On this day in Texas history, in 1982, Centerville native, blues singer Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins died of cancer. He was born in 1912. At the age of eight he had made his first instrument, a cigar-box guitar with chicken-wire for strings. By the age of ten he was playing music with his cousin, Alger “Texas” Alexander, and Blind Lemon Jefferson. In his teens Hopkins was playing the blues anywhere he could gather an audience and get paid. However, he ran afoul of the law and served time at the Houston County Prison Farm in the mid-1930s. After his release, he returned to the blues-club circuit. In 1950 he settled in Houston. Though he recorded a number of albums between 1946 to 1954, it wasn’t until 1959, when he teamed up with producer Sam Chambers, that Hopkins’s music began to reach a larger audience, include mainstream white audiences. Hopkins switched to an acoustic guitar and became a hit in the folk-blues revival of the 1960s, at which time he played at Carnegie Hall with Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. By the end of the decade, he was opening for rock bands and was the subject of a documentary which won the prize for documentary at the Chicago Film Festival in 1970: The Blues According to Lightnin’ Hopkins.