Alan Govenar Read Online Free PDF

them Indian features. She had straight, long hair. Mrs. Cullum must have been around five ten; she wore all kinds of fancy clothes. She was a fancy-dressing person.” 20
    Brown met Cullum in 1946, shortly after moving to Houston. Brown says, “One club in particular where I played at was Shady’s Playhouse [then called Jeff’s Playhouse] on Simmons Street in the Third Ward. It was the most popular club in the Third Ward at that time. And Mrs. Cullum kind of found out. She went looking for young musicians. She was the kind of person who took the young musicians and kept them busy, kept them working.” 21
    Lola Cullum also let Milburn rehearse with his band at her house in the Third Ward. “She had a beautiful home at that time,” Brown says. “She had one of the upper-class houses in Third Ward, and she would make sure everything was just right. And if they [the sidemen] weren’t wearing the right clothes, she get them something. She used to take the doc’s [her husband’s] white shirts and put them on musicians.” 22
    Milburn’s first session for Aladdin on September 12, 1946 was well received. Sid Thompson of the
Informer
said that when Milburn returned to Texas, he had “crashed the movie and musical capital with his particular brand of blues. He cut six sides for Aladdin Recording Company … and is back here for a rest.” 23 A month later, Thompson wrote: “Amos Milburn, newest recording star to flash across the jukebox world, has really hit big time with his boogie woogie singing and piano playing…. He is under the management of Lola Ann Cullum. This brings to mind the little known fact this lady is a song writer of excellence with several hit numbers to her credit. ‘Twas she who got the lucrative contracts for Milburn, who is quite a youngster and just out of the Navy.” 24
    With the success of Milburn’s records, Eddie Mesner from Aladdin encouraged Cullum to look for more local talent. She found out about the scene on Dowling Street, where Sam Hopkins sometimes played on the sidewalk with his old partner from pre-war days, Texas Alexander. Cullum told blues researchers Mike Leadbitter and Larry Skoog in a 1967 interview that she liked Hopkins’s music and that she made some test recordings to send to Aladdin.
    While country blues, performed by such artists as Big Boy Crudup and Big Bill Broonzy, was dying on the charts, the Mesners thought Hopkins might stand a chance in the marketplace. Initially, Hopkins wanted to bring Texas Alexander because of his longtime association with him, but once Cullum heard a rumor that Alexander had just been released from the penitentiary, she was worried about his marketability and replaced him with Wilson Smith, an accomplished barrelhouse piano player. Cullum also had to make Hopkins more presentable, and gave him some money to get new clothes before she drove him and Smith to Los Angeles. 25
    Sam told the story of how Cullum discovered him countless times, but with each telling, he tended to embellish the details. To Sam Charters, he recalled in 1965 that he was shooting craps at home when a friend told him that a lady outside was honking her horn wanting to speak to him. When he went outside, she identified herself as a talent scout and asked him to get his guitar and play one song for her, after which she offered him one thousand dollars to come with her to make records. Two years later, during the filming of
The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins,
Sam exaggerated even further and said Cullum, after hearing him play, gave him ten one-hundred-dollar bills before he even got in the car to go with her. A thousand-dollar advance was astronomical in 1946, especially for an unknown singer.
    Clyde Langford says that when he was a child in Centerville, he heard a radically different version of the story, not only from his parents, but also from Sam’s mother, Frances Hopkins: “That