Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins, the Texas bluesman who recorded more than eighty-five albums, grew up in Leona, the Leon County town six miles south of Centerville at the junction of State Highway 75 and Interstate 45. He was born in Centerville on March 15, probably in 1911, though some sources give 1912, and after his father died in 1915 his mother moved the family to Leona. At eight he made his first instrument, a cigar-box guitar with chicken-wire strings, and by ten he was playing with his cousin, the singer Alger "Texas" Alexander, and with Blind Lemon Jefferson, who encouraged him to keep at it. His brothers John Henry and Joel also played the blues. By the mid-1920s he was jumping trains and playing wherever he could.
In the mid-1930s he served time at the Houston County Prison Farm. His break came in 1946 with a recording session for Aladdin Records in Los Angeles, where he was paired with the pianist Wilson Smith and the two were billed as Lightnin' and Thunder. He settled in Houston in 1950. From 1959, working with Sam Charters, he reached a wide new audience in the folk-blues revival, and in the early 1960s he played Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez.
He recorded for nearly twenty labels, was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1980, and died in Houston on January 30, 1982. Leona itself was Leon County's first seat, from 1846 until the county records moved to the more central Centerville in 1850.
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31.1546, -95.9691
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