Topic: Seminal Versions
The copyright law inherited English precedents that went back before Haydn when the only recognized compositions were made for the court or church. It then was assumed the folk tradition was a corrosive process that took those compositions, broke them down, and preserved bits.
When white folklorists confronted African-American traditions they applied that same concept. In 1937, Ruby Pickens Tartt was asked by the WPA to provide spirituals from Sumter County, Alabama. She wrote a friend she "knew how little" her supervisor "knew of the time it would take to get the verses to eight songs."
"I told her spirituals don’t thrive around the courthouse square, that I might drive all day in the country and never find one complete song. One person would know one verse, one another, and on. [1]
Tartt knew different individuals all sang versions that were recognizably related, but each differed in the verses included. She assumed there once had been a standard version of which each only retained a part.
She did not comprehend that instead of an immutable song that could be transcribed for piano, African Americans had collections of verses they grouped into song clusters, and that anyone, at anytime, could sing any or all of the verses in any order, and the next time that person sang it, he or she could create a different combination. There was no restriction against including a verse from another cluster.
Lightnin’ Hopkins tried to explain the difference to a white film-maker. He claimed the churches
"didn’t teach me the song. Nuh uh, they made them up. Fact of the business, the way it goes, they sang the songs and I played them. Whatever they sing, I played it. All they do is get into tune just like they [plays]." [2]
When Hopkins recorded his version of "Come by Here" in 1952, he used variations on three phrases that had been used in earlier recordings, [3] and added his own. "Come if you don’t stay long" was an abbreviated form of the Southern invitation, "come, even if you can’t stay long" shortened to fit the length of the musical line.
The early recordings of "Come by Here," made primarily by people from the southeastern United States, had repeated one line six times, with little variation. Hopkins was a blues musician from cotton country in the upper reaches of the Trinity river in Texas. He kept the sestet form, but alternated a three-line AAA verse with three repetitions of "now is the needed time." He then reverted to the AAB blues stanza, with "Jesus, will you come by here" as the commentary (AAB-CCC).
His version of "Come by Here" may not have been long enough for a three-minute recording. [4] He began with three variations on the "come" theme, then played the melody on the guitar. Next he reversed the pattern and began with three repetitions of "needed time," which he followed with a repetition of the "stay long" verse. He already had said he was praying for Jesus to come. He reworded that verse by repeating he was down on his knees twice, and finished by singing come by here four times (AAB-BBB).
He made the recording for a company owned by the Bihari brothers. The label gave him credit as the composer, but the music publisher also was owned by the brothers. It was a small operation that diverted royalties whenever it could. [5]
Performers
Instrumental Accompaniment: acoustic guitar
Rhythm Accompaniment: acoustic guitar
Credits
Written-by - Lightnin’ Hopkins [6]
Mod Music Pub Co. (BMI) [7]
Notes on Lyrics
Language: English
Pronunciation: a loose coupling between music and text allowed Hopkins to emphasize the important word "come" rather than the one that ended the sentence or phrase, "here."
Verses: come by here, needed time, come if you don’t stay long, praying, praying on my knees
Vocabulary:
Pronoun: I
Term for Deity: Jesus
Jesus: in the form of the Holy Spirit
Now: this is not a premillennial reference to the second coming of Christ, but a request for the Holy Spirit to materialize immediately.
Down on my knees: refers both to the common habit of getting on one’s knees to pray and older African-American initiation rituals where an individual went out in the wilderness to contact the spirits.
Format: sestet
Line Meter: varies around a basic iambic trimeter
Line Repetition Pattern: AAB-CCC
Notes on Music
Basic Structure: repetition of first verse with few changes.
Singing Style: fundamentally one syllable to one note. The sustained words like come, Lord, and Oh occasionally shifted to a second tone toward the end, sometime shading into a hum of the extended vowel. Many African languages did not end in consonants, and the emphasis on the vowel here is one way Black American English perpetuated older pronunciation patterns. [8]
Vocal-Orchestral Dynamics: rhythmic accompaniment to vocal parts and an instrumental interlude when the guitar replaced the voice.
The general pattern was simple chords on the first two lines, with the guitar playing a parallel melody on the last phrase of the third line. In the interlude, the guitar played the melody with chords. Base runs were used between melodic phrases.
Notes on Performer
Sam Hopkins, who lived from 1911 to 1982, had two recording careers: one on labels marketed to African-American audiences in the 1940s and 1950s, and another on albums aimed at whites interested in the rural blues. He was a link with early musicians, like Blind Lemon Jefferson, and thus was interviewed numerous times. Sam Charters released one set of interviews on a Prestige record, and Les Blank and PBS captured others on films. Blank made his unused footage available to biographers.
Lightnin’ Hopkins. My Life in Blues. Prestige 7370. 1965. Interviewed by Sam Charters. Fantasy, Inc reissued it as the seventh CD in The Complete Prestige/Bluesville Recordings in 1991.
Les Blank. The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins. El Cerrito, California: Flower Films, 1968.
PBS. Artists in America, 1971, program 6, "Sam ‘Lightnin’’ Hopkins." Produced by KUHT, Houston.
Availability
78/45 rpm: RPM Records 359. Recorded in Houston, 1952.
Reissue: No Blues for Young Men. Leicester, UK: Broken Audio Recordings. 19 September 2013.
Reissue: In God We Trust. Zürich, Switzerland: Brownsville Records. 15 November 2015.
YouTube: uploaded by stompingsevens, 10 February 2013.
End Notes
1. Ruby Pickens Tartt. Letter to Janie Long Allen, undated. Ruby Pickens Tartt Collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama University. Reprinted by Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens. Toting the Lead Row. University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 13.
The WPA program was the Federal Writer’s Project sponsored by the federal government’s Works Progress Administration.
2. Lightnin’ Hopkins. Transcribed by Timothy J. O’Brien and David Ensminger. Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin’ Hopkins. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013. 15. Credit to the PBS documentary.
Hopkins’ separation of the roles of accompanying and participating in a church service was the same distinction made about trance rituals by Gilbert Rouget that was discussed in the post for 3 August 2017.
3. I will be discussing the early recordings in later posts.
4. The three-minute record form was discussed in the post for 2 August 2017.
5. Wikipedia. "Bihari Brothers."
6. "Lightning Hopkins And His Guitar – One Kind Favor / Needed Time." Discogs website. It reproduced the label for the other song on the recording, and implied the information was the same for both.
7. RPM was a subsidiary of Modern Records, and Modern Music Publishing was one of the Bihari’s properties.
8. Lorenzo Dow Turner. Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect. Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 2002 edition. 247.
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