Texas Blues Guitar

Wanderlust hit him early: “Left there when I was eight years
old,” he told Les Blank. “I went back when I was 12; leave
again. Just travelin’. I didn’t get no schoolin’, man. I got my
education by sittin’ around talkin’ and lookin’ at what this one
do and that one do.” It was an education he would put to
good use in his songs.
Hopkins learned the rudiments of guitar from an older
brother, Joel, and was already playing when he first encoun-
tered Blind Lemon Jefferson at age eight. (Traces of Jefferson
occasionally surface in Hopkins’s music; check one of the ‘runs’
he plays in “Bunion Stew.”). Youthful encounters with Jefferson
and Alger ‘Texas’ Alexander, a blues-singing cousin of Hopkins’,
reinforced his resolve to use blues as a ticket out of the in-
dentured servitude of his kindred. “It wasn’t nothin’ on the
end of that hoe handle for me,” he said flatly. “Chopping cot-
ton, plowing that mule for six bits a day. That wasn’t in store
for me.”
Instead there was the adventure of hopping freights and
entertaining at weekend dances for black farm hands around
such small towns as Crockett, Brenham, Buffalo and Pales-
tine. Hopkins carved out a circuit which took him from
Houston’s Dowling Street to West Dallas and back. His free-
dom was mitigated by the risks run by any young black man
of the era who didn’t have a ‘boss man’ to vouch for him in
time of trouble. In the late 1930s Hopkins served time on a
Houston County Prison Farm, an experience which left its mark
in both ankle scars he would display like war wounds and in
such searing autobiographical songs as “Prison Farm Blues”
and “I Work Down On the Chain Gang.”
By the time the opportunity to record came to Hopkins,
he was 34 and had settled in Houston, where he hustled tips
singing in bars and on street corners. His teaming with pianist
Wilson ‘Thunder’ Smith prompted a recording engineer to dub
him ‘Lightnin’.’ His 1946 Aladdin label debut session came as
the urbane ‘club blues’ sound, epitomized by Houston expa-
triate Charles Brown, dominated black blues-based music, yet
Hopkins’ downhome performance of “Katie Mae Blues” proved
surprisingly successful. It was one of the first audible expres-
sions of a still vital country blues tradition which became in-
creasingly popular on jukeboxes in the late 1940s and early
1950s. Hopkins seized the opportunity to record for a plethora
of labels both great (Decca, Mercury) and small (Gold Star,
Herald). But the record company offers had dried up by 1956,