Alan Govenar by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life, Blues

the Guest Star label, a budget record line, at the Bird Lounge, a small jazz/blues club in Houston. The fidelity was poor, and the songs offered nothing new despite the claim in the liner notes that the live recordings “captured Lightnin’ seldom heard.” According to blues fan George Lyon, Lightnin’ played often at the Bird Lounge in the mid-1960s, sometimes with Cleveland Chenier and once with Elmore Nixon. Located on Shepherd Drive on the outskirts of the wealthy River Oaks, and not far from “one of the wilder Houston ghettoes [the Fourth Ward],” it was later known as Lu’s Ricksha Lounge (in 1966), and was a place that Lyon thought was a “beat hangout” when he was growing up in Houston. “Houston was a minor oasis for beats stranded away from either coast,” Lyons wrote in the British
Blues Unlimited.
“It was suitably trashy and regularly raided (the reason, I’m sure, it became the Bird). The clientele was lily white, almost exclusively. It really wasn’t a folky place … they were mostly, I think, white trash and frat boys.” 18
    One night, Lyons recalled, “Hopkins was between songs, and some asshole in the back yelled out, ‘Sing, nigger!’ Hopkins ignored him. He repeated himself, somewhat louder. After a bit, Hopkins looked back and adjusted his glasses and said, ‘What chew [sic] want?’ The drunk yelled out again and Hopkins said, ‘What?’ He straightened his glasses with irritation. By now the guy was really yelling and looked like a real fool. Finally Hopkins said, ‘Well, I can’t play the song for you if I can’t hear what you’re asking for,’ and continued his set, cool to his toes.” 19
    By 1964, Lightnin’ had had considerable experience performing in white clubs, though the Bird Lounge was a much tougher scene than the Jester on Westheimer in Houston, which was more like the folk clubs of New York, Los Angeles, and the Bay Area. Lightnin’ was on the road a lot during this period, and he traveled often between Houston, the West Coast, and New York City, though he still avoided airplanes and took the bus and train as often as he could. On May 4 and 5, he recorded enough material for two LPs—
Soul Blues
and
Down Home Blues
—for Prestige/Bluesville, probably at Gold Star in Houston with overdubbing by Gaskin and Lovelle at Rudy Van Gelder’s studio in New Jersey. The recordings were technically well produced and were essentially free form improvisations by Lightnin’ on songs, ranging from “I Like to Boogie” to “Just a Wristwatch on My Arm.” But again, musically, there was little new.
    After Lightnin’ returned from the East Coast, he headed off to California to play at the Cabale, where Strachwitz recorded him with Barbara Dane. The session wasn’t planned, but emerged somewhat spontaneously. Strachwitz was recording Dane on Thursday afternoon, June 18, 1964. When Lightnin’ walked in with his guitar and saw Dane on stage, he wanted to join in. “I was making a folk music style record by myself with a guitar,” Dane says. “Chris [Strachwitz] had his machine set up in there, and I had invited Carroll Peery and a few friends to come by so I’d have an audience recording it. And Carroll knew that Lightning was in town and brought him over. And of course, when Lightning saw me with a guitar, you know, up on the stage with a microphone, well, he just had friends there. It was the afternoon, and he assumed it was just a jam. And he pulled out a guitar and started playing along, and then we started to improvise lyrics at each other. That’s all. There was no plan to it at all. It was not a normal recording session, and you can see how well he adapted to the situation and just, it’s great. It’s a wonderful example of how artists on the same wavelength can work together with their own idiosyncrasies. Every