Lightnin’ Hopkins: Centerville’s Blues Truth

Today is the birthday of Lightnin’ Hopkins. He would be 115 today.

Sam John Hopkins was born in Centerville, Texas on March 15, 1912. Leon County is in the heart of Central Texas — rolling piney-woods country that sits between the old plantation belt to the east and the blackland prairie to the west. Hopkins met Blind Lemon Jefferson at a church picnic when he was eight years old. He was already gone then. The blues had its hooks in him and never let go.

A Conversation, Not a Performance

Hopkins settled in Houston’s Third Ward and built a reputation on the local club circuit across the 1940s. His recordings for Aladdin Records gave him the name “Lightnin'” — a producer paired him with a pianist billed as “Thunder” Washington. The recordings were spare and honest, and they traveled. But Hopkins almost disappeared entirely. A researcher found him in Houston in 1959, virtually unknown outside the neighborhood. The folk revival rediscovered him, and he recorded prolifically through the 1960s and 1970s — solo guitar, voice raw and specific as the Texas soil beneath him. He died January 30, 1982, in Houston. Learn more at the Texas State Historical Association.