Lightnin’ Hopkins
I have this weird tendency in my head to differentiate in my head between the blues-y music that I heard literally from the moment of my birth and the “real” blues that I discovered when I was fourteen. It seems ungrateful in a way to characterize genuinely gifted musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, Janis Joplin, Bob Dylan, and even Elvis Presley as pseudo-representatives of a form of music, the blues, which they all obviously loved and emulated to the best of their ability. While anyone of them might play a blues song credibly, their interpretation would, at best, crossover the blues with some more popular form.
Of course, I didn’t understand any of that the first time I heard Lightnin’ Hopkins but I did know the blues when I finally heard it. Having explored hundreds of different performers stretching over a hundred years of recording and performing, I’m grateful that journey began with Lightnin’. He is an important transitional figure whose influences, both received and transmitted, blend fundamentally into the core of the blues canon and the performers who filled it with their genius.
Lightnin’ Hopkins might best be described as a progressive anachronism. He was a guitar player and a singer, based out of Houston who began his career recording the blues in 1946. After a short stint with pianist Wilson “Thunder” Smith, Hopkins spent a lot of the 1950s recording on the electric guitar, veering more towards rhythm and blues as acoustic blues slowly drifted into the rural past. With the explosion of interest in country blues in the early 1960s, Hopkins picked up the acoustic again and found great success playing to young, predominantly white audiences. During those times, he was playing a role of the grizzled old blues man resurrected from anonymity to dust off music that he hadn’t played since the Great depression that had little to do with his actual musical legacy. But, his recording output was prolific during this period, justifying effectively the marketing subterfuge employed on his behalf to get his excellent music to a larger audience.
Lightnin’ Hopkins does however share at least two important element in common with many of the original country blues musicians that set him apart from many of his contemporaries; one, an idiosyncratic sense of rhythm and technique that is instantly recognizable and, two, a disdain for the complexities of copyright law as antithetical to the blues as he lived and performed it.
You could literally write a book on the intricacies of Lightnin’ Hopkins guitar technique but I’ll do what I can to describe its essence without dwelling too much on the technical aspects of how he played. Still, some historical context is helpful to appreciate how very different Lightnin’ Hopkins approach to playing the blues really was. In studying country blues guitar players of the 1920s and 30s, there is a tendency to lump them into various schools based on a variety of criteria. While this list making leads, at one extreme, to the way of madness, these categories are often suggestive of real, historical lines of musical influence whether direct or via recordings. As so much of blues music was regional during this period, there is a tremendous diversity of styles and technical approaches to be explored in trying to gain a complete picture of what the blues was becoming.
In the period between the two World Wars, there was a great migration in the black community from South to North that profoundly affected the blues ecosystems as they had existed. As musicians from various regions came into direct contact with one another in these cultural centers like Kansas City and Chicago, those musical dialects within the blues language lost much of their distinction. Contributing to this blending effect was the changes in technology that saw the rise of the combo, the electric guitar joined by the piano, upright bass, a full drum kit with an amplified singer at the helm, and, in some cases, horns and even strings. This demand to codify a blues performance into something that several people could learn and perform changed the nature of many blues which came before it, which had been composed more spontaneously from musical and thematic elements common to the tradition.
This led to a homogenization not only of technique relative to playing blues guitar but of blues music itself. While the electric guitar enjoyed many advantages over its acoustic forebear, the addition of melodic and rhythmic counterparts to the guitar in the performance necessitated that the guitarist rethink how he might best fill the remaining space. Following the example of the wildly successful T-Bone Walker (himself the archetype for Chuck Berry), guitar accompaniment was reduced primarily chords once associated with jazz, simple riffs that didn’t interfere with the rhythm section, or single-note lines that emulated the more fluid saxophone. By the late 1950s, while a plethora of electric blues guitar players had staked out their own recognizable styles, the essential technique of playing the blues guitar had become codified to the point of caricature. It was, in fact, this caricature that first British and then American rock guitar players often mistook for the blues itself.
There are, of course, exceptions to that rule and Lightnin’ Hopkins is but one of them. His technique is, at once, simplistic and very difficult to replicate. In some ways, his playing can be formal to a fault, sometimes using the same fill to begin or end every song on an album until it starts to grate. Most of his songs gravitate towards the key of E and draw from a surprisingly limited palette of accompaniment patterns. He has at most five different tempos and rhythms in which he seems most comfortable playing and doesn’t vary much from them, creating over time a small batch of archetypes of which each new song discovered can be considered part.
But where so much of Lightnin’ Hopkins guitar work can be frustratingly pedestrian, more often does his sense of phrasing and structure defy expectation in a way that overcomes these limitations and, indeed, much of what makes many modern blues competent rather than transcendent. In Lightnin’ Hopkins world, there is no such thing as a wrong note, just one played without enough conviction and they are a rarity in any of his many recordings. There is also no such thing as a right number of beats in a measure, or measures to a phrase.
It is always a source of perverse pleasure for me to listen any rhythm section playing behind Hopkins struggling to anticipate when the chord will change and for how long. To some, this might seem amateurish or, at best, suggest a lack of rehearsal or planning. The blues, for Lightnin’ Hopkins was an experiential medium and had no meaning beyond the moment of performing it. For Lightnin’, the idea that you could write that down or rehearse it in advance would be like trying catching wind in a butterfly net.
I’ll leave you with a nice clip of Lightnin’ playing one his better known songs, “Mojo Hand” with the promise of more on other aspects of his legacy to come. Thanks!
