by Alan Schaefer with The Center for Texas Music History
This Week in Texas Music History, lightning strikes twice at the Armadillo.
Lightnin’ Hopkins, guitarist, vocalist, and arguably Texas’s greatest blues performer, took the stage in Austin at the Armadillo World Headquarters for two nights, October 22nd and 23rd, 1971. Hopkins was born in the early 1910s in Centerville and grew up there and in the East Texas communities of Leona and Crockett. By his own account, he was encouraged by the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson while playing guitar at the age of eight at a Baptist gathering in Buffalo, Texas, and by the age of ten was performing alongside another blues pioneer, Texas Alexander. He recorded for dozens of labels in the early postwar era, including Aladdin and Prestige, and by the 1950s made Houston his home.
Hopkins’s visit to the Armadillo was not his first performance for Austin rock audiences. He played Austin’s psychedelic ballroom, the Vulcan Gas Company, in December 1967 and again in February 1968, and made his first trip to the Armadillo in November 1970, taking the stage just one week after fellow Houstonians ZZ Top made an early Austin appearance. This October 1971 weekend stand included the then up-and-coming Taj Mahal on Friday night, while the local ensemble Greezy Wheels supported Hopkins on Saturday. Artist Jim Franklin’s poster advertised the concert with his trademark visual shorthand for the artists, with the requisite armadillo frolicking around India’s Taj Mahal, its snout pointed skyward, conducting a strike of lightning. Indeed, Lightnin’ struck Austin on that October weekend in 1971.
Sources:
Alan Govenar. Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010.
Timothy J. O’Brien and David Ensminger. Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin’ Hopkins. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.
Alan Schaefer, ed. Homegrown: Austin Music Posters 1967 to 1982. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015.
Eddie Wilson with Jesse Sublett. Armadillo World Headquarters. Austin: TSSI Publishing, 2019.
Media:
From the Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins by Les Blank
Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Baby, Please Don’t Go”
Beginning of The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins by Les Blank
