I’m spending this month in California with my in-laws, and so naturally I went searching my iTunes for thematically appropriate songs. One of the results was this exquisite Lightnin’ Hopkins recording.
Here’s my visualization using Ableton Live. I tuned the recording up a half step so that it’s in A rather than A-flat, which makes it easier for you to play along. The big challenge was to figure out the meter, which changes constantly. I aligned the Hopkins track to the grid over a drum machine kick, programmed in the tempo changes, and used audio to MIDI conversion as a starting point for my transcription. Then I sweated out the details in Dorico, before bringing the MIDI back into Ableton to make the visualization. There was necessarily quite a lot of interpretation involved here.
I first heard Lightnin’ Hopkins thanks to the Grateful Dead, specifically, Pigpen’s performance of “Katie Mae” on Bear’s Choice. Pigpen gets at Hopkins’ introspective soul, but he doesn’t have the authoritative groove of the original performance.
Hopkins treats the standard twelve-bar blues as a launchpad for his idiosyncratic and improvisational approach to form. “My California” is a particularly freewheeling example. You can hear the standard blues form under there, but between the meter changes, the tempo changes and the syncopation, Hopkins pushes the form as far as it can be pushed. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top says that when a backing musician complained about his metrical unpredictability, Hopkins responded, “Lightnin’ change when Lightnin’ want to change.”
Here’s a standard twelve-bar blues:
Phrase A: | I | IV | I | I | Phrase B: | IV | IV | I | I | Phrase C: | V | IV | I | V |
The three phrases are audible in the verses of “My California”, but their lengths vary, and the only consistent feature of the harmony is the move to the IV chord at the beginning of the B phrase. Hopkins never once plays the V chord! Sometimes he plays IV at the beginning of the C phrase, and sometimes he just stays on I.
It took me quite a while to figure out Hopkins has his guitar tuned in open D. This is surprising, because like I said, the song is in A. It’s perfectly possible to play a song in A using open D tuning, but it’s not the most obvious thing you can do. (Remember that Hopkins is also tuned down a half-step, so he’s really in open D-flat and playing in A-flat.)
Notation can only vaguely approximate the fluid pitches and rhythms of the blues, but I did my best. I used this transcription as an opportunity to get better at Dorico, and then transferring the chart over to Noteflight so I could embed it here. I haven’t put in the bends and slides, but you can pick those up by ear.
Essentially all of the pitches in “My California” come from the union of the A “minor” and A “major” blues scales:
You could think of Hopkins as playing a “scale” that includes A, every chromatic pitch between B and E, F-sharp, and G. You could think of it as the union of A Mixolydian and A Dorian, plus the sharp fourth/flat fifth. But it is really just A blues. Many of these pitches are blue notes, in between the piano keys; I colored those blue in the chart. It seems most likely that this pitch collection grows from the natural overtone series of A and D.
I love Hopkins’ guitar playing because it’s extremely minimal and bare, even by country blues standards. Sometimes he just doubles his vocal in single notes. There are also long stretches where he doesn’t play anything at all. The chord changes are implied more than stated. And yet, it doesn’t sound empty. Is this because Hopkins knows that you are familiar with the conventions of the blues, and you can fill in the “missing” notes in your head? Or is he telling you that there are no missing notes, that all you need is a drone and some blue notes to create the full sound?