and I played from then on.”

His playing was only interrupted when he did a stint in the Houston County Prison Farm when he was in his 20s for a still unknown reason. Upon his release, he played in juke joints and at picnics.  At the age of 35, he made his first recordings with pianist Wilson “Thunder” Smith at Aladdin Records, where the marketing department decided to call Sam Hopkins “Lightning” so they could market the act as “Thunder and Lightning.”  Hopkins’ nickname stuck, but he wasn’t one to stick with any record label.

Like Chuck Berry, who told concert promoters he’d only play if he was paid up front, Lightnin’ would only enter a recording studio if he was paid up front in cash.  And as long as the money flowed, songs (estimated at 800 to 1,000) flowed out of Lightnin’ until he hit a dry spell in the mid-1950s.  By then, Hopkins was forgotten until Sam Charters of Folkways Records remembered him and went to his threadbare Houston apartment. Sam used one microphone to record Lightnin’, who used his acoustic guitar, a thumb pick, and a bottle of gin to create a lo-fi masterpiece.

The 1959 album, Lightnin’ Hopkins, created mania amongst pockets of musicians.  The Grateful Dead played his lascivious “Ain’t it Crazy (the Rub)” in concert, and Bob Dylan played Hopkins’ “Automobile” on Blonde on Blonde, but gave the tune a different name. Dylan pilfered Hopkins’ lyrics and incorporated them into “Leopard Skin Pillbox Hat.”  In “Automobile,” Hopkins sang, “Your car’s so pretty, Can you let me drive sometime?” with each chorus ending with, “In your brand new automobile.” Dylan’s take on it was, “Well, you look so pretty in it, Honey, can I jump on it sometime?” with each chorus ending, “Your brand-new leopard-skin pill-box hat.”

Thankfully, Dylan hasn’t borrowed Lightnin’s look, which consisted of a porkpie hat, a pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses, and a lit cigarette.  Mississippi blues man Skip James joked that his friend’s style was “on the pimpy side.”  Lester Chambers of the Chambers Brothers gushed, “I don’t know anybody cooler than Lightnin’. He was slick, from his shoes to his tie, the whole thing.  When he stepped out of his door, he was slick already!”

The folk-blues revival in the early 1960s introduced Lightnin’ to Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, who joined Hopkins on the same October 1960 Carnegie Hall bill.  His career, as well as that of the Jefferson Airplane, who opened for him, took off.  Lightnin’ was appreciative of his newfound fame and fortune, confessing to musician, Cork Marcheschi, “I wouldn’t be working if it wasn’t for these white college kids.”

Unlike some groups who seem to annually announce money-grabbing farewell tours, Hopkins would turn down a $2,000-a-week tour, content to stay in his Houston home and play in a shabby club for $17 a night.  He died from cancer in 1982 at the age of 68 and called himself “Just a country boy who moved to town.” But to other guitarists, he was a trailblazing artist. In an unfinished documentary, Where Lightnin’ Strikes, guitarist Jimmie Vaughn of the Fabulous Thunderbirds claimed, “I don’t think there could be a B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, or Stevie Ray Vaughn without Lightnin’.”

-Mark Daponte

Photo: Lightnin’ Hopkins (33stradale via Wikimedia Commons)