Artist: Lighting Hopkins
Genre(s):
Blues
Discography:
Blues Train
Year: 1951
Tracks: 15
Sam Hopkins was a Texas country bluesman of the highest caliber whose career began in the 1920s and stretched all the way of life into the 1980s. Along the way, Hopkins watched the genre change unmistakably, only he never appreciably neutered his plaintive Lone Star sound, which translated onto both acoustic and electric guitar. Hopkins' nimble manual dexterity made intricate boogie riffs seem soft, and his riveting predilection for improvising lyrics to suit whatever state of affairs mightiness originate made him a honey megrims poet-singer.
Hopkins' brothers John Henry and Joel were as well talented bluesmen, just it was Sam wHO became a star. In 1920, he met the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson at a social function, and even got a chance to play with him. Later, Hopkins served as Jefferson's guide. In his teens, Hopkins began working with some other prewar great, singer Texas Alexander, wHO was his first cousin. A mid-'30s stretch in Houston's County Prison Farm for the brigham Young guitar player fitful their partnership for a time, only when he was freed, Hopkins dependant back up up with the elder bluesman.
The pair was dishing tabu their lowdown brand of vapours in Houston's Third Ward in 1946 when gift talent scout Lola Anne Cullum came across them. She had already engineered a accord with Los Angeles-based Aladdin Records for some other of her charges, piano player Amos Milburn, and Cullum saw the same sort of opportunity inside Hopkins' dust-covered rural area vapours. Alexander wasn't voice of the address; rather, Cullum paired Hopkins with piano player Wilson "Boom" Smith, reasonably re-christened the guitar player "Lightnin'," and presto! Hopkins was very shortly an Aladdin transcription creative person.
"Katie May," cut on November 9, 1946, in L.A. with Smith loaning a hand on the 88s, was Lightnin' Hopkins' first-class honours degree regional trafficker of eminence. He recorded prolifically for Aladdin in both L.A. and Houston into 1948, scoring a national R&B strike for the immobile with his "Shotgun Blues." "Little Haired Woman," "Abilene," and "Big Mama Jump," among many Aladdin gems, were redolent Texas blues stock-still in an sooner era.
A freight of other labels recorded the slick Hopkins later on that, both in a solo setting and with a low beat section: Modern/RPM (his inflexible "Tim Moore's Farm" was an R&B strike in 1949); Gold Star (where he strike with "T-Model Blues" that same year); Sittin' in With ("Give Me Central 209" and "Coffee Blues" were national chart entries in 1952) and its Jax subsidiary; the major labels Mercury and Decca; and, in 1954, a singular clutch of sides for Herald where Hopkins played red-hot electric guitar on a serial of blasting bikers ("Lightnin's Boogie," "Lightnin's Special," and the astonishing "Hopkins' Sky Hop") in strawman of drummer Ben Turner and bassist Donald Cooks (wHO moldiness suffer had haemorrhage fingers, so torrid were some of the tempos).
But Hopkins' style was seemingly as well bumpkinly and old fashioned for the new generation of sway & undulate enthusiasts (they should have checkered stunned "Hopkins' Sky Hop"). He was back on the Houston scene by 1959, for the most part disregarded. Fortunately, folklorist Mack McCormick rediscovered the guitar player, wHO was dusted off and presented as a folk-blues artist; a part that Hopkins was born to play. Pioneering musicologist Sam Charters produced Hopkins in a solo context of use for Folkways Records that same year, cutting an entire LP in Hopkins' petite flat (on a borrowed guitar). The results helped introduced his medicine to an wholly new interview.
Lightnin' Hopkins went from gigging at back-alley gin joints to stellar at collegiate coffeehouses, coming into court on TV programs, and touring Europe to flush. His once-flagging transcription vocation went proper through the roof, with albums for World Pacific; Vee-Jay; Bluesville; Bobby Robinson's Fire label (where he cut his classical "Mojo Hand" in 1960); Candid; Arhoolie; Prestige; Verve; and, in 1965, the first-class honours degree of several LPs for Stan Lewis' Shreveport-based Jewel logotype.
Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins generally demanded full requital earlier he'd deign to sit down and criminal record, and rarely indulged a producer's desire for more than than matchless take of any song. His singular sense of area time mixed-up more than a few unseasoned musicians; from the sixties on, his solo work is ordinarily preferred to band-backed material.
Film producer Les Blank captured the Texas troubadour's informal modus vivendi most vividly in his acclaimed 1967 objective, The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins. As one of the utmost majuscule nation bluesmen, Hopkins was a bewitching figure world Health Organization bridged the gap between rural and urban styles.
