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One of 13 children, Albert King was born Albert Nelson, on April 25, 1923 on a cotton plantation near Indianola, Mississippi. (This was also known as the birthplace of B.B. King. Although the two were not related, Albert would sometimes claim that B.B. was his half-brother.) Albert King had musical parents. Mary Blevins, his mother, was a church singer, and his stepfather Will Nelson was an amateur guitar player and a preacher.
The family moved to a farm near Forrest City, Arkansas in 1931 when he was eight, across the Mississippi from Memphis, Tennessee.
Albert Nelson taught himself to play on homemade cigar box guitars and "diddley bow" one string slide guitars.
He bought a "real" second-hand guitar for $1.25 around 1931.
A left-hander, he learned to play the right-hand guitar upside-down,
which made it hard to learn guitar chords.
But after practicing for a few years, he began sitting in with a group called Yancey's Band.
"I rehearsed to myself for five years before I played with another soul," he said. "That may account for some of my style. I knew that playing the blues was a life I chose to lead. And when I started, there were three things I decided to do: play the blues, play 'em right, and make all the gigs. And I have."
Leaving home, Albert Nelson found work in construction as a bulldozer driver, moving from city to city and playing in clubs when he could. He spent some time in St. Louis in the 1940s. In South Bend, Indiana he was a lead tenor singer with the gospel quartet The Harmony Boys.
In 1950, Albert Nelson met M.C. Reeder,
who owned the T-99 nightclub in Osceola, Arkansas, not far from Memphis.
He moved to Osceola and joined the T-99's house band, the In the Groove Boys.
The band played several local gigs besides the T-99, including shows for a local radio station.
He said "I learned 'em those three songs that I knew, and we'd play 'em fast, slow, and medium, but we got over."
Nelson moved to Gary, Indiana in 1953, where he joined a band that featured Jimmy Reed and John Brim. Both Reed and Brim were guitarists, so Nelson played drums. Around this time, he adopted the name Albert King, perhaps influenced by B.B. King.
Albert King met Willie Dixon in Gary. Dixon introduced him to Parrot label owner Al Benson, and Albert King made his first recording with Parrot in Chicago late in 1953. Parrot released the resulting single "Be on Your Merry Way" / "Bad Luck Blues" with moderate success. King was only paid $14.
In early 1954, King returned to Osceola and re-joined the In the Groove Boys.
He stayed in Arkansas for the next two years.
Albert King moved to St. Louis In 1956, where he played in various local blues clubs. During these years, he began playing his signature Gibson Flying V, which he named 'Lucy'. Encouraged by Little Milton, he signed up with the local Bobbin Records in 1958, who released his first minor hit "I'm A Lonely Man". This was followed by a number of other Bobbin singles where King was backed by a pianist and a small horn section.
In 1961, King Records arranged with Bobbin to release Albert King's slow blues single "Don't Throw Your Love On Me So Strong" nationally. It reached number fourteen on the R&B charts. King Records released more of King's material from Bobbin, including the album "Big Blues" (1963), but without great success. Albert King left Bobbin in late 1962. He recorded a session with King Records in the spring of 1963, but the singles did not sell.
The next year, he cut four songs for the local label Coun-Tree, owned by jazz singer Leo Gooden. Though these singles were only distributed in St. Louis, Chicago, and Kansas City, they were popular within St. Louis - so popular that Gooden became jealous of the attention King was receiving, and dropped him from the label.
By 1966, Albert King was 43 years old. He had gained considerable experience and skills but had little to show apart from one hit single and one obscure album. He was a moody man, known to carry a .45 stuck in his pants, and perhaps lacked confidence in his ability. Throughout the rest of his career, he was disliked performing with other well-known musicians, and was never at ease with recording in the studio. But his career was about to catch fire.
In 1966 Albert King signed with the Stax record label, who teamed him up with drummer / producer Al Jackson Jr. Over the next few years, he recorded dozens of blues songs with a Memphis soul flavor, backed up by the Stax house band Booker T. & the MGs (guitarist Steve Cropper, keyboards Booker T. Jones, and bass player Donald "Duck" Dunn). Singles included "Laundromat Blues" (1966), "Born Under a Bad Sign" (1967 written by Booker T. Jones and William Bell), "Oh Pretty Woman", "Crosscut Saw" (a cover of Tommy McClennan's original), "As the Years Go Passing By", "I'll Play the Blues for You," and "Breaking Up Somebody's Home."
