This album was an early, transformative, blues experience for me: a cassette (made by the father of a high-school friend specifically as part of a wildly successful program to inculcate my young ears with THE BLUES and JAZZ) that I listened to over and over and over and over and over and over and over. I've heard a lot of Hopkins since, and he pretty much falls into the category of a lot of blues and jazz folks: every recording is excellent, so why pick a favorite? But this album seems pretty perfect in every way to me.
I remember really 'hearing' it for the first time, after many listens, one night while working alone at a tiny ice cream shop in a tourist trap in San Diego. I had the boom-box turned up, no customers were anywhere near, and I was bored, and then cleaning, and then mopping, and then bored again, and meanwhile this was playing. The sound of Lightnin's voice suddenly stopped sounding strange or foreign or 'black' or historical or like 'blues' or even like a recording of someone I'd never met and who'd been dead a long time, and suddenly sounded like THE VOICE, present now and living and true, with all of the sly humour and world-weariness and gentle wisdom and frailty and subtle anger and love, that all of us would sing with if we only knew how to sing with our pure inner selves; it sounded like the sound of my soul and yours. I decided that this was the true meaning of 'soul' music: not just a genre, but any music that really contained so much humanity that it could sweep your soul up into it and carry you along.
I know now that this effect is a type of magic that can come from nearly any good music (I could make a long list of things that have made me feel this way, but many of them are already posted to this blog...), but that night I was young enough and the music was awesome enough that it really changed my life.
Give this one a few listens. And any time you see a Lightnin' Hopkins record, pick it up.
Here's a randomly selected video: there are other good ones out there but this will give you an idea of the magic.
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