In recent years, Hypolite was a fixture on the Acadiana club scene, regularly playing at venues such as 307 Downtown, Artmosphere and Clementine's in New Iberia. When I last visited Hypolite at his trailer in Cade in the spring of 2004, it was a reminder of his signature warmth, determination and optimism. He never flinched in the face of the financial hardships and health issues, and our conversation was filled with his hopes for international festival shows and recording future albums.
I was honored to write the liner notes for his debut CD, Louisiana Country Boy, in 2001. The album introduced him to a whole new fanbase and received uniformly positive reviews locally and nationally. Hypolite was immensely proud of Louisiana Country Boy, and after his unexpected and tragic passing, the CD now stands as a testament to a moving musical legacy. The original liner notes for Louisiana Country Boy follow, and I hope they still pay tribute to a gentle giant who overcame immense odds.
Harry Hypolite finished his day's work at the Fruit of the Loom factory in St. Martinville, La., and Clifton Chenier came by to see him. Hypolite occasionally played guitar with Chenier, the King of Zydeco, but now Chenier was issuing him a challenge.
"He wanted me to play with him regularly," remembers Hypolite. "I'd told him before, I didn't think so, but he kept after me. That day he said, 'You feel like you want to play some music? Then you've got to go out and get it if you want to make it.'"
More than two decades later, those words speak volumes for Hypolite. After heeding Chenier's call and playing with the zydeco legend until his passing, and more recently touring and recording with Clifton's son, C.J. Chenier, 63-year-old Hypolite is moving from the shadows to the spotlight. Louisiana Country Boy is his debut release, a moving testament to the power of faith and conviction.
"Nobody gave me a chance before," he notes. "But I said, 'I'm going to show 'em what I can do.' For me, this comes deep down in my soul. I want to play the blues, and I want to tell people about my Creole heritage."
Although he toured the world with the Cheniers, Hypolite's heart has always been in south Louisiana. He was born in St. Martinville on April 19, 1937, and the landscape was literally in his blood. As a boy, he picked cotton, okra and sweet potatoes, and worked the rice and sugar cane fields. Shoes were considered a luxury, and a grueling day in the brutal summer sun might net 75 cents and a plate of potatoes on a good day. The struggle was magnified when his mother died while he was young. "I had hard times coming up," he says. "I never forget where I came from."
Music became an outlet for him, and he started buying records by artists like B.B. King, T-Bone Walker, Muddy Waters and Clarence "Gatemouth" Brown. He taught himself to play, but he wasn't just learning by copying the licks off 45-RPM records. St. Martinville was home to the Dew Drop Inn, a popular juke joint on the chitlin circuit (and no relation to the famed New Orleans nightspot), and Hypolite took a job there.
"I used to stack up those soda water cases made out of wood and then stand up on 'em outside and watch the guys playing inside," he remembers. "I got to see T-Bone [Walker] and Gatemouth [Brown], Albert King, Albert Collins. I got to see Guitar Slim many times. Lord have mercy, thinking about 'The Things (I Used to Do)' brings me way back, when I was a young kid. I knew this was a song that would never be forgotten, and I've been having it in my mind to do it again. I saw Slim many times, always in those colorful clothes ' red, green yellow, purple."
The stamp of those formative years is all over Louisiana Country Boy. Like his peers Gatemouth Brown, Lonnie Brooks and Phillip Walker, Hypolite's guitar playing sings with the influence of the Gulf Coast, blending sweet single-note runs as wide open as Texas with greasier, syncopated licks cooked up for Louisiana swamp grooves. He takes a no-nonsense approach to playing zydeco and the blues.
"Zydeco is simple music," muses Hypolite. "Guys who try to play jazz and put big chords in zydeco make it hard on themselves. You just need to know how to phrase it right, and it has to have a feeling and a meaning to it."
Hypolite does just that on this recording by honoring Clifton Chenier with fresh versions of four songs from the King of Zydeco. He also pays homage to early blues inspirations. "Big Bad Girl" takes a cue from the school of slurred Jimmy Reed chords, and the brooding intro to "Someday" recalls the Fenton Robinson classic "Somebody Loan Me a Dime."
