Lightnin' Hopkins - Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop

since. You think I’m lyin’, but that’s the truth!”
Lightnin’ had little use for other guitarists: “Can’t nobody
talk ‘bout me bein’ jealous of no guitar player,” he
boasted, “‘cause I learned all them sons of bitches how to
play!” Even B.B. King? “Listen at him! He ain’t got but one
tune. He come down to Galveston one time and got all his
stuff from me.” One longtime associate said in admiration,
“Some folks mellow when they get older, but not
Lightnin’! He’ll be scratchin’ n’ bitin’ till the day he dies.”
The sole conversation in which I engaged him began
with me telling him I last heard him play in Oklahoma City.
“Man, that’s a tough town,” he said. “Them cowboys is
rough. Wonder what makes them so rough?” Then we talked
about rodeo clowns and bull riders, sharing a mutual respect
for the badness of cowboys. And once we were talking,
I asked if he would play a song during his performance
that night:
Don’t the moon look pretty,
Shinin’ through the trees?
Don’t the moon look pretty, darlin’,
Shinin’ down through the trees?
I can see my baby, but she can’t see me.”
“You want to hear that?” Lightnin’ said. “Yeah, all right.
You know I remember that. You ask me nice. Now if someone
ask me nice to play somethin’, I do it.”
Lightnin’ honored my request that night and I recall
with gratitude that and the many other occasions when his
music moved me. His bitterness, transformed into music,
gave off an awesome beauty. Lightnin’ made blues as deep
and raw as anyone who ever worked the idiom. Despite
deep chasms of time and culture, his “audio snapshots”
still sear listeners with piquant pains and pleasures: pains
of penitentiaries and sharecropping and loves lost, pleasures
of country frolics and Texas moons shining on sleeping
lovers. Listen. Such poetry as his will not be sung again.
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