Lightnin Schools Swarthmore

Looking back, it now seems an odd place for me to have begun my Lightnin Hopkins collection. By the time I started getting hipped to Hopkins, already a few years into my love affair with the blues, you could have sunk an aircraft carrier beneath the weight of Lightnin's discography. Like a great many of the discs I purchased back then, I'd done so blind, mail-ordering and rolling the dice, hoping I wouldn't crap out. The blues gods smiled on me and I managed to order a classic...even if it was only just then achieving that status.

Before Fantasy released The Swarthmore Concert, this stellar set of live Lightnin had gone unreleased for years, only to appear on the fifth disc of The Complete Prestige/Bluesville Recordings in '91. Fantasy astutely repackaged the concert, which appears to be complete, and turned it loose two years later, in August, of '93. It started being called "essential" almost immediately and has continued to hold a lofty position in the quintessential Texas bluesman's canon. That it had languished in the vault for 27 years had been an unfortunate twist of fate. Prestige/Bluesville was being bought out by Fantasy, and at the time Fantasy wasn't terribly interested in releasing "yet another" Hopkins album. It appears that so much time went by simply because it had been forgotten. Listening to this set and drinking it in, it now seems an exasperating oversight.

The Swarthmore Concert is perhaps the best live concert we have from Hopkins. I ain't even playing on that point. There weren't too many bluesmen around (excepting, perhaps, John Lee Hooker) who were recorded as prolifically as Hopkins. Lightnin recorded for nearly forty years for a dizzying array of labels, to include Arhoolie, Herald, Candid, Aladdin, etc etc etc. Personal tastes being what they are, I believe he did his best work through the first 15 years of his reign, beginning with Aladdin sides and hitting his peak through the late '50's-mid-'60's on labels that very much included Prestige/Bluesville.

Taped on April 6, 1964 at the Swarthmore College Folk Festival, this set was almost certainly planned to be released to capitalize on the emergent (read that young & caucasian) interest in primarily the country blues. Swarthmore is a prestigious Quaker university just outside Philadelphia, was, for all practical purposes, just another stop on the coffee house & university circuit that a great many bluesmen were finding themselves on through the 1960's. Veteran that he was, Hopkins knew precisely how to work a crowd and, odd as it may have seen to him (& most of his contemporaries), Hopkins made the leap from African-American clubs and jukes to the college crowd almost seamlessly.

We see in venues like this bluesmen like Son House, Mississippi John Hurt and Hopkins getting chatty as they introduce their next number. This presentation was very much geared to their "new audience," who would consistently find themselves enthralled in the stories almost as much as the music. Few bluesmen could weave their homespun tales more effectively or warmly-humored as Hopkins--and we see this recipe delivered throughout this disc. On many of Hopkins' recordings, we'll find he can play this out too much. While he did get a little wordy and rambling at Swarthmore, he at least managed to keep it entertaining. Witness, for example, his story of My Black Cadillac, a witty proto-rock ditty of luring a lady away from her man with his new car...and where that little move got him. His story behind his Short Haired Woman is every bit as entertaining--and enlightening as to why Lightnin didn't want no woman whose hair was longer than his.

Hopkins' setlist for this concert is a wonderfully-balanced blend of his reinventions of old standards and his own originals (some of which can sound derivative in their own right. For example, his It's Crazy (aka The Rub), a tune famously "his," is, of course, drawn heavily from Leadbelly's Bottle Up & Go.) With his covers, whether we're talking about Big Joe Williams' Baby Please Don't Go, Willie Dixon's My Babe or Big Boy Crudup's Mean Ol Frisco, Lightnin was a master of putting his stamp to his arrangements. These songs, in this milieu, firmly become his own. As for his covers, riffing up Booker T & the MG's' Green Onion seems probably the most curious inclusion of the evening. And that one he does talk to death.

Lightnin's slower, more mournful blues, most especially I'm a Stranger and his frigging magical reading of Trouble in Mind end up providing some of the evening's most stirring moments.

Few men could hold an auditorium full of folks as enthralled and entertained with just a box guitar and strength of personality, and make it seem so effortless, as could Sam Hopkins. With this disc we are given one of its best examples. Few blues albums would wait as long to assert itself as Essential.

Peace, Mudcatz


Lightnin Hopkins
The Swarthmore Concert
Fantasy/Prestige 1993

1. Baby Please Don't Go
2. My Black Cadillac
3. It's Crazy
4. Mojo Hand
5. My Babe
6. Short Haired Woman
7. Mean Ol Frisco
8. Trouble in Mind
9. The Twister
10. Green Onion
11. Sun Goin' Down
12. Come Go Home With Me
13. I'm a Stranger


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