“Lightnin’ Strikes was the only LP Hopkins made for Vee-Jay, as he never stayed with one label long anyway, and he’d spend his final 20 years, before succumbing to esophageal cancer in 1982, ripping and recording around the country and building a mammoth body of work. Lightnin’ Strikes is but a single cloud in the atmosphere of his work, but it provides an entry point, a single portrait of the artist as a blues iconoclast. Lightnin’ could be anything you wanted him to be — the acoustic blues trouba-dour, the hardened city slicker playing electric riffs, the old bluesman down on his luck — but take him as he is on Lightnin’ Strikes: just a bluesman being himself, in his entirety.”