In 1967 Stax released his breakthrough album "Born Under a Bad Sign", a collection of recordings from five sessions between March of 1966 and June of 1967. The album included numbers such as "As The Years Go Passing By" and "The Hunter", which would be staples for Blues and Rock guitarists for years to come. The album caught the attention of the white Rock & Roll audiences, waking them up to the power of contemporary Blues. "Born Under a Bad Sign" had immense influence over rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.
In the liner notes of the 2002 reissue of this album, Michael Point wrote:
"It was the great divide of modern blues, the point at which the music was rescued from slipping into derivative obscurity.
Blues, still just a rumor to a mainstream white audience, was rapidly losing popularity in African-American communities.
It was seemingly out of step and out of touch with the psychedelic times and politicized attitudes that
emerged as the dominant cultural aspects of the era. It was viewed by even some of its fans as an archival music,
an enjoyable vestige of the past but hardly an influence on the future."
On February 1, 1968, Albert King shared a bill that included John Mayall and Jimi Hendrix for opening night at Bill Graham's new Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. As Albert King recalled it, Bill Graham walked into the Manhattan Club in East St. Louis, Illinois and offered him $1,600 to play three nights at the Fillmore. "I hadn't made $1,600 for three days in my life," King recalled. "He said, 'How much deposit do you want?' I said, '$500.' I sent him a contract and he sent me a check for $1000. When I got there, I found out I was on the show with Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin."
With a series of Fillmore appearances he began to break through to white audiences. He appeared at the first Fillmore East show on March 8, 1968, with Tim Buckley and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and played at the hall's closing on June 27, 1971. His Fillmore performances provided the material for the 1968 album "Live Wire / Blues Power", one of the best-selling live blues recordings of all time.
Warren Haynes says of Albert King at that time: "Nobody else was doing that. And it had this whole vocal-like thing. You could sing it, but you couldn't play it. It's just so wild. And his tone was just over the top on Live Wire/Blues Power. That's a rock and roll sound, not a traditional blues sound. It's dirty, nasty, distorted… Albert just had this raw-power thing."
For the next few years, Albert King continued to release new albums while touring America and Europe. One of his more unusual performances was a 1969 date with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, forming what was called "an 87-piece blues band".
Early in 1969, King recorded "Years Gone By", his first true studio album.
Later that year, he recorded "Blues for Elvis: Albert King Does the King's Things"
and a jam session with Steve Cropper and Pops Staples (Jammed Together).
He returned to the studio in 1971, to record the album "Lovejoy" at Muscle Shoals with white Southern rockers.
None of these were as strong (or successful) as his earlier Stax albums.
In 1972, he recorded "I'll Play the Blues for You", backed by members of the Bar-Kays, the Memphis Horns, and the Movement (Isaac Hayes's backing group). Although rooted in the blues, the album had a much fuller sound than his earlier recordings with Booker T. & the MGs, with stronger soul and funk elements.
Stax got into financial difficulties in the mid-1970s, and Albert King moved to the Utopia label, a subsidiary of RCA. Albert released two albums on Utopia, "Truckload of Lovin'" and "Albert". Both were routine commercial soul productions.
He signed with Tomato Records in 1978, and then switched to Fantasy Records in 1983, releasing "San Francisco '83" and "I'm in A Phone Booth, Baby" (1984). With these albums, Albert King returned to his blues roots. Both albums earned Grammy award nominations. In 1983, Albert King was inducted into the W. C. Handy International Blues Awards Hall of Fame.
Albert King announced his retirement in 1985,
but continued to regularly play concerts and festivals throughout America and Europe for the rest of his life.
He made guest appearances on albums by up-coming Bluesmen like Chris Cain ("Cuttin' Loose") and Gary Moore ("Still Got The Blues").
Albert King played his final concert in Los Angeles on December 19, 1992. He died of a heart attack two days later at his Memphis home on December 21, 1992, just before starting a major European tour. He was 69 years old.
At his funeral, Joe Walsh paid tribute with a slide-guitar rendition of "Amazing Grace." Afterwards, his hearse was carried in a procession down Beale Street led by the Memphis Horns playing "When the Saints Go Marching In". He was buried in the Paradise Gardens Cemetery in Edmondson, Arkansas.