LIGHTNIN' HOPKINS Lightnin' Strikes AAA 180g cut by Ryan K Smith Plated by RTI

Description: (AAA) Lacquers Cut From the Original Master Tapes by Ryan Smith, Sterling Sound.Plated at RTI; Pressed on 180g Black Vinyl.Housed in Tip On Style JacketListening Notes Booklet by Andrew Winistorfer. Lightnin’ Hopkins, the pride of Centerville, Texas, was never a performer that fit neatly into a historical narrative. For at least 20 years, he was a guitar slinger who hardly played outside of the bars in Houston’s historic Third Ward neighborhood. He was too young and inexperienced to have been swept up in the race records boom of the ’30s at Paramount Records along with Skip James and Robert Johnson, and too old to have been part of the Vanguard Records boom of the late ’60s alongside Buddy Guy and Junior Wells. But that didn’t mean he was working in complete obscurity: As noted in Alan Govenar’s comprehensive Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues, Hopkins is likely the most recorded blues musician of all time. He was never pinned down by a record label and would record for any outfit who would have him for the better part of 40 years. A1Got Me A Louisiana WomanWritten-By – Semien*, Hopkins*3:02A2Want To Come HomeWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*3:55A3Please Don't Quit MeWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*3:09A4Devil Is Watching YouWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*3:57A5Rolling And RollingWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*2:56B1War Is Starting AgainWritten-By – Semien*, Hopkins*3:02B2Walkin' Round In CirclesWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*3:05B3Mary LouWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*3:13B4Heavy SnowWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*3:31B5Coon Is Hard To CatchWritten-By – B. Quinn*, A. Cullen*4:10 Hopkins wasn’t just a favorite of the white folk fans, though; he was a favorite of the urban Black blues audiences of Dallas, Houston and New Orleans as well. His acoustic records could get him booked at Carnegie Hall opening for Pete Seeger and Joan Baez, while his electric records got him booked in LA and Chicago, where he linked up with the folks at Vee-Jay Records. Vee-Jay was one of America’s first successful Black-owned record labels, as it catered to blues and R&B fans with artists like John Lee Hooker and Jimmy Reed. They were also the first U.S. label to take a flier on a U.K. band called The Beatles. Hopkins was so prolific in those days he popped into Gold Star Studios — the same Houston studio that would launch George Jones — and recorded often. A couple of his one-off Gold Star sessions (a 1961 single session with a band, and a longer solo session) were turned into his Vee-Jay debut. Called Lightnin’ Strikes, it wasn’t the only album title that would play on that specific pun, as another would follow in 1966 on Folkways, after Vee-Jay would close up shop. But the 1962 Strikes captures everything that made Hopkins so exciting in the early ’60s in what resembled a single weather system, encompassing his modes and moods as fully as he’d allow them to be grasped on a single slab of vinyl. Lightnin’ Strikes opens with Hopkins’ biggest hit on Vee-Jay, one of two cuts on the album that have a backing band, “Got Me A Louisiana Woman.” Backed by Elmore Nixon on piano, Robert Ingram on drums and a bassist forgotten to the sands of time, Hopkins spools out a tale of a woman who cooks his regular meals in Louisiana, and how good that makes him feel, extolling her virtues and cooking abilities. The verses are irregularly shaped in length, and the band sounds ever on the verge of falling out of step with Hopkins. But, the song showcases the main contribution to blues guitar that Hopkins made that was copied by Texas bluesmen like ZZ Top: the turnaround. No one could come into and out of solos or verses better than Hopkins; his turnaround riffs sound like a football player tiptoeing a sideline, like a tightrope walker going to one foot in the middle of a string between two tall structures. The song is audibly in danger of crashing into the side of a building at least four times, but Hopkins brings it over the rails and makes a sharp turn each time. The rest of the album is mostly Hopkins alone, talking his blues over his spacious riffs, sounding like the Texas prairies he grew up in. Govenar notes that Hopkins was adept at making himself sound sad and pathetic on record, to better match the down-and-out plight of his audience, and that’s borne out in Lightnin’ Strikes. He’s begging to come home after being put out for being a dog on “Want to Come Home,” he’s homeless and aimless on “Walkin’ ’Round in Circles” and decries the bleakness of East Coast weather on “Heavy Snow.” He memorializes a particularly evasive racoon who foiled his childhood dog on “Coon is Hard to Catch,” and takes some time to decry the American military industrial complex on “War Is Starting Again,” the only other song to feature a band, and a classic in the anti-Vietnam protests of the early ’60s. Vee-Jay opted to add a hefty amount of reverb to these songs after they were delivered from George Jones producer Pappy Daily, but it wouldn’t take much to believe Hopkins recorded this album inside an abandoned grain silo, where he chose to live out his days after being rejected and dejected. Lightnin’ Strikes was the only LP Hopkins made for Vee-Jay, as he never stayed with one label long anyway, and he’d spend his final 20 years, before succumbing to esophageal cancer in 1982, ripping and recording around the country and building a mammoth body of work. Lightnin’ Strikes is but a single cloud in the atmosphere of his work, but it provides an entry point, a single portrait of the artist as a blues iconoclast. Lightnin’ could be anything you wanted him to be — the acoustic blues troubadour, the hardened city slicker playing electric riffs, the old bluesman down on his luck — but take him as he is on Lightnin’ Strikes: just a bluesman being himself, in his entirety.

Price: 59.95 USD

Location: Macon, Georgia

End Time: 2024-11-23T21:50:08.000Z

Shipping Cost: 8.95 USD