Lightnin' Hopkins - Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop

Photo by Tom Copi
Take Me Back is the
oldest piece performed
here, a song Lightnin’
used to entertain farm
workers at long-ago
country dances and
which reflects pre-blues
Texas traditions. It was
widely popular with
Lone Star songsters;
Blind Lemon Jefferson
recorded it as Beggin’
Back in 1926 and you
can hear Mance
Lipscomb’s version on
Mance Lipscomb in
Concert (Vestapol
13011).
During the same 1967 visit to Seattle, some of
Lightnin’s music was captured by the Seattle Folklore Society.
Hurricane Beulah is the sort of topical song for which
Lightnin’ was noted, though it can’t honestly be said that it
was made from scratch. Ostensibly a song about one of
the hurricanes which periodically brutalize the Texas gulf
coast, he refers to “a mean ol’ twister” (tornado) which
was actually the title of one of his songs from his debut
Thunder and Lightnin’ session in 1946! He had sung about
Hurricanes Carla and Esther for Arhoolie in 1961 and about
Hurricane Betsy for Verve-Folkways in 1965. Such
catastrophies were inevitable parts of life on the Texas coast
and Lightnin’ could readily recycle lyrics describing an
earlier season’s calamity under the name of the latest hurricane.
His ability to cobble bits of earlier songs into ones
seemingly fresh was a skill at which the prolific Lightnin’
excelled.
The impetus to perform Slim Harpo’s 1965 hit, Baby
Scratch My Back, was simply that it was immensely popular,
one of the last blues performances to enjoy pop ‘crossover’
success and probably much requested in Houston
bars. Lightnin’ gives it his sly best.
Three years after his 1967 Washington appearances,
Lightnin’ gave a memorable performance on Los Angeles
station KCET-TV’s Boboquivari. Couldn’t be Satisfied is a
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