Albert King induced Lucy, his Gibson Flying V, to moan and cry the blues. He played left-handed and upside down, and the massively bent notes arced from his strings as he yanked them down with his
Albert King induced Lucy, his Gibson Flying V, to moan and cry the blues. He played left-handed and upside down, and the massively bent notes arced from his strings as he yanked them down with his fingers. In an African-American tradition going back to the one-stringed diddley bows, King squeezed out fluid microtones as expressive as the melismatic singing found in field hollers.
Born Albert Nelson on April 25 1923, in Indianola, Mississippi, King acquired the surname of his stepfather. Seeing the legendary Blind Lemon Jefferson perform in the late Thirties inspired him to make a cigar-box guitar. Jefferson’s linear style left a mark on King, as did the musings of T-Bone Walker in the Forties. He started gigging around Little Rock, Arkansas, in the early Fifties, though he gave up the guitar for a brief period to play drums behind Jimmy Reed. Moving to St. Louis in 1956 led to his substantial sides on Bobbin Records in 1959, courtesy of Ike Turner’s production.
But the defining moment of his career occurred in 1966, when he signed with Stax records in Memphis. Backed brilliantly by Booker T. & the MGs, King released the monumental Born Under a Bad Sign in 1967, and gave blues and rock guitarists a punch in their collective ears. When he died of a heart attack on December 1,1992, he left a hole in the music world that has yet to be filled.
Unique in every way, Albert King employed an altered tuning that is still open to speculation. MGs guitarist Steve Cropper examined his ax once and declared it was tuned (low to high) C B E F# B E, whereas Dan Erlewine checked it several years later and found it tuned to C F C F A D. For