Never-Before-Heard Song from Lightnin’ Hopkins Released Ahead of New Box Set

There is a new never-before-heard song from blues legend Lightnin’ Hopkins out in the world.

The track, “Blues Jumped a Rabbit,” is out this week as part of the new Mack McCormick archive three-box set of 66 songs featuring Hopkins. The project is set for release this summer on August 4. The box set, out on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, features previously unheard field recordings from McCormick’s archive.

Called Playing for the Man at the Door: Field Recordings from the Collection of Mack McCormick, 1958 – 1971, the box set includes bigger names like Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, as well as many lesser or even unknown names today.

On the new track, Hopkins combines the lyrics from several Blind Lemon Jefferson songs, including traditional songs like “Rabbit Foot Blues” and “Long Lonesome Blues.” It’s easy to hear the years in the song, which was recorded mid-20th century.

Sings Hopkins, Didn’t have no education, hadn’t spent a day in school / I didn’t have no education, hadn’t spent a day in school / But I had sense left to know when I got the blues.

Born March 15, 1912, Hopkins, a Centerville, Texas, native was a highly regarded blues musician, guitarist, and singer/songwriter. In 2010, Rolling Stone named him one of the 100 best guitar players of all time.

McCormick, a musicologist from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who died in 2015, is quoted in the book, The Blues: From Robert Johnson to Robert Cray. He described Hopkins as “the embodiment of the jazz-and-poetry spirit, representing its ancient form in the single creator whose words and music are one act.”

By the time he died, McCormick had amassed hundreds of reels of field recordings of blues artists. He also had boxes of notes, playbills, posters, and manuscripts. His collection, over the years, had become a thing of rumors and hopes.

“Recorded everywhere from nightclubs to prison farms, these 66 performances capture a wide range of African American musicians in the region McCormick dubbed ‘Greater Texas’—Western Louisiana, East Texas and sections of Oklahoma and Arkansas,” a press statement explains. “Because McCormick never published or released most of these materials, his collection became a thing of legend and intense speculation among scholars, blues aficionados, and musicians alike.”

Check out the new song below.

Photo by Ed Badeaux / Shore Fire Media