Mojo Hand: The Life and Music of Lightnin' Hopkins (Brad and Michele Moore Roots Music Series)
*Starred Review* Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins was determined to escape the toil and misery of sharecropping in Jim Crow–era East Texas, and his innate gift for music was the ticket out. He started young, quickly developing his complex, signature style of blues guitar. His ability to play rhythm and lead simultaneously, “unhitched intensity and speed,” and impishly witty lyrics made him “one of the most important bluesmen of the twentieth century,” while his refusal to trust record-industry professionals made for a roller-coaster career. Music journalist O’Brien assiduously combed archives public and private and conducted 130 interviews, then Ensminger stepped in to help after O’Brien became ill with the cancer that took his life. The result is a comprehensively detailed and provocative biography brimming with vivid oral history, in which Hopkins comes into focus as a wry, tough, and prickly man, always sharply dressed and happiest playing in small clubs in his Houston neighborhood, gambling, or fishing, even though he thrilled audiences at Carnegie Hall and around the world. Extensive, anecdotal coverage of gigs and recording sessions is balanced with incisive analysis of racial inequities in American society and the music business, Hopkins’ tremendous influence on white rock musicians, and how his music built “bridges between cultures and people, politics and poetry, humor and humanism.” --Donna Seaman