Lightnin' Hopkins - Free Form Patterns (Deluxe Edition) (1968/2014)

3CD Digibook edition of the Texax blues legend, Sam Lightnin' Hopkins' only album for the International Artists label in Houston. Includes 2x bonus discs featuring previously unheard and unreleased songs, studio chatter and a candid conversations with Lightnin', all packaged in a deluxe, hard-back book.

Recorded in January 1968 it stands out in Lightnin' discography due to unusual line-up on the sessions, with the veteran bluesman fuelled by homemade moonshine supported by a young hippy rhythm section, comprising Danny Thomas and Duke Davis from the Thirteenth Floor Elevators, both high on acid at the time This however is no failed hippy/blues amalgam just a straight forward honest blues album with the great man backed by fans, who happened to be members of a psychedelic band. Its significance lies in how the music cut across the generation and racial boundaries within the segregated and repressive atmosphere of late 1960s Texas.

Alongside recording the album for International Artists producer Lelan Rogers set out to generate the definitive interview with the great bluesman and so left the tapes running in the studio as the album was cut. These recordings have sat in a series of dump tapes for 44 years but have now been put back together as unique documentation of one of the 20th century's most revered bluesmen. We now have a coherent combination of songs, studio chatter and a candid conversations with Lightnin' about his life and times. On the two additional discs the songs are as the band played them in the studio, live and unmixed and the conversations are as they were with only unintelligible chatter left out.

All of this material is previously unheard and unreleased except the final versions of the songs and a brief excerpt of conversation included on the 1980 complilation 'Epitaph for a Legend'. It this offers a fascinating and unique insight into Lightnin' Hopkins, the man and the musician.