Lightnin’ Hopkins and the Korean War blues
Country, big band, R&B, blues and pop music all find their way into “Battleground Korea: Songs and Sounds of America’s Forgotten War,” a new anthology of music and spoken-word recordings from the early-1950s. Some of the artists included were or would become canonized legends: B.B. King, Fats Domino, John Lee Hooker, Ernest Tubb, Gene Autry, Merle Travis. Others faded into obscurity despite plucky names like Arkie Shibley and His Mountain Dew Boys and Smilin’ Eddie Vernado and the Delta Ranch Hands.
Though difficult to identify a single focal point among more than 120 tracks representing more than 100 artists, the anthology certainly leans heavily on the Houston-based blues great Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins. “Battleground Korea” opens with his “War News Blues” and including two more of his songs: “Sad News From Korea” and “The War Is Over.”
The Korean War era was an interesting transitional time for Hopkins, which makes the songs’ inclusion revelatory. Hopkins would have been just 38 — he sounded elderly, even then — and living in Houston when the Unites States began its involvement in the conflict.
The Centerville native moved to Houston for a second time around 1945 or 1946, settling in the Third Ward. He cut some songs in Los Angeles for the Aladdin label with pianist Wilson “Thunder” Smith around 1947, too. But back in Houston, he made some of his best and best-known recordings in 1947 and 1950 for Bill Quinn’s Gold Star label. This was the beginning of a period when Hopkins’ musical existence grew increasingly insular as he rarely left Houston.
The other reference point in Hopkins’ discography is 1959, when music historian and producer Samuel Charters recorded him in Houston for what would become “The Roots of Lightnin’ Hopkins,” a record issued on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label.
That recording helped set off a 1960s blues revival, during which Hopkins was lionized with folk festival gigs and numerous recordings, enjoying renown that would last until his death in 1982.
But between his early recordings (hundreds of them) and his rediscovery (hundreds more), Hopkins wasn’t his usual prolific self. Which makes “Battleground Korea” a fascinating peephole into an under-documented period in his life, when Hopkins’ scaled back his performing and recording.
Roger Wood — author of the indispensable “Down in Houston: Bayou City Blues” — believes Hopkins cut “War News Blues” around 1950 or 1951, and it was released as a single on the Kent label. During this time, Hopkins cut more than two dozen songs for a New York producer, as well as eight songs for the Mercury label in 1951. One of those eight was “Sad News From Korea.” He made another eight songs for the Decca label in 1951, which included “The War Is Over,” even though, well, the war wasn’t over.
Wood had no record of any songs cut by Hopkins in 1952, and only 14 in 1953. Then began a particularly quiet five-year spell before the Charters’ session.
The songs included on “Battleground Korea” are varied, two electric and one acoustic, though the noted folklorist and producer Chris Strachwitz — who recorded Hopkins in the ’60s — once curtly noted: “People talk about acoustic, electric, it doesn’t matter. He just wanted the loudest box he could find, and he’d play whatever wasn’t in hock.”
“War News Blues,” likely recorded in late 1950 or early 1951, is among the more ominous songs in Hopkins’ catalog, which is saying something. He plays a droning bassline on the song, picking out an agitated, fuzzy pattern beneath the first two cryptic verses: “You may turn your radio on soon in the morning, sad news every day/Yes, you know, I got a warning, trouble is on its way.”
And: “Poor children running, crying, ‘Whoa, mama, mama, now what shall we do?’/‘Yes’ she said, ‘You had better pray, children, same thing is happening to mama too.’ ”
The song bears no direct mention to Korea other than its title. But the third and final verse brings home a chilling Cold War anxiety: “I’m gonna dig me a hole this morning, dig it deep down in the ground/So if it should happen to drop a bomb around somewhere, I can’t hear the echo when it sounds.”
Hopkins stomps his foot for percussive effect on “Sad News From Korea,” an acoustic song that puts more of the emphasis on his vocal.
The general anxiety of “War News Blues” is here replaced by a very specific blues lament from a parent’s point of view: “Send my poor child back to me.”
Also interesting is Hopkins’ use of metaphor: “You know it’s sad when the rain come falling down.”
For a fairly short song, “Sad News” contains multitudes.
Hopkins is back on the electric guitar on “The War Is Over,” which takes a lighter approach than the other two songs. Written from a soldier’s point of view, the song revels in the opportunity to come back home, though they’re tempered with other concerns: “If that woman spent all my money … .”
Humor aside, Hopkins’ deftly conveys some hope for a transition that doesn’t always go smoothly: “You can get back to that old used-to-be and have the same good times you used to have.”
Rediscovered after the Charters’ recording, Hopkins slid into his fifties as a revered blues figure. The financial windfall might’ve been grander had he taken more interest in publishing and less in getting paid in cash for recordings up front. But he had his ways of doing things.
And in the ’60s — as in the ’40s and ’50s — he sang personal blues as well as taking the temperature of the times. One war ended, another began and Hopkins made recordings like “Please Settle in Vietnam” and “Vietnam War Blues.”
He was welldocumented in the ’60s, which paired with his early, influential recordings makes that ’50s period touched on by “Battleground Korea” all the rarer and more intriguing.