Week 15: Bring Me My Shotgun



Lightnin' Hopkins

The Man

Lightnin’ Hopkins is a genuine legend of the blues, and one of the most influential guitarists of all time. He is also the most recorded blues artist in history, releasing over 80 albums and recording around 1,000 songs in his 35 year career.

Sam John Hopkins was born in to the harsh reality of the deep south on March 15, in either 1911 or 1912 (Hopkins himself says 1912), in Centerville, Texas, to Abe and Frances Hopkins. Abe Hopkins was the son of a freed slave, born just 10 years after emancipation, and he was a hard man living the hard life of a share cropper. His father, Lightnin’s grand father, had hanged himself when he was young, despairing over the hopeless life of a sharecropper in the years after the end of slavery.

Abe had already served time for murder before he met and married 15 year old Frances in 1901, working as a dirt poor share cropper for white landowners in the dangerous Jim Crow south. They had 5 children, with Sam being the youngest. The eldest, John Henry, started working in the fields at age 9. Abe was a brawler, drinker and gambler, and he was murdered in 1915, when Sam was just 3 years old. John Henry, then just 13, left town for a while so he didn’t have to murder the man who killed his father, and Frances and the 4 children still at home moved 9 miles south to Leona, though the children attended school in Centerville.

In 1919, when Sam was just 7, a black man was lynched from the tree that stood in front of the local court house. Called the ‘tree of justice’ by the locals, the body was left hanging for two days. Lightnin’ recalled the man was lynched because he had the nerve to tell a white man to stop bothering his wife. By the age of 7, Sam’s grandfather had hanged himself, his father had been murdered and he had seen the body of a black man hanging from a tree outside the county court house.

Although dirt poor, the family were musical. All the children sang and played home made instruments. Sam made his first guitar out of a cigar box and wire he took from the screen door and he had a natural talent for music. John Henry had a proper store bought guitar that Sam would play during John Henry’s absences. One day John Henry came home and found 8 year old Sam playing the guitar – after seeing how much better he was, John Henry gave the guitar to him. France’s cousin played fiddle with his wife on guitar, and a family friend, Albert Holley, was a blues guitarist.

When Sam was 8 and already working in the fields, he took his guitar to a church picnic in Buffalo. Blind Lemon Jefferson was performing that day, and although he hadn’t been recorded at that stage of his career, he had a reputation as a blues man and guitarist. Young Sam started playing along, and impressed Blind Lemon. From that moment, Sam saw music as a way out of the hard life of a share cropper.

He took to the road as a hobo, playing for tips on street corners, and following Blind Lemon from town to town in East Texas. He learnt a lot and started to develop his own distinctive style of playing percussion, bass, rhythm and melody lines on the guitar at the same time. He also developed a taste for gambling and alcohol, and got into trouble with the law a few times.

In 1928, he returned to Centerville where he married Elamer Lacey, and they had a daughter a year later. Sam returned to share cropping but continued to play music to supplement the meagre income working the fields produced. A few years later, he met Alger “Texas” Alexander at a local baseball game. Texas Alexander was a commanding presence with a big, deep voice that hollered the blues. He was a successful musician – he had recorded 50 odd sides before the depression hit and he owned a Cadillac – and he always drew a crowd when he started singing. He didn’t play an instrument, and had recorded with the best musicians of the time – including Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon. He was notorious for playing in “Alexander time” – disregarding timing completely, and ignoring song structures whenever he felt like it.

Sam left his young family, and took up hoboing again with Alexander. Due to his high profile, Alexander received payments instead of tips for performing, and Sam saw a way to get a steady wage for performing. He followed Alexander through Texas and surrounding states, sometimes performing individually at cafes or as a duo. They made their way to Houston in the mid 30’s but continued travelling around either together or separately. In 1939. Alexander was imprisoned for murdering his wife, and Hopkins returned to the Leona/Centerville area and to field labouring. His gambling and drinking led him to more trouble with the law, and he served some time in prison.

