Blues Stories
Albert king, The blues power
Out of the three blues “kings”, Albert was always my favourite. He was the blues power. It’s not anodyne that Jimi Hendrix and the legendary SRV were always trying to watch, if not copy his right hand playing, which he knew about and used to purposely hide.
A bit of background for non-guitar players: usually a right handed guitarist will strum with his right hand and play the fret notes with his left hand, with the strings tuned from high E at the bottom 1st string and low E at the top 6th string. Albert took this to the next level!
First, Albert was left-handed, meaning he used to strum with left hand and play notes with right hand. But because he couldn’t afford to buy a guitar by his own, he learned to play on a right-hand player’s guitar, leaving the strings unchanged. This means that while normal players will have the low E down, Albert had his low E up, … When normal players will bend the string UP, he would bend it the opposite way, DOWN…
Add to this a custom tuning (not the standard eBGDAE), This gave him a unique bend technic and blues sound…listen to blues power, Laundromat blues or answer to laundromat blues to feel how unique he was…
Jimi Hendrix lists Albert king as his biggest influence along the giant Howlin’ wolf. If you listen to Jimi’s Red House, which is for me the most sophisticated blues song in history, you can hear how influential Albert was to Jimi, but then Jimi, being Jimi, took blues to the next level. Albert called his last album, Red house, reference to Jimi’s song.
Albert didn’t have the guitar phrasing of BB King, but he had this raw deep dramatic sound, along an R&B touch. Listen to “Born under a bad sign” to have an idea what I mean. Listen to “As the years go passing by”, increase the tempo, convert it to a Riff and you will have the foundation of Duane Allman (will have an article on him next) famous “Layla”? All this played with a Gibson Flying V model, which was custom made for him later in his career.
Stevie Ray Vaughan list Albert as his biggest influence. He also influenced others such as Mick Taylor (the best rolling stones guitar soloist), Derek Trucks and much others.
He was inducted in the blues hall of fame in 1983, and in 2013, he was inducted posthumously in the Rock and Roll hall of fame, ranked #13 in 100 best guitarists of all time by Rolling stones magazine!
