Texas Blues Guitar

Lightnin’ Hopkins

(1912-1982)

“Lightnin’, in his way, is a magnificent figure. He is one of

the last of his kind, a lonely, bitter man who brings to the blues the

intensity and pain of the hours in the hot sun, scraping at the

earth, singing to make the hours pass. The blues will go on, but

the country blues, and the great singers who created from the raw

singing of the work songs and the field cries the richness and

variety of the country blues, will pass with men like

this thin, intense singer from Centerville, Texas.”

Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues, Rinehart & Co. New York, 1959

In the person of Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins we come to a
crossroads. The sudden shift we feel moving from color to
black & white, electric to acoustic, is a contrast emblematic of
entering a world quite different from that inhabited by Albert
Collins and Freddie King. They were country born but earned
their musical spurs in major cities, Houston and Chicago. Even
if there were country vestiges in their playing, they were es-
sentially urban bandleaders who effectively combined blues
with funk and other post-blues sounds. Hopkins had left the
country a generation before them but it never really left him.
Its cadences and downhome pleasures animated his music
even as he took it to Houston, and that music was a strong
part of what younger men like Collins and King integrated
into their own expansions of Texas blues.
Lightnin’ Hopkins was born and raised in what he de-
scribed as “a little ol’ one horse town,” Centerville, Texas.

Photo by David Gahr