Alan Govenar by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life, Blues Page B

[their relationship] to a further degree, acting like there was really some kind of thing going on there, which there wasn’t.” 26 The lyrics are suggestive, humorous, teasing, and sometimes silly.
    In the LP’s title song, Lightnin’ begins by singing:
    Sometimes I believe she loves me
And then again Poor Lightnin’ believe she don’t
When I say can I go home with you
She won’t, won’t let me
    And Dane answered:
    Well, I said come over Lightnin’, I’m gonna cook you some hash
But when you come there, daddy, you done got smashed
Now, if that’s the way you want to do, I say that’s all right, that’s all right
I’ll just keep waiting on you
    Lightnin’ replied:
    You know I come to your house, I come that eve
But what you had cooked for Lightnin’
Do you know I had to eat it out on the streets
    Overall, Dane and Hopkins’s blues dialogue is entertaining; the guitar work is tight, but at times rambling, and the lyrics have a drive that evokes the spirit of improvisation and the joy of swapping words and music on a Thursday afternoon for a small audience of friends and family.
    When Lightnin’ got back to Texas, he mostly played around Houston, though he did perform as part of the KHFI festival at Zilker Park in Austin on July 13, 1964, with Mance Lipscomb, Carolyn Hester, John Lomax Jr., and Mickey and Marty. Over the course of the summer, Lightnin’ didn’t travel much, though he was no doubt thinking about the American Folk Blues Festival that he had agreed to earlier that year. His dread of air travel meant he was even more apprehensive by the time Strachwitz arrived in Houston to fly with him to Germany. “We took a United or American plane from Houston to New York, New York to Frankfurt,” Strachwitz says, “In those days, it was a charter flight, it wasn’t the system they’ve got now. Air India was one of the ones that had one plane a day flying around. I think the whole fleet had three planes. And if one got stuck some place, then you got stuck. Anyway, we got on this Air India plane. I think it was one of those back loading ones where you crawl in on the back, and I remember Lightnin’ and I were already sitting in our seats and the crew walks in. And Lightnin’ turns to me, ‘Chris, these people are going to fly this airplane?’ I said, ‘Ya, they’re good, you know.’ And it only dawned on me later on that he had never encountered these East Indians, except as ‘hoodoo’ people down in Louisiana.” 27
    When they finally landed in Frankfurt, Lightnin’ was a wreck: “He was just sickened. He couldn’t play. We called a doctor and they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. And thank God, we had a whole week in Baden-Baden for the television program that Joachim Berendt had arranged for and had apparently paid for much of the whole tour. So they put him on the last day of the week. By that time, he sort of regained his ability to play. I think he had a nervous breakdown.” 28
    During the TV recordings, the German photographer Stephanie Wiesand took an interest in Lightnin’ and realized his mysterious illness was psychosomatic. “I was looking after Lightnin’,” she recalled; he “spent quite some time at my kitchen table and on a sun chair on my balcony [located in Baden-Baden]. Lightnin’ recovered under my supervision, after providing him with his beloved soul food (steaks, etc.).” 29 Lightnin’ was very grateful to Wiesand, and the following spring, on March 17, 1965, enshrined his memories of her in a song he recorded with his brother Joel Hopkins for Chris Strachwitz, who simply called the loosely structured tune “Two Brothers Playing (Going Back to Baden-Baden).” 30
    Strachwitz felt Hopkins “must have been scared shitless that these damn hoodoo people were going to fly that airplane. That was his big