And as the album's title track reveals, Hypolite has bottled pure emotion by writing and singing autobiographical songs that reach all the way back to his childhood. He's been waiting for this moment for so long, played it over in his head so many times, that almost every song on this recording was done in one take, with no lyric sheets. On "Colinda," "You Used to Call Me" and "Hog for You Baby," Hypolite honors his heritage by warmly phrasing in Creole French. Three of the songs ' "For Better or Worse," "Big Bad Girl" and "Louisiana Country Boy" ' Harry improvised on the spot.
"My mind is like a computer," he says. "All these things that are on my mind, all the things I want to say, I could never forget. It's not a record where you go piece by piece. You've got to go straight up."
At a time when many blues artists are at the twilight of their careers, it's the dawn of Harry Hypolite's time in the sun. "This is like a dream for me," he says. "I'm proud of this record, and I've got plenty more tunes that I can do and that I think people are going to like. This is just the beginning."
MAY 20 This post by blogger CB Forgotston draws parallels between Gov. Bobby Jindal and two individuals he probably doesn't want to be aligned with: President Obama and former governor Edwin Edwards. CB says Jindal's trying to jack up the debt ceiling (an Obama play, according to CB) and buy votes from GOP leges who normally wouldn't go for that (an Edwards play, CB says).
MAY 20 Here's a post in the Baptist Message from an alumnus of Louisiana College. The author, Larry Burgess, calls on the leadership of the private school to take care of some pressing problems. Physical plant issues are critical and unaddressed, some faculty make so little they need government health care, and there is an atmosphere that does not encourage honest discussion, he writes. It's time to get things back in order, he says.
MAY 20 This post in Gambit tells of a benefit concert scheduled to raise money for the 19 people shot during a Mother's Day second line on Frenchmen Street in NOLA. Among them was Gambit blogger Deb Cotton, who spoke frequently about violence in the city and reported on the city's second line culture. Gambit's foundation, along with other NOLA non-profits, also is selling t-shirts to raise money for the victims.
MAY 20 Blogger Robert Mann is critical of the personal interest some legislators take in their work here, sharing the comments one NOLA solon made in explaining his decision to vote against a bill that would require people to stop discriminating against female workers. His wife might lose some salary, so he was going to have to vote against the equal pay bill, Conrad Appel said. Appel and everyone who heard him should have been ashamed, but they weren't, and that's what is wrong in that building, Mann argues.
MAY 20 American Press columnist Jim Beam writes about the budget again here, urging kudos for the House and its efforts to try to fix the budget as opposed to passing on a flawed and messy rubber-stamped document as it usually does. The Senate already is poo-pooing the effort, but instead Senators should be trying to find a way to improve it as well, Beam argues. He also has some predictions in here from LABI and CABL.
MAY 20 Here's a link to the photo gallery from Tulane's graduation this past weekend. Dr. John and Allen Toussaint played together and received honorary degrees. The Dalai Lama was so entranced by their performance he got up from his seat and walked across the stage to stand next to them. He even participated in a second line with his own personal, saffron-colored umbrella. To the graduates, he urged them to think about creating a peaceful, hopeful life and society.
MAY 20 This Picayune story questions the rhetoric of NOLA officials who say the city, aside from having a "murder problem," is safe. The talking points generally are that the criminals are killing each other, but everything else is OK. The police chief there says that even Lafayette is more dangerous than NOLA. But crime experts interviewed here say that NOLA's numbers indicate one of two things: either people are so used to violence they don't report it, or somebody's "fudging the numbers."
MAY 20 The Advocate's Mark Ballard writes about some of the background maneuvering that took place during the development of budget alternatives in the Legislature. From Rep. Joel Robideaux being called a "tax and spend liberal" to robo-call influence, Ballard lets us in on some of the work that happens behind the scenes but usually doesn't make it into the Advocate's daily coverage of the session.
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