Walkin' This Road By Myself - Lightnin' Hopkins (1962)

Ideated from: the year in music, 1962

Life is funny sometimes.

Lightnin’ Hopkins played country-style acoustic blues in eastern Texas, and wound up recording and touring in the 40s and 50s. But by the end of the 50s, the only blues that sold was the northern electric blues of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker. So bluesmen who didn’t want to plug in were practically forgotten.

Then, as the folk revival movement rolled into the 60s, people started to realize that the blues encapsulated a lot of traditional music that the genre was already interested, often even variants of the same songs. A musicologist named Sam Charters found Lightnin’ playing bars back home in Houston and recorded him solo, doing his thing.

It relaunched his career, not to the Texas juke joint crowd, but to college kids, record collectors, and European audiences.

A double irony here: first, as Hopkins had more success recording, he started to record with a small combo and an electric (or at least amplified) guitar, making some of the blues shuffle tunes you hear on this disc, and sounding more like the conventional electric blues he’d avoided. Secondly, the success of his brand of repackaged acoustic blues–called “folk blues”–was a genuine industry-changer. By the end of the 60s, just about all the big electric stars had recorded acoustic records titled with some variation of “folk blues,” “real folk blues,” or “original folk blues.”

Tracks I Liked

Worried Life Blues - Along with Good Morning Little School Girl, Lightnin’s contribution to the standard repertoire

Coffee Blues - a great walking bassline with a lot of the signature Lightnin’ humor