‘Lightnin’ Strikes’ When Acoustic Sounds Handles An Excellent Hopkins Curio

A LESSER-KNOWN ALBUM BY THE TEXAS BLUES LEGEND BENEFITS FROM SONIC CLARIFICATION

Lightnin’ Hopkins was many things — a hauntingly personal guitarist, a casually riveting storyteller, and as the country blues tradition goes, a figure of resounding influence. Every scrape of a string, every craggy vocalization, every ribald bon mot, seemed to spring from the Texas soil itself. To put it plainly, the bluesman was real — about as real as it gets.

From the ‘40s until his 1982 death, Hopkins weathered his share of peaks and valleys, as tastes ebbed and flowed. But most everything he laid to wax is worth hearing; any time hanging out with the self-christened “Po’ Lightnin’” is well-spent. Those who steward his body of work should abide no resistance to his current — and I can hardly think of one more worthy than Acoustic Sounds.

Granted, the quality applies across the board with them, But for their CEO, Chad Kassem, Hopkins carries particular significance; he’s cited 1963’s Goin’ Away, which AS reissued back in 2016, as his favorite blues album of all time.

Today, with more than a dozen Hopkins reissues under their belt, they’ve zeroed in on a less-heralded offering: 1966’s odds-and-sods collection Lightnin’ Strikes, featuring harmonicist Don Crawford, bassist Jimmy Bond, and drummer Earl Palmer.

Surveying Hopkins’ discography, it’s easy for one’s eyeball to skip over Lightnin’ Strikes; it’s a bit of a confusing product. (It’s not even his first album of that title: Vee-Jay released an unrelated Lightnin’ Strikes in 1962.) But it has a lot going for it; the opening track, “Mojo Hand” — here in electrified form — is one of his signature songs. An eerie stillness permeates “Cotton.” His rasping, snarling vocal on “Woke Up this Morning” is authoritative; it cuts to the quick.

An alternative to the Verve Folkways pressing of Lightnin’ Strikes released by Everest/ Tradition Records (the result of a contract dispute) sounds just fine today. Bond’s bass is mixed low, but well-defined; Palmer’s drums sound well-recorded and detailed; Hopkins’s performance sounds muscular.

However, the 2025 edition improves on it in just about every way. With the compression stripped away, Hopkins’ vocal track really blossoms; you can practically hear the nicotine stains in his pipes. Of course, the mix is the mix, so the bass is still fairly low, but it levels up in depth and detail. The reverb trail from each snare thwack is cleaner, more thorough.

To say nothing of Hopkins’ guitar; he had liquid phrasing, and every one of his finger seemed to be a member of the band. As with every other element of this Lightnin’ Strikes; this is how you hear it. Hopefully somehow, someway, the old man knows his life’s work, and the essence of his inimitable sound, is in very good hands.