52 weeks of blues

Lightnin’ Hopkins is a genuine legend of the blues, and one of the most influential guitarists of all time. He is also the most recorded blues artist in history, releasing over 80 albums and recording around 1,000 songs in his 35 year career.
Sam John Hopkins was born in to the harsh reality of the deep south on March 15, in either 1911 or 1912 (Hopkins himself says 1912), in Centerville, Texas, to Abe and Frances Hopkins. Abe Hopkins was the son of a freed slave, born just 10 years after emancipation, and he was a hard man living the hard life of a share cropper. His father, Lightnin’s grand father, had hanged himself when he was young, despairing over the hopeless life of a sharecropper in the years after the end of slavery.
Abe had already served time for murder before he met and married 15 year old Frances in 1901, working as a dirt poor share cropper for white landowners in the dangerous Jim Crow south. They had 5 children, with Sam being the youngest. The eldest, John Henry, started working in the fields at age 9. Abe was a brawler, drinker and gambler, and he was murdered in 1915, when Sam was just 3 years old. John Henry, then just 13, left town for a while so he didn’t have to murder the man who killed his father, and Frances and the 4 children still at home moved 9 miles south to Leona, though the children attended school in Centerville.
In 1919, when Sam was just 7, a black man was lynched from the tree that stood in front of the local court house. Called the ‘tree of justice’ by the locals, the body was left hanging for two days. Lightnin’ recalled the man was lynched because he had the nerve to tell a white man to stop bothering his wife. By the age of 7, Sam’s grandfather had hanged himself, his father had been murdered and he had seen the body of a black man hanging from a tree outside the county court house.
Although dirt poor, the family were musical. All the children sang and played home made instruments. Sam made his first guitar out of a cigar box and wire he took from the screen door and he had a natural talent for music. John Henry had a proper store bought guitar that Sam would play during John Henry’s absences. One day John Henry came home and found 8 year old Sam playing the guitar – after seeing how much better he was, John Henry gave the guitar to him. France’s cousin played fiddle with his wife on guitar, and a family friend, Albert Holley, was a blues guitarist.
When Sam was 8 and already working in the fields, he took his guitar to a church picnic in Buffalo. Blind Lemon Jefferson was performing that day, and although he hadn’t been recorded at that stage of his career, he had a reputation as a blues man and guitarist. Young Sam started playing along, and impressed Blind Lemon. From that moment, Sam saw music as a way out of the hard life of a share cropper.
He took to the road as a hobo, playing for tips on street corners, and following Blind Lemon from town to town in East Texas. He learnt a lot and started to develop his own distinctive style of playing percussion, bass, rhythm and melody lines on the guitar at the same time. He also developed a taste for gambling and alcohol, and got into trouble with the law a few times.
In 1928, he returned to Centerville where he married Elamer Lacey, and they had a daughter a year later. Sam returned to share cropping but continued to play music to supplement the meagre income working the fields produced. A few years later, he met Alger “Texas” Alexander at a local baseball game. Texas Alexander was a commanding presence with a big, deep voice that hollered the blues. He was a successful musician – he had recorded 50 odd sides before the depression hit and he owned a Cadillac – and he always drew a crowd when he started singing. He didn’t play an instrument, and had recorded with the best musicians of the time – including Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon. He was notorious for playing in “Alexander time” – disregarding timing completely, and ignoring song structures whenever he felt like it.
Sam left his young family, and took up hoboing again with Alexander. Due to his high profile, Alexander received payments instead of tips for performing, and Sam saw a way to get a steady wage for performing. He followed Alexander through Texas and surrounding states, sometimes performing individually at cafes or as a duo. They made their way to Houston in the mid 30’s but continued travelling around either together or separately. In 1939. Alexander was imprisoned for murdering his wife, and Hopkins returned to the Leona/Centerville area and to field labouring. His gambling and drinking led him to more trouble with the law, and he served some time in prison.
In 1946, he relocated to Houston, performing in bars and street corners and started to create a reputation for himself. In late 1946, he was discovered by Alladin records, and invited to Los Angeles to record with pianist Wilson Smith. They recorded 12 tracks on November 9, 1946, and a producer thought they need dynamic names: the records was released under various variations of ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins and Thunder Smith’. The records were successful enough to lead to another session in August 1947.
He returned to Houston, recording for the Gold Star Label and rarely leaving the state. He began a period of prodigious output and build a reputation among African Americans and blues fans. The popularity of the Chicago style saw Lightnin’ increasingly use an electric guitar and move away from his country roots and his popularity started to wane. In 1959 he was contacted by Sam Charters, who recorded him on an acoustic in a room he was renting. This recording brought him to the attention of a wider audience as part of the folk revival of the 60s. Lightnin’ played Carnegie Hall in 1960 alongside Pete Seeger and Joan Biaz. He continued recording – averaging 2 albums a year – and extensively toured the US and even a tour of Japan.
A car accident in the 70’s reduced his output, and he was inducted in the Blues Hall of Fame as an original member in 1980.
Sam ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins died of cancer on January 30, 1982 in Houston, Texas.

