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when he had the time. After the 1959 Alley Theatre hootenanny, Lomax corresponded with Barry Olivier and his staff at the Berkeley Folk Festival, to be held on the University of California campus in July 1960, and was able to get Lightnin’ booked for four hundred dollars, a fee that exceeded that for any of his previous public performances. However, Lomax did have some reservations. In a letter to B. J. Connors, secretary of the Committee for Arts and Lectures at the University of California, Lomax wrote: “If Lightning’s presence adds to the rich flavor to the Festival, as I believe it can, I wish you know that I will be due at least a large pink rosette for my extra curricular duties with him. Largely, he lives each day to itself…. You might be surprised at the number of conversations and meetings I have already had with him to get the proceedings to this point. I had to agree to stay with him at all times throughout the trip; this includes his performance too.”7

Lightnin’ was high maintenance, and although McCormick had a fairly good working relationship with him, he knew that he could be difficult. “Lightning behaved like he was some great star who should have champagne cooling in his hotel suite when he arrived,” McCormick told Andrew Brown. “He didn’t demand those kinds of things, but he did demand an awful lot of care and protection in terms of arrangements, getting to places, this and that. Otherwise, he just suddenly wasn’t there. So you couldn’t just call a university and say, ‘Would you like Lightning Hopkins to appear?’ You better be prepared to deliver him—to take him personally, to go get him up, buy his beer, carry his guitar, and all of that. And he had the people that would do that around town, all these young guitar players that wanted to learn from him, and people who treated him like a celebrity. So that was his existence here. He had an entourage; he went around like a prizefighter. Why should he, because he’s going to a university, be this lonely person propelled into this world he really didn’t want?”8 Although Lightnin’ seemed content to simply be a “star” in the Third Ward, shying away from the audiences McCormick was dragging him toward, he was nonetheless beginning to earn more than he ever had before.

In the summer of 1960, Chris Strachwitz came back to Houston with his portable Roberts tape recorder and Electrovoice 664 microphone, hoping to record Lightnin’. But Lightnin’ was in no position to record because he was getting ready to leave for California.9 On June 30, 1960, Lomax flew to San Francisco with Lightnin’, who performed at the Berkeley Folk Festival on July 3 and 4 to great success. Alfred Frankenstein of the San Francisco Chronicle called Lightnin’ a “great, authentic folk artist … whose gorgeous bass voice, colossal rhythm, and subtly shaded delicacy in guitar-playing provided the festival with one of its most distinguished moments.”10

Lightnin’, when asked about the Berkeley Folk Festival the following week in a radio interview, said, “I liked it so well I just can’t tell you. I had a wonderful time. I could go up on top of those hills and see the beautiful lights, cool breeze, just look down…. It was my first time up there which I hope it don’t be the last time. I enjoyed it so, I want to go back again.”11

From San Francisco, Lomax took Lightnin’ to Los Angeles, where his sister Bess Lomax Hawes helped to arrange a couple of dates at the Ash Grove, a folk club owned by Ed Pearl. Hawes was a folklorist and musician who was Pearl’s guitar teacher, and when Lightnin’ and Lomax got to Los Angeles, she hosted a “welcoming party.” In attendance were lots of people from the L.A. folk scene who had heard Lightnin’s records but had never met him, including the singer, songwriter, and radio host Barbara Dane, a regular at the Ash Grove who was eager to meet Lightnin’. But she was shocked when she saw that Lomax had dressed Lightnin’ as “a country bumpkin” in a flannel shirt and dungarees, because apparently that was his impression of what the folk scene was. “It was completely the wrong