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John Lee and the rest rather than being out on some publicity thing.” The Carnegie Hall show was nearly sold out, though Mikofsky said it was never his impression that De Menil ever thought she was going to make money. Benson recalls, “All the New York press came out—it was a hell of an affair. Paul Simon was on the guest list. George Plimpton and Lee Radziwill were there. Lightnin’ didn’t much care for the party at Windows on the World, but he liked One Fifth. In the middle of that party, everybody got sort of schnockered and women started taking their clothes off on the dance floor, and Lightnin’ was entranced. They were all getting naked and he was sitting back in a corner there.”61

Lightnin’s performance at Carnegie Hall was high profile, and on June 20, 1979, the mayor of Houston issued a proclamation to celebrate “Lightnin’ Hopkins Day” as part of the Juneteenth Blues Festival, which included a parade down Dowling Street in the Third Ward that culminated with free concerts in Miller Outdoor Theater at Hermann Park. On August 3 and 4, Lightnin’ was one of the headliners at ChicagoFest, and on October 10, he appeared at the Armadillo in Austin. Lightnin’ was also invited back to New York to perform at the Lone Star Cafe by Christophe De Menil, who also provided Lightnin’ with lodging at her residence at Sutton Place.

In 1980, Benson says he sensed that Lightnin’ was having health problems, but he wasn’t really sure. He had noticed how Lightnin’ had trouble finding the right food to eat for years, but it didn’t really click until later when he started having more serious symptoms. He didn’t eat much and he was getting thinner. Eventually Benson realized that Lightnin’s touring had declined not only because he didn’t like traveling, but because it simply became too difficult physically. However, Lightnin’ did not want to stop performing.

For Lightnin’s sixty-eighth birthday, Benson says, Antoinette and Ron Wilson, who had accompanied him on his tour to Sweden and Germany, gave Lightnin’ a 1980 Gibson Custom Les Paul Silverburst guitar. By then Lightnin’ had established his guitar preferences and had become somewhat of a guitar collector. For years he played a small Harmony flat-top and a Gibson J-50 outfitted with a DeArmond soundhole pickup. But in the 1960s, he began using a Gibson J160E that he purchased at Ray Henning’s Heart of Music store in Austin, though he also liked to perform with his red Guild Starfire and Fender Stratocaster and sometimes even used a wah-wah pedal.62

In June 1980, Lightnin’ was invited again to be a headliner at the Juneteenth Blues Festival, which was an event that had honored him the previous year and whose director, Lanny Steele, Lightnin’ liked a great deal. Onstage, no one knew exactly what to expect. Steve Ditzell, a guitarist for Koko Taylor’s band, was sitting backstage when Lightnin’ was about to go on. “I remember that day very well. I met him back stage and shook his hand. Well, he was getting ready to go do a gig, so [was] very reserved at that moment. He had a little 100-ml flask, one of the smaller ones, and he was working on that. He said, ‘That’s just enough,’ and he was with his wife [Antoinette]. They were both real cordial. You know, musicians before they play, they tend to be kind of withdrawn, because you’re psyching yourself; you’re getting ready to do a show. That’s the state of mind he was in.”63

Muddy Waters had finished his set to loud applause, but this was Houston and the anticipation was building for Lightnin’. He wasn’t going to be upstaged. He was the headliner. “It was great,” Ditzell said. “He came out there and sat on one of those metal folding chairs. And he had a black Stratocaster and he had it turned up loud, and he just had a bass player and a drummer, and he sang into that mike, and when he wasn’t singing into that mike, he rocked back on that chair, back on the last two legs; thought he was going to tip over backwards a couple of times. And he would hit these notes with that Stratocaster, just grin at the sky…. It was fantastic. There were maybe