Listening to Prestige 531: Lightnin' Hopkins

LISTEN TO ONE: T Model Blues

 In his liner notes to this album, Mack McCormick notes that 

In a brief three years Lightnin Hopkins has become an international celebrity who receives fan mail from England, Australia, Sweden and Germany. A cascade of recordings, night club, concert and TV appearances have brought him to a glare of limelight of a kind accorded few blues singers.

That fame would date from 1959, when Hopkins was discovered by both McCormick and Samuel Charters. Charters recorded him on January 16, 1959, on a home tape recorder, one mike, in a furnished room in Houston, for Folkways. McCormick followed on February 16 and 26, with the same sort of basic equipment. His recording was released on Tradition, a folk music label started by Patrick Clancy of the Irish folk group the Clancy Brothers, along with Kenneth S. Goldstein, who would later run the Bluesville label for Prestige.

Hopkins, of course, had had a long recording history before being discovered by Charters and McCormick. going back to the 1940s and rhythm and blues labels like Aladdin, Modern, Harlem and Herald. Both Charters and McCormick had the idea of stripping the R&B commercialization from Hopkins, and having him sing the old-style Texas blues he learned from his cousin Texas Alexander and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

It was the right time and right approach for Hopkins, coming at the beginning of the blues revival of the 1960s, although McCormick may have been overstating the case for his celebrity by a bit. He may have gotten fan mail from England, Australia, Sweden and Germany, but Black musicians in America were still not getting the acclaim and adulation that went to Bobby Vinton or Connie Francis--and that's not even mentioning the white tsunami that is just a year away from sweeping in from Britain.

This is Hopkins's fifth album for Prestige, and by no means his last, so I'll digress a little and talk about Mack McCormick's liner notes, probably the strangest I've ever seen, 

McCormick could have been a real prototype for the Beat Generation, except that he spent most of his life on the byways of Texas and didn't cross paths with Kerouac and Ginsberg and that crew. A high school dropout, carnival worker, jazz buff, rambler, he stopped into a music store in New Orleans one day in 1946, got into a conversation with the store owner, who was compiling a jazz discography, and was hired on the spot to be its Texas editor. That brought him to Texas and Texas folklore, and the unearthing of many Texas bluesmen, most notably Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb.

But perhaps Hopkins was not sufficiently grateful? There's an undertone in the paragraph quoted above that Hopkins might not deserve all the acclaim, and that note becomes more strident as McCormick goes on: "In acknowledgement of my own position as mentor and monster-maker, I am continually asked, 'Has he changed much?'"

 McCormick hastens to let us know that he's not the one criticizing Hopkins, but "in the minds of some critics...college and coffee house crowds have corrupted him."

And McCormick goes on to deliver his verdict--Hopkins didn't even need "Hollywood night clubs, Harvard University and the State of New Jersey" to become corrupt. He has always been "consumed by self-pity and everlastingly trying to persuade the world that it is his valet."

I don't want to denigrate McCormick, whose contributions as a folklorist were enormous, but he certainly seems to have been caught in a mood when asked, probably by Kenny Goldstein, to write these liner notes. And he was very much a product of his time, a time marked, even for people with social and artistic consciences, with a heavy overlay of white privilege.

Does Lightnin' even have a right to sing the blues? His songs may "reflect the mistreatment which has been and, in lesser degree [white privilege creeping in] is the condition of Negro life. But...Lightnin' is not in any real sense subject to it in the way his neighbors are."

McCormick ticks off a few of the advantages that disqualify Hopkins from a right to sing the blues, including being "pursued by women of two races."

Hopkins, McCormick believes, is "free to exercise all but a fraction of the rights of first class cltizenship [but] nevertheless maintains he is victimized from all sides. He sees injustice in the fact that the police continually arrest him for drunk driving" (try explaining that to the families of Michael Brown or Taylor)...He goes to astonishing lengths to maintain himself in a pathetic, blues-producing state."

Lightnin' Hopkins had a right to sing the blues. He had a right to make a little money doing it, and the longevity of his career--he may have made more recordings than any other blues singer--is a tribute to the amount of work and dedication he put into his art form. Many blues singers of the twenties, many rhythm and blues and rock and roll and country and western singers of the 1940s, 1950s and on up, only made a handful of records, were "one-hit wonders," because they really only had one great song in them. This is, in itself, a heroic accomplishment. Most of us don't even have one great work of art in in us. But it puts Lightnin' Hopkins long history of accomplishment into perspective.

Smokes Like Lightning was produced by MeCormick, and he did a creditable job, this time in a professional recording studio (ACA Studios in Houston). McCormick produced a second session in February, which included three songs that filled out this album and enough material for a second album, Walkin' this Road by Myself. The latter session was actually released first, in 1962 (Smokes Like Lightning came out in 1963), so its liner notes found McCormick in a more positive frame of mind. 

The album  was a Bluesville release. "T-Model Blues" and "You Cook All Right" were released as a 45 RPM single on Prestige.