| Lefty
By Alan diPerna
Albert King was a giant among bluesmen, and not only for his immense talents on the guitar. A 250-pound giant of considerable bulk, King stood between six-four and six-seven and made any guitar he held in his massive hands look like a child’s plaything. But the notes and tones he tore from the instrument were anything but small. In the middle years of the 20th century, King grabbed hold of a Gibson Flying V and boldly went where no blues guitar player had gone before, or has gone since. A left-hander, he flipped a right-handed guitar upside down, put it in an unorthodox tuning, and forged a style steeped in steely drama and epic note-bends that evoke the vertiginous blood rush of powerful emotions. King’s impact on the blues and rock guitar legacy is prodigious. Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, Jimi Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan have been among his greatest admirers. Each drafted huge chunks of King’s fiercely original style into his own playing. Clapton famously nicked the solo from King’s “Oh, Pretty Woman” and inserted it in “Strange Brew” from Cream’s wildly influential 1967 album, Disraeli Gears. Jimi Hendrix cited King’s “Crosscut Saw” as one of his favorite tunes. Mike Bloomfield covered Albert’s “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong,” and Cream recorded their own version of King’s signature tune, “Born Under a Bad Sign.” As for Stevie Ray Vaughan, he outdid his King-crazed predecessors by recording an In Session television special with his hero in 1983. His influence on many of the world’s most revered guitarists is sufficient to make him a national treasure of American music. But in many ways, his own achievements outshine those of his acolytes. After all, he did it first. And he certainly did it his way. True to his name, King is arguably the monarch of upside-down-lefty guitarists, a distinguished company that includes Otis Rush, Doyle Bramhall II, Elizabeth Cotton, and Coco Montoya in the blues-folk realm, and everyone from Babyface to Bob Geldof in other genres. The barbed-wire minimalism of King’s searing leads makes an ideal counterpoint to his husky, gospel-inflected vocal style. It’s a true call-and-response passion play. King was nicknamed the Velvet Bulldozer, a name that resonates once you realize that he once made his living driving a bulldozer. Albert King lived the blues. That’s why he played and sang them so beautifully. He had a remarkably wide perspective on the blues as well, crossbreeding more traditional 12-bar forms with everything from sweet Stax soul to big-band balladry. Like a lot of left-hand/right-brain creatives, Albert King didn’t play by any rulebook but his own, nor would he suffer fools gladly. Possessed of a notoriously bad temper, he would lay into band members onstage if things weren’t going his way. In one famous public display of anger, he chewed out John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, who were backing him, for playing too loud. Luthier Dan Erlewine, who made King one of the Flying V guitars that he played throughout his career, had a few occasions to witness the Velvet Bulldozer in high dudgeon. “The first time Albert was playing at the Grande Ballroom, I was backstage after the show,” Erlewine says, referring to Detroit’s legendary Sixties rock venue, just a few miles from the bridge to Windsor, Ontario. “And Albert was pissed at the promoters, who were trying to pay him with Canadian bills. He wouldn’t take them. ‘I don’t want none of that funny money,’ he said. And they got him want he wanted.” King was known to pack a gun, so people were reluctant to cross him. But his hot temper was only one aspect of a complex and gifted artist. Erlewine puts the anger down to a combination of impatience and competitiveness. “I’d say Albert was more competitive than some, certainly more so than the older folks out there, like [his blues contemporaries] Mance Lipscomb and Johnny Shines. As a person, though, Albert had a softness and kindness inside. But he kept it hidden a lot.” Along with B.B. and Freddie, Albert King is one of the three kings of the blues, although the man born Albert Nelson was related to neither of those great bluesmen by blood. He was, however, born in the same place as B.B. King—Indianola, Mississippi—on April 25, 1923. While he may not have literally been born under a bad sign, his birth date does put Albert King in the contentious and creative zodiacal house of Taurus. Later in life, he would assume the regal surname King as a stage name, some say in homage to B.B. King. The family moved to Forrest City, Arkansas, when Albert was eight. He spent some time as an agricultural laborer, picking cotton, but set his sights on making a life for himself in music early on. He once joked that he didn’t learn from studying any other guitarists, saying, “Everything I do is wrong.” But that isn’t strictly accurate. King also spoke often of being influenced by Lonnie Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Elmore James. “I listened to the slide guitar of Elmore James and a couple of more people I knew way back there,” he told one interviewer. “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 own thing to it.” It may have been the open slide-guitar tunings of players like Jefferson and James that inspired King’s own use of alternate tunings. He is mainly associated with an E minor tuning (low to high, C B E G B E). But he also tuned to the same intervals in both C# and D. He was known to use open F (low to high, C F C D A D) as well. For guitarists accustomed to playing in standard, none of these tunings are as intuitive as, say, open G or E. But remember that Albert King was holding a right-handed electric guitar the “wrong” way around. This yields a different perspective on the instrument, one that is, in a way, more in tune with nature, with the low strings closer to the ground and the high strings nearer to the sky. But even upside down, some of King’s open tunings are mighty strange, which also accounts for the unique beauty embodied in some of his phrasing. “I knew I was going to have to create my own style,” he told guitar journalist Dan Forte, “because I couldn’t make the changes and 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.” King also enjoyed what’s known as the “lefty advantage” when it comes to bending notes. With the strings’ vertical arrangement flipped, you bend notes on the critical higher-pitched strings by pulling the string downward, which is much easier than pushing upward to execute a bend. King exploited this capacity to particularly dramatic effect, sometimes bending notes as much as four tones up. His huge hands were another factor in this aspect of his style, as was the slackness of the strings in the low-slung tunings Albert favored. As if all this weren’t unconventional enough, King didn’t use a pick. He mainly used his thumb to pluck the notes. But his first finger would also sometimes come into play in helping shape the steely pinched tones that are another hallmark of his style. “I never could hold a pick in my hand,” King explained to Forte. “I had started out playing with one, but I’d be really gettin’ into it, and after a while the pick would sail across the room. I said, ‘To hell with this.’ So I just play with the meat of the thumb.” The core elements of King’s riveting style are all evident, albeit embryonically, on his first recording, “Bad Luck Blues,” recorded in Chicago in 1953 for Parrot Records. By the time he cut this disc, King had paid plenty of dues, singing lead tenor with gospel quartet the Harmony Kings, fronting his own group—the Groove Boys—in Osceola, Arkansas, and playing drums for seminal blues guitarist and singer Jimmy Reed. But “Bad Luck Blues” lived up to its name by not providing King with the hit he might have been hoping for. He didn’t score big until eight years later, when he released “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong” in 1961. The record climbed to Number 14 on the R&B charts and put Albert King on the map. It also became a featured track on his very first album, The Big Blues, in 1962. A study in pinched, plucked passion, the lead guitar intro to “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong” makes it clear from the start that Albert King ain’t about to do things in a small way. This is the lowdown slow blues at its finest, and the guitar-and-vocal interplay is exquisite. King’s biting leads alternate with a vocal performance that scales the full emotional range, from a mournful croon to a high-pitched gospel wail. The symbiotic relationship between King’s guitar and voice is one of the blues’ greatest treasures. By the time the disc was released, King had found his instrument: a 1958 korina wood Gibson Flying V. There has been much speculation as to why he favored this particular guitar, but upside-down lefties tend to seek out instruments with symmetrically shaped bodies and headstocks, as they look much less awkward when flipped. And among symmetrically shaped guitars, a Flying V certainly has far more flash and panache than, say, an SG or 335. Along with Lonnie Mack, King was one of the earliest guitarists to popularize Gibson’s angular, V-shaped masterpiece. | 