Jason Moran Barline Hopkins Deathbed

Barline Hopkins Deathbed: Sankofa Project, Artist Statement

“Get up in the morning, turn around and just lay back down.” – Lightnin’ Hopkins

Barline Hopkins Deathbed is a tribute to legendary blues guitarist Lightnin’ Hopkins. His voice cut the air, and his guitar solos were a balm that healed souls. He rattled eardrums with his piercing voice, roused audiences to their feet to shake it off, made his guitar sound like a howling street dog, or slow-dragged a blues so slow it became a lullaby. Hopkins was a sound griot, documenting the world around him through his penetrating music.

When I think about Lightnin’, and especially the Blues, I think about how much he informs American sound. He lets the listener inside the sounds around him and then coats it in electricity. His Blues is a contrast to what is often termed “folk” music. The singer Georgia Ann Muldrow defines the Blues, and Black music broadly, as “high tech”. She refers to the way the music has always been at the forefront of our communal knowledge, celebration and therapy. The music is a communal technology, thus high tech, distributed widely from soul to soul. Lightnin’ distributes a quintessentially Houston “High Tech” music to the world, and when we listen beyond our ears, and see beyond our eyes, we can find it’s truth shining.

In the Les Blank documentary The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins, the guitarist says
“The blues is something that is hard to get acquainted with, just like death.”
This complex description is what frequently makes musicians afraid of performing the Blues. The difficulty of the Blues lies in a technique called honesty. This Blues stares unflinchingly into the mirror, tracing the cracks in a smile to the lies in the eyes. It asks us to ask ourselves the hard questions. We can look beyond the lyrics about “loves long lost” for the deeper metaphors of extrication from homelands.

As a pianist, much of my sound is held in the way my fingers press the keys. My body is heard in the sound of the piano. I use the term “attack” or “touch” to describe my piano sound, thus my body sound. The paper pieces are made by draping delicate paper over the piano keyboard, then dumping a pile of dry pigment onto the paper, and then my hands begin playing. The frottage becomes the residue of the performance, essentially another way of recording the performance. It documents the moment of attack, the sustain, the glissando and the release. I have created a series of pieces dedicated to Hopkins’ moment of release: when lightning rests in earth. The shape of the “H” is also about the bridge between worlds/states. In 1982, at age 69, Sam ‘Lightnin’ Hopkins died of esophageal cancer and was buried nearby at the Forest Park Lawndale Cemetery.

“Yeah, you know the life I’m living
I’ve been living it for many a year.
I know the chariot was coming for me
But I didn’t know what kind of chariot was gonna take me away from here.”

– Death Blues by Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins