Five days from now, the Napoleon Ultra heads off to our "base camp" in Crockett, 190 miles north-east of Austin. An interesting sidenote is that Sam Lightnin' Hopkins frequently played there back in the day. Lightnin' Hopkins was one of the classic blues figures my father introduced me to as a young kid, along with the likes of Brownie Terry, Sonnie McGee, Sonny Boy Williamson and Leadbelly.
According to the Houston Chronicle:
Sam Hopkins was born in 1912 to a sharecropping family in Centerville, a few farms west of Crockett. His grandfather was a slave who hanged himself. His father, Abe, was a ruffian murdered after an argument over a card game.
In the 1930s Hopkins crisscrossed East Texas, playing for hat money in Buffalo, Brenham, Palestine, Leona and Crockett. On Camp Street, Crockett's hot entertainment district that somehow circumvented the county's prohibition on liquor, Hopkins found opportunity in music.
Hopkins served on a road gang for gambling and wrote up the experience in Penitentiary Blues. It was a song sung by many on Camp Street, where vice raids were commonplace. "When the police went in the front door, the gamblers were jumpin' all out the windows."
Conveniently, the jailhouse was down the street.
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