There’s a classic video clip on Youtube of guitarist Albert Lee in the studio around 1978 with two of his admirers, Nick Lowe and Dave Edmunds. Lee comes up with a typically dazzling solo for their album, after which Lowe can only stare at him slack jawed. Finally Lowe deadpans, “I see you’ve read our guitar manual.”

“The Everly Brothers used to make the same joke onstage,” Lee said by phone this week. “I’d play my solo, do a big high-speed thing, and Don would say, ‘He learned all that from the Everly Brothers Big Note Guitar Book’.” But Lee’s lofty status among his fellow musicians is no joke. Along with a decade-plus with the Everlys, he has toured in Eric Clapton and Emmylou Harris’s bands, while maintaining a longtime solo career. Monday’’s show at City Winery is a continued celebration of his 80th birthday, which happened just before Christmas.

“The nice, special thing about it is that I’m still around,” he said. “We do our regular show, but it’s a big birthday so I’ll be celebrating throughout the tour. And I have to say that I’ve been as busy as ever. And after living in America for 40 years, I finally put a band together here. If you’re my age you have to keep playing regularly, else your skin gets thinner and you lose your callouses. There’s always been interest in my guitar playing but a lot of people don’t realize that I also sing and play piano, and I’d say my voice is almost as good as it ever was. That doesn’t usually happen once people get to their late 70’s.”

Lee’s recording career goes back to the early 70s, when he made three cult-classic albums with the band Heads, Hands & Feet. With that band he wrote his signature song, “Country Boy at Heart,” which proclaims his love for American rock & roll. “Anybody that started playing in the ‘50s was certainly influenced by American music, just as American kids in the ‘60s were influenced by the Beatles. So yeah, American rock and roll was really what got us playing — there wasn’t much English music that encouraged us to play, aside from Cliff Richard. I bought my first Telecaster in 1963, and that really dictates your sound and style.”

Lee wound up joining a 70s version of Buddy Holly’s former band the Crickets, and was in the band when the Everly Brothers called it a day in the late ‘90s (Both brothers are now deceased). “That was a great band friendship-wise, and if course they were great singers. Don Everly was really anxious to keep going, but Phil was a lifelong smoker and he couldn’t hit the high notes like he did before; and Don refused to change the keys to accommodate his voice. After the last show we were in the bus with a couple bottles of wine, trying to persuade Phil to do a few gigs in Las Vegas, but he wasn’t having it.”

Also memorable was his late-’70s tenure with Eric Clapton, resulting in a few guitar duels onstage. “That was good fun, we’d been friends since the ‘60s. He gave me lots of solos, more than he does with the guitar players that he has now. I got to sing a couple of songs and for awhile he’d let me do ‘Country Boy.’ Eric would be sitting there with a brandy and a cigarette and he’d say, ‘Go on Albert, keep going!’”