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Albert King

Musical Style

As a youth Albert King was influenced by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson, and by Robert Nighthawk and Elmore James who played in nearby West Memphis. In an interview, King said "I listened to the slide guitar by Elmore James, and a couple of more people I knew way back there. Then along came T-Bone Walker, and that did it. So I just mixed it all together and I couldn't get it exactly like they had it, but I just put my thing to it." Later, he was also influenced by Howlin' Wolf and B.B. King. (He sometimes claimed B.B. King was his half brother, although they were not related.)

But Albert King's unique "upside down" single-string style of playing was all his own.

A natural left-hander, King learned to play the guitar upside-down so the low E string was on the bottom, and used his thumb instead of a pick. The sound was unique because he was pulling on strings that others were pushing. He tuned his guitar as low as C to squeeze out sweeping string bends. He played without a pick because "I never could hold [one] in my hand. I started out playing with one, but I'd be really getting into it, and after a while the pick would sail across the house. I said to hell with this. So I just play with the meat of the thumb."

"I knew I was going to have to create my own style because I couldn't make the changes and the chords the same as a right-handed man could. I play a few chords, but not many. I always concentrated on my singing guitar sound - more of a sustained note."

He played primarily on the three highest strings. By concentrating on tone and intensity more than flash, King fashioned a distinctive sound. He was a master of the single-string solo and could bend strings to produce a particularly tormented blues sound. His tasteful, economical technique combined metallic tone with a powerful attack and relentless string-bending. Michael Point wrote. "His guitar genius wasn't expressed by the number of notes and chords he could string together but instead was distinguished by the endless variations he could coax out of a few basic blues building blocks. His simple but subtle reconfigurations were accomplished through inflections, emphasis, and timing, not via sprinting through scales."

Mike Bloomfield said: "He was a huge, immense man, and his hands would just dwarf his Flying V guitar. He played with his thumb, and he played horizontally-across the fingerboard, as opposed to vertically. And he approached lead playing more vocally than any guitar player I ever heard in my life; he plays exactly like a singer. As a matter of fact, his guitar playing has almost more of a vocal range than his voice does-which is unusual, because if you look at B.B. or Freddie King or Buddy Guy, their singing is almost equal to their guitar playing. They sing real high falsetto notes, then drop down into the mid-register. Albert just sings in one sort of very mellifluous but monotonous register, with a crooner's vibrato, almost like a lounge singer, but his guitar playing is just as vocal as possible - He makes the guitar talk."

Many musicians acknowledged Albert King's influence, including Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Winter, Gary Moore, Albert Collins, Mick Taylor, Warren Haynes, Robert Cray and Otis Rush.

Born Under a Bad Sign was covered by The Band on their 1968 "Wheels of Fire", and by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band on their 1967 "The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw". Stevie Ray Vaughan covered many of King's songs, and referred to him as "Daddy".

Eric Clapton said his work on the 1967 Cream hit "Strange Brew" and throughout the album "Disraeli Gears" was inspired by Born Under a Bad Sign. Clapton also imitated King's riff from "As Years Go Passing By" in his impassioned hit song "Layla."

John Lee Hooker named Albert King as one of his all-time favorite guitarists. Michael Bloomfield once said, "Albert can take four notes and write a volume. He can say more with fewer notes than anyone I've ever known." B.B. King stated in his autobiography "He wasn't my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in Blues." The Allman Brothers guitarist Warren Haynes said "I think Albert probably was the blues guitarist that influenced rock guitar playing more than anybody else."

Albert King is gone, but his legacy lives on.