Koch Records
2005
Lightnin' Strikes Twice
About This Album
Aubrey Mayhew, founder of the maverick country label Little Darlin' Records, sought out taciturn bluesman Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins in Houston in 1967 and persuaded him to make some casual field recordings for him at nearby Gold Star Studio and, as it turned out, at two small local bars. The results of these extremely loose and casual sessions were issued as a series of five short albums under the blanket title of The Lost Texas Tapes, and it is those five releases that are collected here into one double-disc set. Intimacy is the operative word for these tracks, as Hopkins (playing solo electric guitar) sounds relaxed and at ease, and while these recordings are hardly the place to start with Lightnin', die-hard fans will find them indispensable for the insight they give into his creative process. Hopkins didn't sing songs so much as spontaneously make them up on the spot, pulling events from his daily life and matching them to one of his set blues riffs, and when the process worked, as it does here on cuts like "I Heard My Baby Crying" and "You and Your Man Don't Get Along," the results can be a stunning example of the blues as personal catharsis, and when it failed to click, well, it sounded like any of a dozen other Hopkins songs.
Track List

Disc 1 (try tracks 1,2,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14 and 15)

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Disc 2 (try tracks 1,2,3,5,7,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16 and 17)

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