Lightnin’ Hopkins in the Early ’60s

Texas bluesman Lightnin’ Hopkins (b. Sam John Hopkins in 1912) doesn’t get a lot of notoriety these days, but listen to the guitar licks and the rhythm on this video and you can hear the same patterns used by modern rock and blues guitarists. Hopkins was one of those transitional artists like B.B. King and Muddy Waters who moved the blues from country acoustic to urban electric and, like many solo bluesmen of his day, sometimes had an ‘imaginative’ approach to chord progressions and timing. That said, when Lightnin’ was at his best, there was no one better at that finger-picking roadhouse blues style. By the time he died in 1982, Lightnin’ had amassed a cult following in Europe and a whole southbound freight train of fans among blues-rock musicians, aficiandos, and other ‘outsider’ oddballs. In his obituary, the NY Times claimed he was the single greatest influence on rock guitar players of all the Robert Johnson-era bluesmen; that may be an overstatement, but not by much. In the ‘I never would have guessed that’ department, Hopkins made more albums than any other bluesman. I don’t have any citation for the video below, but it’s likely a TV show from the early ’60s and damned if that doesn’t look like a young and slightly embarrassed Joan Baez sharing the stage with Lightnin’s ‘debbil music.’