Listening to Prestige 405: Sonny Terry and Lightning Hopkins

Sonny Terry is sprung loose from his usual partnership with Brownie McGhee, and paired with a different blues guitar man. Lightnin' Hopkins was an altogether different proposition. From Texas, he was not at all of the Piedmont school of Blind Boy Fuller-influenced finger picking. He got something from serving as an on-and-off lead boy for Blind Lemon Jefferson on the streets of Houston, and by playing on the streets. He bounced back and forth between playing music, picking cotton, and working on the railroad, until in 1946 he was offered a recording contract by Aladdin Records in Los Angeles (one of his songs on that session was "Rocky Mountain Blues," which he would record again for Prestige). That began a long, strange recording Odyssey for

Hopkins, which made him, by the time he was finished, the most recorded blues musician of all time. Nobody knows how many records he made, or for how many labels? Eight hundred? A thousand? More? You pays your money and you takes your choice.

The first heyday of his recording career lasted from 1946 to 1956, the rhythm and blues years, and the small independent record label years. with a style that was loose, rough, not too overly concerned with time signatures or even staying in tune, but always powerful and authoritative. He was limited in developing a name for himself in that he didn't much like to travel and he didn't much like to leave Houston, but he left a remarkable legacy of recorded music. And he wasn't through yet.

In 1959, he was discovered by Samuel Charters, the first of the

white scholars to take a serious interest in the blues. Charters, who was married to literature professor and Beat Generation scholar Ann Charters, was particularly interested in the richness of blues lyrics. As he put it, "I really got bored with all those damn guitar solos. To me, they all sounded like B.B. King, and what I really wanted to hear was great text."

Hopkins was a perfect choice for Charters. At a time when the blues was going electric, and guitar solos were starting to dominate, Hopkins still played acoustic, and with all those recordings he made, often of the same songs over and over, he would find subtle and improvised variations on the lyrics. Filmmaker Les Blank recalls one such improvised lyric:

You make your bed hard, baby,
and calls it ease.
The blues is just a funny feelin’,
yet some folks calls it a mighty bad disease.

This line was composed late one night while I was filming what started out to be an ordinary interview. I had asked him 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 a nasty 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. Hardly a situation in which to delve into an academic and linear exploration of the nature of truth and the blues, but I came away feeling I knew a lot more about it than before, but I couldn’t exactly put it in words. 

Charters was one of the first to ignite the new interest in the blues that would grow into the blues

explosion of the 1960s, with blues festivals and new recordings. His interest in Hopkins led to a second career for the old bluesman, one that Hopkins himself was reluctant to enter. He had played all his life for black audiences, and was almost completely unknown to whites (not completely--I had his 45 RPM recording of "Good Old Woman" on the Harlem label). But this was suddenly to change. His first appearance, on a bill with young white urban folkies to the Houston Folklore and Folk Music Society, was a huge success, and before long he was appearing in New York on a bill with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. and recording for new record companies that made LPs and marketed them to white audiences.

Like Bluesville, where he was teamed up with Sonny Terry, a bluesman who had thrived for some years in New York, playing for whites, and put under the supervision of a white producer, Ozzie
Cadena. It was an odd pairing. Terry, no less authentic a bluesman, was technically more organized, and was used to playing with musicians like Brownie McGhee who were similarly more structured. An odd pairing, but not a bad one. Each knew enough to let the other do his thing, so although the same musicians--Terry, Hopkins, bassist Leonard Gaskin and drummer Belton Evans--were there for the whole date, it was really two separate sessions, with Terry front and center for the first one, and Hopkins taking center stage for the second.

There were similarities between the two, beyond a deep familiarity with the blues. While it's probable that no bluesman has ever been as prolifically recorded as Hopkins, Terry was no stranger to the recording studio. And he, too, had often recorded variations on the same material.

Terry begins his session with "One Monkey Don't Stop the Show," one of many songs to have been written under that title. The first recorded version was by Brownie's brother Sticks McGhee, with whom Terry had also recorded, including a Prestige session just two weeks previous. McGhee's "One Monkey Don't Stop No Show" bears no relation to Terry's. His is actually a reworking of a song he and Brownie McGhee performed regularly, and recorded more than once, called "Better Day." Both songs had the same verse-chorus structure, the same melody, and the same theme--things are bad, but that's all right, because they'll get better.

To the early blues musicians, authorship of lyrics was not that important, which is why there are so many "traveling lyrics," verses that pop up in one blues after another -- and part of the reason why their descendants in the 1950s were often a little too casual about nailing down lyricist credit for a song, leading to later lawsuits over the ownership of hits like "Earth Angel" and "Why Do Fools Fall in Love." Guitar styles were a different story. Charley Patton was way ahead of Jimi Hendrix with flamboyant tricks like tossing his guitar in the air, playing with his teeth, playing behind his back. Partly it was showmanship, partly it was so that no would would quite be able to figure out what he was doing. Something not dissimilar was done with Fats Domino's recordings, which were ever so slightly speeded up -- partly to make them faster and livelier for the rock 'n roll crowd, but also so that they were not quite in any key, and couldn't exactly be duplicated.

So both of these blues masters knew a million songs, which were inexhaustible variations on a hundred or so songs, and both of them bring their mastery to this session. And if they weren't exactly made for each other, it would be hard to prove it by either Sonny is King or Last Night Blues. They are two very different sessions, each of them rewarding in its own way.

One unusual cut that showcases both of them is "Lightnin's Stroke," from the Hopkins album, a mostly instrumental number that features guitar, harmonica, and a little lick from "When the Saints Go Marching In."

Sonny is King featured songs from this session and a later one, produced by folklorist Kenneth S. Goldstein. Last Night Blues had a couple of rereleases, as Gotta Move Your Baby on Bluesville and Got to Move Your Baby on Prestige. The Prestige 45, b/w "Sinner's Prayer" (not the Lowell Fulson song also covered by Ray Charles), was "Got to Move Your Baby," Other 45 RPM releases from this session, also combined with tracks from other sessions and released on Bluesville, were "The Walkin' Blues" / "Last Night Blues" and "Hard To Love A Woman" / "Back To New Orleans."


Listening to Prestige Vol. 2, 1955-56, and Vol. 3, 1957-58 now include, in the Kindle editions, links to all the "Listen to One" selections. All three volumes available from Amazon.

The most interesting book of its kind that I have ever seen. If any of you real jazz lovers want to know about some of the classic records made by some of the legends of jazz, get this book. LOVED IT.
– Terry Gibbs