Albert King: Born Under a Bad Sign Turns 40

Albert King occupies unique terrain in the land of the blues. His signature guitar sound, which combined metallic tone with a ferocious attack, relentless string-bending and an inclination toward economy, was wholly original. The fact that the left-handed King frequently used right-handed Flying Vs turned upside-down—with the low E string closest to the floor—also contributed to his sound, namely since he was pulling on the same strings that others were pushing.

King’s guitar style wasn’t the only thing that made him special: He also created music that looked forward. When the 43-year-old bluesman signed with Memphis-based Stax Records in 1966, 13 years after he’d recorded his first sides for the Parrot label in Chicago, what emerged was a trailblazing synthesis of stinging blues guitar work atop a fat layer of soulful, funky rhythms laid down by the famed Stax house band, Booker T. and the MGs.

Perhaps King’s greatest legacy is that he remains a colossal influence on legions of guitarists—famous and otherwise—who grew up listening over and over to classic albums like Born Under a Bad Sign and Live Wire/Blues Power, both of which are cornerstones of his recorded body of work and serve to document the spectacular intensity and emotion he summoned and poured into his music.

“I think Albert probably was the blues guitarist that influenced rock guitar playing more than anybody else,” says Allman Brothers Band and Gov’t Mule guitarist Warren Haynes, who discovered King’s music while growing up in Asheville, North Carolina. “With most other players, it’s easy to trace the lineage… But who played like that before Albert? Nobody that I know. I’ve never been able to find anybody prior to Albert that played that way—totally like he was from Pluto or something.”

King, all 6-feet-5-inches and 250 pounds of him, became a sensation upon the release of Born Under a Bad Sign in 1967, but his ascension on the American music scene was by no means an overnight process. King (who is of no relation to B.B. King, despite Albert’s early claims to the contrary) was born Albert Nelson in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1923, and by the early 1930s was living in Osceola, Arkansas, where he learned to play the guitar as well as sing. He spent some time in St. Louis in the 1940s, and in the early 1950s was living in Gary, Indiana, and working with Chicago bluesman Jimmy Reed. King was back in St. Louis by the mid-1950s.

He recorded a number of singles for the Bobbin label before he scored a national R&B hit in 1962 with a slow blues called “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong,” which was put out by King Records. (The highlights of King’s pre-Stax Records output can be found on his first LP, 1962’s The Big Blues.

But it wasn’t until he signed with Stax in 1966 that his career caught fire. The following year’s release of the album Born Under a Bad Sign—which was actually a collection of singles recorded for the label over five sessions between March of 1966 and June of 1967—not only directly influenced legions of guitar players who studied its every subtlety and nuance, but it would changed the face of American music, modernizing the blues at a time when albums like the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Jimi Hendrix’s Are You Experienced? were galvanizing the face of rock.

“It was the great divide of modern blues, the point at which the music was rescued from slipping into derivative obscurity” Michael Point wrote in the liner notes to the 2002 reissue of Born Under a Bad Sign. “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.”

Born Under a Bad Sign may be a compilation and not a concept, but that fact has done little to diminish the music’s power during the 40 years that have passed since its release; in fact, it may have actually helped. There’s nary a dog on the entire album, and most of its songs are tight, compact compositions, calculatingly ready for the radio: the first six songs on the album (the title track, “Crosscut Saw,” “Kansas City,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” “Down Don’t Bother Me” and “The Hunter”) all clock in at under three minutes, and what’s missing are long, extended guitar solos.

Instead, King opted for tasteful, economical—though still powerfully effective—guitar statements, usually communicated in stinging, authoritative flurries of notes. With an endless array of phrasing ideas running through his head, King had the uncanny ability to play relatively few notes—he played primarily on the three highest strings—while still making those notes sound fresh and vibrant on each run.

“For all the primal power of his guitar work, Albert’s forte was finesse, not force,” 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.”

"You got to get in your mind what you want to play," King said. "You've got to take your time and learn your bag one lick at a time. And take your time in your delivery."

“You got to get in your mind what you want to play,” King explained to Alan Paul of Guitar World magazine in a 1991 interview. “If you hear a good lick--even if you’re just rehearsing to yourself--and you feel it, then hit another one and another one and another one. The next thing you know, you got 15 or 20 different licks you can hit and they all feel good. But if you rush right through, hitting them all, you’re not even going to know what you did.  You’ve got to take your time and learn your bag one lick at a time. And take your time in your delivery.”

The influence of Born Under a Bad Sign was immediate. “Oh, Pretty Woman” was appropriated by Eric Clapton for Cream’s “Strange Brew” (from Disraeli Gears) within a matter of months, and on 1968’s Wheels of Fire, the band covered the title track. The Paul Butterfield Blues Band, meanwhile, covered “Born Under a Bad Sign” on 1967’s The Resurrection of Pigboy Crabshaw.

As younger—and whiter—audiences became hip to his music, King entered a new phase in his career, becoming a regular at storied rock venues like the Fillmore East in New York and San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium. It was at the Bay Area venue where in 1968, as a favorite of young “hippie” blues fans (note the album artwork, which finds King with a flower in his mouth instead of his trademark pipe), King recorded one of the blues’ quintessential live albums, Live Wire/Blues Power. The performance bears witness to his remarkable onstage focus and intensity, not to mention his patented two-step guitar bends.

“Nobody else was doing that,” Warren Haynes says. “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.”

Recalls Mike Bloomfield in an interview with Dan Forte of Guitar Player magazine:

“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.”

Although his early Stax output is what ultimately forges the foundation of his recorded legacy, King still had plenty of fuel in his creative tank after 1968. He recorded more albums for the label like Years Gone By (1969), I’ll Play the Blues for You (1972), and Blues at Sunset (1973), among others, and he remained a mainstay on the blues scene for the next two decades. He also managed to maintain his appeal to black and white audiences alike, and his dramatic guitar influence never waned. One performance with disciple Stevie Ray Vaughan, recorded in late 1983, was released in 1999 as In Session. (For a clear statement of King’s direct influence on Vaughan, witness the latter’s guitar solo on David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance.”)

Albert King died of a heart attack at his Memphis home on December 21, 1992. He was 69 years old. And although it has now been nearly 15 years since his death, time has done little to minimize the impact of his music and guitar style, which can still be heard in the recordings of artists like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton, Johnny Winter, and Gary Moore.

“I rehearsed to myself for five years before I played with another soul,” King told Alan Paul. “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.”