In 1946, he relocated to Houston, performing in bars and street corners and started to create a reputation for himself. In late 1946, he was discovered by Alladin records, and invited to Los Angeles to record with pianist Wilson Smith. They recorded 12 tracks on November 9, 1946, and a producer thought they need dynamic names: the records was released under various variations of ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins and Thunder Smith’. The records were successful enough to lead to another session in August 1947.

He returned to Houston, recording for the Gold Star Label and rarely leaving the state. He began a period of prodigious output and build a reputation among African Americans and blues fans. The popularity of the Chicago style saw Lightnin’ increasingly use an electric guitar and move away from his country roots and his popularity started to wane. In 1959 he was contacted by Sam Charters, who recorded him on an acoustic in a room he was renting. This recording brought him to the attention of a wider audience as part of the folk revival of the 60s. Lightnin’ played Carnegie Hall in 1960 alongside Pete Seeger and Joan Biaz. He continued recording – averaging 2 albums a year – and extensively toured the US and even a tour of Japan.

A car accident in the 70’s reduced his output, and he was inducted in the Blues Hall of Fame as an original member in 1980.

Sam ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins died of cancer on January 30, 1982 in Houston, Texas.



The Song

Bring Me My Shotgun is loosely based on a slow 12 bar blues. It is in a somewhat standard tuning, though all the strings are tuned fairly low – between a whole tone and a tone and a half lower than usual. The E strings sound like they are between C# and D (I write it out as D, but it is a bit lower than that). Lightnin’ uses the casual relationship to timing and song structure that he learnt from Texas Alexander in their years on the road. Beats are dropped or added to bars, bars are dropped and added at will.

All the trademarks of Lightnin’s style are included in this song. His thumb is as solid as a rock that hits any beat he wants it to hit. The passages in the G section are propelled only by his thumb, and he has minimal use of the high strings in the singing sections. This creates an atmosphere with so much space that the solos sound like another instrument. The timing is critical – you have to keep that shuffle rhythm of the thumb consistently slow to allow the thumb lines to create an emotional element. Between sung lines, he has some great riffing in the blues scale, but he refrains from using the high string except as parts of chords. This approach cannot be underestimated – by keeping the verse melodies to a mid range,. he allows the solos to go into new territory and allows them to have a voice of their own.

He ‘rakes’ the lower strings of an E7 shape in bar 4 of the progression (and in the turn around) in an up pick motion that is really hard to do accurately. Every melody line he does is very well controlled against the slow bass, pay more attention to recreating the feel of the bass/melody interplay than playing it note for note accurately.

The solos themselves do away completely with song structure and are very quick with accurate bending. My tab plug in cannot show the bends, so you’ll need to listen to the track to get them accurate. The solos feature flurries of 32nd notes over on the beat bass notes, and you cannot really tab it when any consistent timing. Again, listen to the recording to get the notes into the beats they are supposed to be in. The second solo features some percussive very quick string ‘scratching’ in bar 7 that is impossible to tab. It uses the 4th fret G string, but you’ll have to listen to it and try to recreate something similar.

This is one of those songs that you can pick up in ten minutes and spend the next 20 years trying to get to sound right!



The Lyrics

D Woah, go bring me my shotgun G D Oh I'm gonna start shootin again G Go bring me my shotgun D You know I just got to start shootin' again A You know I'm gonna shoot my woman D Cause she's foolin' around with too many men Yes bring me my shotgun Yes man and a pocket full of shells Yes go bring me my shotgun Yes man and a pocket full of shells Yeah you know I'm gonna kill that woman I'm gonna throw her in that old deep dug well Hide her from everybody they won't know where she at That woman said Lightnin' you can't shoot me She said now you is dead of tryin' I don't take a day off for nobody She said Lightnin' you can't shoot me She said yes and you dare to try I said the only reason I don't shoot you little woman My double barrel shotgun, it just won't fire

The Intro



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The Progression



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The First Solo



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The Second Solo

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The Outro