Bring Me My Shotgun

There is a threat buried in the acoustic guitar lines that open this recording, something in the way the notes are placed — deliberate, unrushed, each one given its full weight before the next arrives. Hopkins was a storyteller first, and the story here is one of jealousy pushed past the point of reason, of a man who has decided the time for talking is finished. His voice is dry and matter-of-fact, which somehow makes the content more unsettling than any theatrical snarl could. The production is bare: guitar and voice, occasional bass mumble, nothing softening the edges. There is a tradition in Texas blues of this kind of plainspoken violence in lyric, not glorified but documented, treated with the same flat affect one might use to describe the weather. Hopkins navigates this space without apology, the delivery suggesting that what he is singing is simply the truth of a situation. Rhythmically the track is elastic, Hopkins stretching and compressing the beat around his vocal phrasing with complete freedom. This is music that makes the hair stand up not because it is aggressive in sound but because it is utterly calm — the calm of a man who has already made up his mind. You would reach for this in a particular mood, when you want the blues stripped down to its barest bones, before amplification and studio polish arrived to complicate things.