In February of 1968, Albert King stepped onto the stage of San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium for the first time. With the Jimi Hendrix Experience headlining, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers featuring 19-year-old Mick Taylor, and King as opener, the evening was an embarrassment of guitar riches.
“I’d never heard of him,” says Robben Ford, who was 16 at the time. “We arrived after the show had started, and Albert was playing a slow blues – so slow and quiet. You could cut the atmosphere with a knife. I was transfixed and transformed. It changed the way I felt and approached playing a slow blues.”
The bastion of hippiedom was unlike any venue Albert had played, but he soon earned a nickname as “the flower power blues guitarist.” As Rolling Stone’s Jerrold Greenberg wrote, “Albert King was the only consummate artist among them, the only one who could play on the full emotional range of his audience with as much facility as he used to sustain a note on his guitar.”
Born Under A Bad Sign was compiled from singles released by Stax the two previous years, fleshed out with five new tunes, all backed by Booker T. & the M.G.’s.
In a 1977 King cover story in Guitar Player, Mike Bloomfield said, “He was the only bluesman I know of who had a completely comfortable synthesis with modern black music, R&B so to speak, and sold copiously to a black audience as well as the white audience. He was the only singer who had clever, modern arrangements that would fit in with the black radio market and in no way compromised his style. That’s sort of amazing, in that B.B. King never did it except once with ‘Thrill Is Gone,’ but Albert did it time after time.”
In a 1978 interview, M.G.’s rhythm guitarist Steve Cropper credited drummer Al Jackson with transforming country bluesman Tommy McClennan’s “Cross Cut Saw Blues.” “It has a sort of slop, bloopy, crazy kind of lick that was Al’s innovation. Consequently, it made everybody else play a little differently. The only one who didn’t play differently would be Albert King – who played like Albert King.”
Citing Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker as influences, King said, “It really got me into the bent-note sound when T-Bone Walker came. That was the sound I was looking for, because he had incredible blues sound. And the things he was making, I couldn’t do. I said, ‘I’m going to have to do something with these strings.’ So I developed that string-squeezing sound.”
But King’s style was completely his own, dictated in part by him being left-handed and playing a right-handed guitar. Unlike Hendrix, who would restring his guitar so that he was playing normally for a southpaw (highest strings nearest the floor), Albert actually played upside-down and backward, with the highest strings closest to his chin. Other “backward” lefty guitarists include Otis Rush, Dick Dale, Eric Gales, Bobby Womack, Barbara Lynn, and Doyle Bramhall, II.
Producer/engineer Terry Manning worked with Stax artists as well as ZZ Top, Big Star, and Led Zeppelin. He explains, “The way Albert would bend, he’d take those high strings and pull them down, which gave him a different, unique vibrato.”
Born in Indianola, Mississippi, on April 25, 1923, King made his first guitar out of a cigar box. His first legitimate guitar, a Guild acoustic, didn’t come until he was 18.
“Because I couldn’t make the changes and the chords the same as a right-handed man could, I played a few chords, but not many,” he said. “I always concentrated on my singing guitar sound – more of a sustained note.”
With a $125 Epiphone electric, in 1953 he traveled to Gary, Indiana, and was hired as Jimmy Reed’s drummer.
In the words of Billy Gibbons, “Albert King, suffice it to say, resonates today as was heard after stepping out from behind the drum kit and latching onto his six-string thing – that being his original Gibson Flying V, right off the ’50s production line. It fit perfectly with Albert’s left-hand approach to slinging a wealth of stinging solos in his inimitable style.”
Beginning in ’54, King sporadically released singles on small labels, with only one charting effort in “Don’t Throw Your Love On Me So Strong,” a #14 R&B. His guitar style was already quite developed, but the arrangements and playing rose several notches when he landed at Stax.
“Those first two Stax releases feature hit after hit, track-by-track, with Albert carving a personality, turning out some of the most memorable works of his recording career,” says Gibbons. “His perfect guitar and vocal delivery were simply hard to beat.”
The effect of the hip arrangements, guitar hooks, and solos was immediate. The first seven syllables of “As The Years Go Passing By” provided the riff for “Layla,” and Eric Clapton grafted the solo from “Oh, Pretty Woman” into Cream’s “Strange Brew.” “The Hunter” was covered by Ike and Tina Turner, Free, and Blue Cheer, and Led Zeppelin snuck a verse into “How Many More Times.” In “Personal Manager” – the only track longer than four minutes – Albert’s sweeping bends built a dramatic two-chorus solo.
“He was a huge, immense man, and his hands would just dwarf his Flying V,” Bloomfield observed. “He played with his thumb, and played horizontally, across the fretboard, as opposed to vertically. If he had to go seven frets, he’d bend the guitar seven frets!”
Soon, King was playing festivals and headlining Fillmore shows, with Live Wire/Blues Power recorded at the ballroom in June of ’68. David Grissom feels, “It captured him in all his glory. The title track is a slow-blues masterclass. His voice, hands, and heart held immense power, made even more effective by his sense of restraint and economy. He transformed a pentatonic scale into a symphony, and his use of ‘in-between’ notes – bending just shy of the next interval – opened up the vocabulary of the guitar for me.”
The uptempo instrumental “Night Stomp” was another tour de force.
Typically, Albert used an Acoustic amp onstage, but Manning remembers, “In the studio, we had a Fender Showman, a Bassman, and a Deluxe. He didn’t seem to care. He’d reach over, plug in, and start playing.”
There’s debate over how King tuned his guitar, which was C#m. But he could pick up a guitar in standard tuning, flip it over, and sound the same as always.
As for details like strings, he shrugged, “I used to use Black Diamonds, light gauge on the first, second, and third, with a wrapped G, and then heavy gauge on the bass strings. And I usually play with both pickups on the guitar, with the treble turned up.”
Dan Erlewine, who built Albert’s custom-inlaid V in ’72, reports that his G string was a flatwound.
Bloomfield observed, “If you listen to those Stax records, his guitar was always very loud, right out front.”
“It’s Albert-blanking-King!” Manning concurs. “Of course I’m going to turn him up. Each note was played with such importance, and meant so much. It’s so cool, it’s got to be loud.”
Manning engineered King’s subsequent tribute to Elvis Presley and Jammed Together, coupling him with Cropper and Pops Staples. In fact, on Terry’s original “Trashy Dog,” he provides the backup behind Albert’s lead.
“I hear the influence of Albert King in my fellow blues guitarists generally more than that of any other of the blues guitar greats, including B.B. King,” Ford reflects. “Somehow, he seemed to communicate so directly with his playing that you couldn’t resist the power of it. It shows up in your playing without even thinking about it.”
Along with Hendrix, devotees include Joe Walsh, John Mayer, Stevie Ray Vaughan (as on David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”), and Mark Knopfler’s work on Dylan’s Slow Train Coming.
King toured until 1992, the year he died at age of 69. His gravestone reads, “Albert King played the blues for the world, and forever changed the way the world would play the blues.”
This article originally appeared in VG’s January 2025 issue. All copyrights are by the author and Vintage Guitar magazine. Unauthorized replication or use is strictly prohibited.
