Alan Govenar by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life, Blues Page A

song with Chris Strachwitz in 1960 from Mance Lipscomb, who at the time wished to remain anonymous on record because he feared reprisal from Moore. Lipscomb sang: “Tom Moore’ll whip you, dare you not to tell.” He believed that if Moore found out that “I put out a song like that I couldn’t live here no more…. ‘Goddam, you put out a song about me and you made a record of it—I’m gonna kill you!’ Or if he didn’t do it, he’d have it done.”
    The song, McCormick wrote, was “a brutally truthful characterization of one particular hardened opportunist who has taken advantage and mistreated his laborers. It is a protest against ‘them bad farm’ where a farmer can get started with only a borrowed five or ten dollar bill, the ease of which dupes him into working against an ever increasing debt, his life circumscribed by fear of the big boss, and the bells which call him from the field to meals and then call him back to the field where the landlord stands with ‘spurs in his horse’s flank’ and ‘the whip in his hand.’” 54
    Lightnin’ said he had heard Texas Alexander sing a version of the song, and when he recorded it, he thinly disguised the subject by changing the name from Tom to Tim. But anyone black in East Texas knew whom he was singing about.
    Yes, you know, I got a telegram this morning, boy,
    it say, “Your wife is dead.”
    I show it to Mr. Moore, he said, “Go ahead, nigger,
    you know you got to plow a ridge.”
    That white man said, “It’s been raining, yes, and I’m way behind
I may let you bury that woman one of these dinner times”
I told him, “No, Mr. Moore, somebody’s got to go”
He says, “If you ain’t able to plow, Sam, stay up there and grab you a hoe”
    While Lightnin’ never worked for Tom Moore, he inserted himself into the song, personalizing it and identifying himself with the hardships of those who did. For listeners in 1949, many of whom had already migrated from the country to the city, “Tim Moore’s Farm” epitomized the plight of black sharecroppers and the inhumane conditions to which they were subjected.
    After the success of “Tim Moore’s Farm,” Lightnin’ wanted to get back in the studio at Gold Star as quickly as possible. On August 13, 1949,
Billboard
reviewed Lightnin’s recording of “Jail House Blues,” which was based on Bessie Smith’s song by the same title. He was accompanied on it by the steel guitar of Hop Wilson, not Frankie Lee Sims, as has been written for decades. The review doomed its potential by calling it “an old-style, sorrowful blues, warbled and guitared in the ancient manner. Staple fare for the Deep South market.” Still, on October 8, 1949, Lightnin’s song “’T’ Model Blues” made it to #8 on the
Billboard
R & B jukebox charts for one week, even though when it was reviewed with “Jail House Blues” it was called “a provocative double entendre slow blues in the same authentic manner.” 55
    A year later, in September 1950, Lightnin’s “Shotgun Blues,” which he had recorded for Aladdin in 1948, was a hit for four weeks on
Billboard’s
“Best-Selling Retail Race Records” chart and peaked at #5. Hopkins was more popular than ever, and Quinn, probably because “Shotgun Blues” had sold so well, thought he might be able to boost his revenues with the sales of Lightnin’s records. On December 16, 1950, Quinn entered into another contract with Lightnin’ that gave him a two-hundred-dollar advance at each recording session at which four sides are recorded and a royalty of one and a half cents for each side of the record used for recordings. 56
    A two-hundred-dollar advance at
every
recording session was generous of Quinn, particularly at a time when even bigger labels were paying less