Half hour documentary from 1967 about the great Bluesman by Les Blank …notes
“…A short film about the Texas blues singer Lightnin’ (Sam) Hopkins. Built around what I gather was the return of Hopkins to his home town for a visit sometime in 1967, as much a celebration of a mode of life as it is a study of a kind of music. It is also fairly conventional film making (the conventions of documentary poetic realism), but in Hopkins and his friends it has a quality of life rather than a fabricated group image for a subject. Almost everybody in “Blues Accordin’ to Lightnin’ Hopkins” seems to be a performer. But Hopkins himself controls the film’s moods. Not so much in his exposition of the meaning of the blues as in what he makes of them when he sings and plays his guitar.” New York Times, 1967
