Lightnin Hopkins and the Black Struggle

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Lightnin Hopkins, the Texas blues man, took a fighting stand in some of his songs on some of the crucial questions of the Black liberation struggle of the 1960's

Most interesting in this respect is his album Texas Blues Man (Arhoolie CD302. 1967). This is Lightnin at his best, playing an electric guitar by himself. Not boxed in by a combo, Lightnin's guitar cries deep, dramatic arpeggios of pain and anger arising from generations of prison-farm/cotton-field enslavement. Counter-pointed by his understated singing, this music expresses despair and grief, anger and defiance, triumph and mocking swagger.

First on the album is "Tom Moore's Farm," that Texas plantation song brought to its most bitter form by Lightnin. This is the starkest portrayal, the sharpest protest, of the Southern plantation system that I know of in all blues. The system of share-crop labor, in which the laborer and his family were bound to the landlord in debt-slavery enforced by brutal terror, prevailed across the deep South into the 1960's and still exists in places. Lightnin attacks its semi-slave nature this way:

     I got a telegram this mornin,
     Said my wife was dead.
     He said, "Go ahead, Lightnin,
     You got to plow a ridge."
     That white man said, "It's rainin,
     An I'm way behin.
     I might let you bury that woman, Sam,
     One of these ol dinner times."
     I told him, "No, Mr. Moore!
     Somebody's got to go!"
     He said, "If you aint able to plow, Sam,
     Step down an grab you a hoe."

It was from plantations like these in the 1960's that the Black share-croppers of Fayette County, Tennessee, and many other rural southern counties were evicted from the land for registering to vote. The southern freedom struggle was carried on in defiance of landlords like Tom Moore. (Apparently Tom Moore actually existed. In the introduction to another version of the song, Lightnin remarks that if Tom Moore knew he was singing that song about him, he would send somebody up to Houston to kill him.)

In "Slavery," Lightnin attacks the kind of personal deference forced on Blacks by the political and social system of Jim Crow segregation, which had its roots in the plantation system of share-cropping.:

     Thousand years my people was a slave,
     When I was born they teach me this way.
     One thousand years my people was a slave,
     When I was born they teach me this-a-way:
     Tip your hat to the peoples,
     Be careful, son, about what you say.

But Lightnin, like thousands of Black share-croppers and other rural laborers, was unable to accept this degradation. He ends the song with his Grandfather declaring:

     I'm gonna get me a shotgun,
     An I won't be a slave no more.

This was the stand of a large number of Southern Black working people. Generally suspicious or contemptuous of Martin Luther King's non-violence, they took up armed self-defense against racist attacks widely across the South, from North Carolina to Tennessee to Louisiana. In the early '60's the evicted share-croppers of Fayette County set up a Tent City and defended it with guns against the racists. Later in the '60's, the Deacons for Defense and Justice, an organization of armed defense of the Black people, was set up on a fairly large scale in rural Louisiana and may have influenced Lightnin, given the proximity to the East Texas cotton lands near Houston, Lightnin's home.

In "Bud Russell Blues" Lightnin digs back to one of the most powerful of Black prison songs, "Aint No More Cane on the Brazos," written about Sugarland Prison on the Big Brazos River in Texas sometime just after 1910. Two of its most famous verses are:

     Oughta been on de river in 1904,
     Who-oh-oh-oh-oh,
     You could find a dead man on every turn row,
     Who-oh-oh-oh-oh.

     Oughta been on de river in 1910....
     Dey was drivin de women jes lak de men....

Lightnin selects the less grim of these two and lightens it just a bit:

     Lord, you oughta been on Big Brazos.
     Woh, man, nineteen-hundred-and-ten,
     Yeah, man, you oughta been on Big Brazos
     (Lord have mercy!)
     Young man, in nineteen-hundred-and-ten.
     You know Bud Russell drove pretty womens
     Jus like he did them ugly mens.

But the dark, grim drama of Lightnin's guitar playing maintains the stark seriousness of the protest in the song. And where the original song deals simply with prisoners' attempts to escape, Lightnin adds two elements that deepen the song. First there is a dialogue between himself and his parents:

     My Mama called me one mornin,
     I answered, "Ma'am?"
     "Son, are you tired of workin?" (on the prison farm -- T.H.)
     I told her, "Mama, yes I am."
     Then my Papa called me,
     I answered, "Sir?"
     "Son, if you're tired of workin,
     What in the hell
     You gon stay down there fer?"

This shows the heritage of militant Black struggle being passed down from both parents to the children. It ties the resistance of the prisoners portrayed in the original version of the song to the resistance of people outside of prison to Jim Crow authority.

Then, once again reflecting the militant mood of the '60's, Lightnin changes the original song's ending. The original wished Apocalypse on the oppressors:

     Go down, ol Hannah (a name for the sun -- T.H.), don rise no mo....
     If you rise once mo, bring Judgment Day....

Lightnin replaces this with active rebellion in the present:

     Please take care of my wife an child,
     I may not turn back to my home life.
     Please take care of my wife an child,
     I may not turn back to my home life.
     You know, the next time the boss man hits me,
     I'm gonna give him a big surprise.
     (I'm not jokin, neither.)

This stand, taken by Black working folk all over the South, threw fear into the hearts of the Southern racists and enabled the Black movement to raise its head in full pride and dignity.

Having established his fighting stand, in an up-tempo "I Would If I Could" Lightnin goes on to have some delightful fun at the expense of the racists and to raise the spirits of the struggling people. Here is his mocking swagger, the same swagger that Black teen-agers put on at times when facing the racist Klansmen who had felt the sting of armed defense of the African American community:

     Gonna take my baby,
     Goin to the picture show.
     Gonna take my baby,
     We goin to the picture show.
     I'm gonna make everybody get back.
     Cause we got to sit in the front row.

Until the rebellion of the '60's, African Americans had been forced to sit in the balcony at Southern movie houses. At the time Lightnin made this album, the struggle to integrate public facilities was still being fought out across the South. But what movie does Lightnin want to see, once he and his baby are in the front row? "That ol Jesse James," the shoot-em-up bandit who supposedly robbed the rich to give to the poor. Lightnin uses the Jesse James myth to further encourage the people's struggle:

     You know, Jesse James
     The baddest man you ever saw.
     He walked in the lion's den,
     Slapped the he-lion
     An locked the she-lion's jaw.

Then comes the chorus. Here Lightnin takes an old tradition forced on the Black masses by repression and turns it inside-out. This is the tradition of saying something rebellious in a hidden way so that the white boss won't understand it while the Black masses will. Pretending to be mocking himself, Lightnin proclaims just how Jesse James inspires him:

     I'm gonna tell em,
     I would if I could.
     I'm gonna tell em.
     I would if I could,
     But I just can't shoot that good.
     I'm still gonna tell em,
     Ol Lightnin would if he could.

Here Lightning is the sly old trickster, repeating his disclaimers so many times that they become a mockery of disclaimers and turn into a declaration of his willingness to fight.

Lightnin Hopkins was a professional musician, and these instrumentals/songs were only a small part of his repertoire. Nevertheless, they reflect very keenly some of the crucial stands of the African American people in the great struggles of the 1960's. Lightnin's blues on this album refute the idea that music and art suffer by making social and political commentary. On the contrary, the desire to express these stands in the struggle drove Lightnin to his highest musical achievements.

Tim Hall
written in the 1980's
first published in Struggle in 1997
slightly edited here