Lightnin' Hopkins was about the coolest guy in the world. Lightnin' used to sing with a cigarette dangling from the of the corner of his mouth. The first time I visted his house in Crockett Texas, he was wearing dark glasses in the middle of the night. I never saw him without his shades on. I think he slept in dark glasses.
Before I met him I thought he was blind because of the dark glasses, but he told me he had 20/20 vision and he told me he just liked to wear sunglasses all the time. I visited him a few times more before he died in 1982 and I always had a bottle of Jim Crow bourbon in hand which the price you paid to get him to play a few songs on his guitar.
I first heard him as a teenager in New Orleans coming from a high wattage broadcast from some black radio station somewhere in the wilds of Texarkana. The song I heard through all the long distance static was Going Back to Florida and I never heard anything like it in my life, static and all. What a voice!
Check out this intro to a 1967 documentary about Lightnin' I embedded below. Lightnin' is the dude standing with the cowboy hat and guitar in the opening credits. Lightnin's friends, Texas sharecropping singer Mance Liscomb is the seated guitar player and Bill Bizor is the guy dancing around playing harmonica. Later Lightin' sings a duet with Ruth Ames. Notice the half pint bottle of Jim Crow in Lightnin's back pocket in the opening song. Lightnin' was the blues equivalent of a Jamaican rude boy.
The documentary was filmed entirely in Crockett (named after Alamo fighter Davy Crockett) Texas where Lightnin' lived most of his life. Lightnin' told me he used to go see to see Blind Lemon Jefferson play at church picnics when he was growing up. There's a statue of Lightnin' Hopkins in the town square of Crockett Texas.
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