Word: lightnin
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Jackson has spent the last decade travelling to the 14 prisons under the jurisdiction of the Texas Department of Corrections. Armed with his tape recorder and camera, Jackson grasped what life is like for prisoners like Chinaman, Ten-Four. Bacon and Porkchop, Lightnin' and Cowboy. They told him their story and sang him their songs and he was able to gain an unusual insight into the mechanisms of survival contained in the rhythmic melodies...
Whatever the derivation, the connotation of a race of bull-headed, simplistic primitives, inhabiting the mountainous regions of the South, obliterating their consciousness with home-brewed "white lightnin" and singing ballads when they weren't obliterating each other, has been established and, in fact, endures. The radio is probably responsible for bringing this mountain nickname into general public awareness during the '30's, and by the '50's the mass media had so fixed the image as to commercialize it, particularly in the area of musical expression...
...discovery by white youth of black music. It was an awkward, embarrassed rendezvous--a blind date, really. In discussing a blues festival, Guralnick writes, "(There were) many of the same problems which have plagued every blues 'concert' I have attended since I first saw Lightnin' Hopkins at Harvard twelve years ago: a stiff, unnatural atmosphere, an unbridgeable gulf between performer and audience, and a tendency to treat the blues as a kind of museum piece, to be pored over by scholars, to be admired perhaps but to be stifled at the same time by the press of formal attention...
...blues began feeling good to Johnny at the age of eleven, when he first heard the records of Robert Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and Lightnin' Hopkins on the radio down home in Beaumont, Texas. He began playing along on a hand-me-down guitar from his grandfather. Three years later, Johnny, 14, and Brother Edgar, 11, had their own band, Johnny and the Jammers. They made $8 a night for gigs across the border in Louisiana, where clubs were more lenient about age requirements. Edgar recalls that though Johnny only took enough lessons to pick up a few chords...
...Lightnin' Strikes--Lou Christie...