Read Online Alan Govenar by Lightnin' Hopkins: His Life, Blues - Free Book Online

remained, by all appearances, more of a personal hobby than a commercial firm. It must have come as a shock to him, then, when he received a fine from the Internal Revenue Service in early 1951 totaling an astonishing twenty-six thousand dollars. A 10 percent federal excise tax had long been established on the sale of records, but Quinn either didn’t know about the tax or had ignored it on his tax returns since forming the label five years earlier. 58 The penalty probably represented the government’s account of the taxable percentage on the total number of records sold on Gold Star from 1946 to 1950. Quinn couldn’t pay the fine, and Gold Star was soon to be another casualty in the indie record business. 59
    On September 22, 1951,
Billboard
reported that the Modern label had “shelled out $2,500 for 32 unreleased Lightning Hopkins and L’il Son Jackson masters and the disk contract of the former. Deal was made thru’ Bill Quinn, Gold Star Records’ topper, who this week shut down his Houston diskery. Hopkins’ sides will be issued on Modern’s subsidiary…. Diskery will release two sides on each artist 1 October.” 60
    Relatively speaking, $2,500 was a fair sum to pay for thirty-two masters in 1951; Lightnin’ was still perceived as having commercial potential. Modern was quick to release Lightnin’s unissued masters on its subsidiary RPM label, including “Begging You to Stay,” “Jake Head Boogie,” and “Some Day Baby.” A standout in the RPM releases was the single “Black Cat,” for which Lightnin’ took the guts out of the Memphis Minnie and Little Son Joe 1942 hit “Black Rat Swing” and transformed the male “rat” in the original song into a female “cat” in his version.
    Well I took you in my home, you ate up all my bread
I left there this mornin’, you tried to mess up in my bed
Well you’re one black cat, some day you’ll find your tree
Then I’ll hide my shoe somewhere near your cherry tree
    Quinn had tried to salvage his business by issuing one final release from Lightnin’, “Jackstropper Blues,” but ultimately had to discontinue his blues series. 61 Any hope that his December 1950 contract with Lightnin’ would reverse his fortunes and revive Gold Star as a blues label were dashed when he learned that Lightnin’ had already recorded with another producer, Bobby Shad. Shad had founded the Sittin’ In With label in New York in the late 1940s, and had come to Houston in 1950 to record Peppermint Harris, among others, but also met up with Hopkins. He asked Hopkins if he was under contract to anybody, and Lightnin’, as usual, said no. In 1951, Shad brought him to New York and recorded eight sides with him, including “Coffee Blues” and “Give Me Central 209,” both of which would become hits. When Quinn found out about this, he was furious and told Shad that Lightnin’ was under contract to him and that he had already been paid. To placate Quinn, Shad bought a bunch of old masters from him and proceeded to release them. Quinn was essentially powerless; his business was collapsing. When Quinn shut down operations, Shad seized the opportunity to record Lightnin’ in Houston and produced another fourteen sides with him. Some of these recordings were done with portable equipment that Shad brought with him, and others were done at Bill Holford’s ACA studio. 62
    Texas Johnny Brown recalled one such session at ACA: “They had a little recording studio out Washington Avenue…. And we used to go out there, and he’d sit and play…. And I remember Lightnin’ used to take a board, put a board down underneath his feet. And if he didn’t have a drum, he’d just pat his feet real hard—on that board—and play right along with it. It always amazed me how he did it, because his timing was his own timing as