“I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer,” Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins used to tell his audiences. “I was born with the blues.”
The songs he created – “barrelhouse,” he called them – were often as sorrowful as a cotton field holler and as earthy as the Texas bottom lands that swallowed his sweat. “You know the blues come out of the field, baby,” Lightnin’ said. “That’s when you bend down, pickin’ that cotton, and sing, ‘Oh, Lord, please help me.’”
Like Lead Belly, Muddy Waters, and others who’d worked as field hands, Hopkins parlayed his anger and pain into tough, deeply felt music. “The blues is a lot like church,” he explained in Living Blues #53. “When a preacher’s up there preachin’ the Bible, he’s honest to God trying to get you to understand these things. Well, singing the blues is the same thing.”
By the end of his life Lightnin’ Hopkins was among the most recorded artists in blues history. He exerted a powerful influence on other musicians – Albert, B.B. and Freddie King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, J.B. Lenoir, Otis Rush, Albert Collins, Son Thomas, R.L. Burnside, and Jimi Hendrix were among those who praised his records. A longtime smoker, Sam Hopkins died of cancer of the oesophagus in Houston’s St. Joseph Hospital on January 30, 1982, and was buried in Forest Park Cemetery.
“Lightnin’ was one of the last of a dying breed,” said Johnny Winter just after attending Hopkins’ funeral. “There are always going to be blues musicians, but it’s just different with people who really lived the whole thing in the country and could talk about chopping cotton and pulling corn and riding freights. Lightnin’ did everything the way you’d think a real blues player would do. He took care of the people he loved and success never really seemed to go to his head. He did exactly what he wanted to do, and he sure gave us a lot of good blues.”
-Lightnin’ Hopkins: “I Was Born With the Blues”
The Life, Times, and Breakthrough Album of a Texas Legend by Jas Obrecht
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