Sam (Lightnin') Hopkins

Hopkins's audience changed in 1959, when he began working with producer Sam Charters and took up an acoustic guitar. His records had sold mostly in the Black community; the folk-blues revival brought White listeners, a 1964 American Folk Blues Festival tour and, by decade's end, dates opening for the Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane. In the 1970s he played a command performance for Queen Elizabeth II, and in 1972 he worked on the Sounder soundtrack. After a 1970 car crash he mostly played on his porch or at a nearby bar. More than 4,000 people attended his funeral.

What the plaque says

Sam (Lightnin') Hopkins African American blues singer and guitarist Sam Hopkins was born in Centerville, Leon County, Texas in 1912, the youngest of five children of Abe and Frances (Washington) Hopkins. Sam learned to play guitar from John Henry and Joel Hopkins, two of his older brothers, and began his musical career in Central Texas under the guidance of Texas blues pioneers Alger "Texas" Alexander and Blind Lemon Jefferson. Hopkins traveled throughout the south for many years but ultimately settled in Houston in the mid-1940s. He became a mainstay of Houston's Third Ward music clubs, especially those located on and around Dowling Street. Hopkins was "discovered" by an Aladdin Records talent scout in 1946 and was sent to Los Angeles for his first recording sessions. It was during these sessions that Hopkins picked up the nickname "Lightnin'" and recorded his first hit record, "Katy Mae." After returning to Houston, Hopkins recorded for Gold Star, one of the earliest labels to record blues in Houston. Despite recording success, Hopkins continued to play and sing at Houston dance parties, street corners, and Dowling Street establishments. He also continued to record and tour, although he rarely played outside of Texas during the 1950s. The popularity of folk and blues music of the 1960s brought additional attention to Hopkins, and he performed to more integrated audiences, including several performances at New York's Carnegie Hall. After a prolific career that included approximately 100 recorded albums, and over 600 songs, Hopkins died in 1982; he is buried in Houston's Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery. (2010)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Emancipation Park — steps away
  The Third Ward park that freedpeople bought for Juneteenth in 1872, rebuilt in 2017 on Emancipation Avenue and still the center of the city's June 19 celebration.
• Buffalo Soldiers National Museum — 0.8 mi
  A museum in Houston's 1925 Light Guard Armory that tells the service of Black soldiers from the Revolutionary War onward, built from one veteran's thirty years of collecting.
• Museum of Fine Arts, Houston — 1.6 mi
  The oldest art museum in Texas, grown from a 1900 schoolroom art league into a campus of Watkin, Mies van der Rohe and later buildings, with Ima Hogg's Bayou Bend up the bayou.
• Rothko Chapel — 1.8 mi
  An octagonal chapel open to all faiths, built by the de Menils around fourteen dark canvases by Mark Rothko, with Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk standing in the pool outside.

More markers nearby

• Eldorado Ballroom — steps away
• Trinity United Methodist Church — steps away
• The Legacy of Emancipation Park — steps away
• Jordan Grove Missionary Baptist Church — 0.2 mi