Blues From Dowling Street

Lightnin' Hopkins had a hard and fast approach to dealing with the abundance of record labels he recorded for during his career. The irascible bluesman would show up at the session in question but would refuse to play a note until he was paid his fee up-front. Once paid and satisfied, he'd unpack his stock set of boogie blues riffs and pretty much improvise songs on the spot until he'd fulfilled his agreed-upon quota. But Hopkins had a gift for personalizing the blues that came to the fore in the best of these improvised songs, and some gems often showed up in the process. Between 1965 and 1969 he recorded three LPs (Blue Lightnin', Talkin' Some Sense, and The Great Electric Show and Dance) for Stan Lewis' Louisiana-based Jewel Records, in what was a relatively long contractual stay for Hopkins. This set combines two of those albums, 1965's Blue Lightnin' and 1968's The Great Electric Show and Dance. The former is one of Hopkins' lesser acoustic outings while the latter wasn't much better, in which Hopkins was paired with a crack soul band of Eddie Hinton on guitar, Barry Beckett on keyboards, David Hood on bass, Roger Hawkins on drums, and an unnamed harmonica player, guys who had been part of some of the biggest soul hits of the 1960s. What resulted may have been singular, but it certainly wasn't particularly special. Hopkins had a notoriously eccentric sense of timing and rhythm and what these tracks reveal is a thoroughly professional band struggling to make heads or tails out of Hopkins' abrupt, seemingly random chord changes and tendency to elongate or shorten sung lines at will. Nothing really congeals as the band chases the baffling and elusive Lightnin' from cut to cut, occasionally locking in, only to have Hopkins veer off into new rhythmic directions that apparently only he could anticipate. It's fascinating in a way, a bit like watching blind drunks navigate home from the bar at closing time, each one on roller skates and with a firmly held but completely different idea about longitude and latitude. For the dedicated, the 2003 two-disc Blue Lightnin' issue from P-Vine Records has all three of the Jewel LPs collected, plus several other cuts from the era. ~ Steve Leggett