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to tune his guitar … and just when things were rolling tolerably, he’d stop and begin reprimanding an errant sideman.” To be fair, Schuller pointed out that the sidemen actually made few “really drastic mistakes,” but that Hopkins’s songs “emerged as rambling inconglomerates, made of disjointed fragments from any of his countless recordings. Little real music surfaced … the irritating part of this whole trip is that Lightnin’ is quite able to play well but simply chooses not to do so.” The highlights of the evening for Schuller were the performance of “Mojo Hand” and his playing of “My Babe” for two verses until the drummer “blew a cue (one that most bluesmen could have covered easily) and the music stopped while Lightnin’ chewed him out, griped, philosophized, and drank from a Pearl beer can.” Schuller concluded his review by stating that “one hesitates to criticize a legend, but Lightnin’ has done this bit before in Dallas and I have seen him do it in Cleveland’s Music Hall. That Lightnin’ deserves respect is indisputable; he is an irrevocable part of the musical history of this nation. But the legend has become a caricature of itself.”47

During this period, Benson says, Lightnin’ became more selective about the touring dates he accepted because he “didn’t really want to go out that much on the road.” However, he did continue to play at venues that he liked in Dallas, Houston, Austin, and New York City, where he might get three or four dates a year at the Village Gate. In the summer of 1978, he returned to Canada to play at the Rising Sun in Montreal and the New Yorker Theater in Toronto on the same bill with John Hammond, whom Benson heard criticize Lightnin’ in a radio interview in Houston. “I was listening to KPFT and the DJ was talking to John Hammond, who was playing at Liberty Hall, and he was kind of defaming Lightnin’ and Juke Boy Bonner…. He was talking about how Lightnin’ never made it big and how he would never make it big because he didn’t play according to meter. So I heard it on the radio, so I went to Liberty Hall and I went straight to the dressing room. And I confronted John Hammond and he and I were there for a couple of hours talking music theory and that kind of thing. We were talking about meter being something that actually had been introduced later. Because meter is to the blues what grammar is to language. The music existed before.”48 Benson was defensive about Lightnin’, but clearly by the late 1970s, he was declining. “I thought something might be wrong with his health, but I couldn’t be sure. And he didn’t say much about it.”

With Harold and Benson managing Lightnin’s bookings, he was much more selective, and he enjoyed spending more time with Antoinette in Houston. On Friday nights, Benson says, Lightnin’ and Antoinette had a steady date night, and went to some friends’ house where they played the card game Pitty Pat. On other nights, Lightnin’ loved to gamble and shoot dice. “He would take me with him to Fifth Ward and to Third Ward,” Benson remembers, “different places where he would shoot all night. He would want me to go with him. I’m a pretty big guy, so he would want me to go with him to hold his money, and then we’d go in there, and he’d always have a couple of guns.”49

In the Third Ward, there was a man by the name of Mr. Blackwell that Lightnin’ liked. “He owned a walk-up barbecue stand at the corner of McGowen and Dowling,” Benson said, “and he and Lightnin’ would shoot dice at Lightnin’s place. They would take a bathroom rug and turn it upside down, and they would shoot head to head dice all night. Sometimes Mr. Blackwell would lose fifteen thousand dollars, and maybe Lightnin’ might lose. And they’d bullshit each other. Lightnin’ would say, ‘Mr. Blackwell, you need to go sell some barbecue and c’mon back.’ They were good friends.”50

On Sundays, Lightnin’ liked to get in his car and cruise past the churches in the black neighborhoods of Houston, but never go inside. “We would get in the car,” Benson recalls, “and at twenty miles per hour we’d cruise Third Ward, and Fourth Ward,