Prestige Profiles

Performer: Lightnin' Hopkins
Producer: Kenneth S. Goldstein; Mack McCormack; Samuel Charters
Distributor: Universal Distribution

Notes: Personnel: Lightnin' Hopkins (vocals, guitar); Billy Bizor (vocals, harmonica); Sonny Terry (harmonica); Buster Pickens (piano); Leonard Gaskin, Donald Cooks (bass instrument); Belton Evans, Spider Kilpatrick, Herbie Lovelle (drums). Recording information: ACA Studios, Houston, Texas; Van Gelder Studios, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey (1960 - 1964). Although Prestige was primarily known as a jazz label, they did host some superb blues artists, including the brilliant, idiosyncratic Texas guitarist Lightnin' Hopkins. Hopkins was only with Prestige for a spell in the early 1960s, but this excellent 16-track collection skims the cream from his output for the label. Featured in both solo and group settings, Hopkins lays down his inimitable sparse, country-blues guitar style, not to mention his legendary ability to improvise wry, comic stories.

Some artists are influential because so many followers try to imitate them; others are influential precisely because they cannot be imitated. Lightnin' Hopkins was of the latter variety. With a career that stretched from the 1920s through the '70s, the Texas bluesman was a genre unto himself, a deft guitarist equally at home in a quiet solo performance or fronting an electrified boogie band. He was a free-associating poet who made up entire songs on the spot, and a leathery-voiced singer whose vocals simultaneously communicated a lifetime of misery and an endless reserve of self-confidence.

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