Sam originally recorded Shining Moon with a full band in 1961 for the album “The Blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins”. It was a somewhat quiet, slow and emotive song, but the solo acoustic performance he did a few years later is one of the all time great blues performances:

The original was in A, but as Lightnin’ aged his voice got deeper, so this performance is in G, played in a dropped standard tuning – D to D instead of the standard E to E. It uses a normal A shape for the I chord, with a great riff combining both the major and blues scale – the blues scale with the 6th from the major – before going into a D7 shape based on the fifth fret. It’s a great bitter sweet sounding chord, and Lightnin’ sets ’em up and knocks ’em down by adding a great bass slide to bring in a bass A note to create a drone across both the I and IV chords. The bass slide is tricky – he first slides up to the delicate sounding chord, holds it with 3 fingers while he does a full 2 fret slide with the thumb of his left hand to bring in the massive bass sound. Really smart playing.
The main feature of the song is the constant “one – and two – and” shuffle rhythm Lightnin’ maintains with his right hand thumb. He alters the volume subtly, bringing it in and out to suit the mood, but it’s always there – even when it’s not!. He knows exactly where it is at all times – at one point in the video he leans in to tune on of the strings and when he comes back it’s on an ‘and’ beat and stright into the next riff. That’s the control of a master. That constant bassline means he can play sparingly with the melody – the less he plays the more effective that main riff is. Even in the lead up to the changes, where he goes into the 7th chords he plays one less note than you think he will, but you still hear that extra note. This is is really, really gifted and creative artist with the song absolutely in the palm of his hand. LIke all of Lightnin’s material, he doesn’t pay any attention to bars lengths – he basically does what ever he wants but never loses that shuffle.
The solo has some fast and tricky sections, and there are extended hammeron/pulloff trills in the verse – and you’ve still got that constant drone of the shuffle bass going on. This is one of those songs that you can pick up the basics of in a few hours, know every note off by heart in a few days or a week, and spend the next 20 years trying to get perfect! It’s all about the feel.

Keep the shuffle beat: one – and two – and three etc going all throughout the song. The intro hammeron pull off is played about 40 times!

There’s a lot of hammeron/pulloff trills in this song – I’ll show an abbreviated version. This symbol ^^ means to continue the trill over the bass notes eg 2h3^^ is the trill played in bar 3 of the intro. I’ll do this so I can keep the timing in the bass. It’s that strict shuffle the whole way through – one – and two – and. The 0h2p0 trill on the G string in bar 1 continues underneath all the bass notes – it’s played as one continuous sound like in the intro. The x’s in bars 7 and 8 aren’t played – I put them in to keep the timing. The 3rd fret to 5th on the low E in the D sections is a slide played with the thumb of the left hand while holding the chord shape. Hold the high notes than raise the stakes with that move.
Verse 2

Lightnin’ drops some bass notes and plays some in triplets in the first part of the solo. I’ve tabbed it out with the shuffle beat, but play it how ever you feel most comfortable. quick, accurate and deliberate phrase in here – you have to know where that shuffle at all times to bring the melody back to it.

Final verse and outro