This week is (probably) the 100th anniversary of the birth of my favorite blues musician, Albert King. Probably the most influential blues musician after Robert Johnson, King was a hero to such performers as Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan, and his most famous song, "Born Under A Bad Sign," has been covered by everyone from Eric Clapton to Homer Simpson. I got a chance to write about his unique artistry for The Dispatch
What Vaughan admired most was the way King sang with his guitar, bending Lucy’s voice into a personality as real as his own. In “Laundromat Blues,” she’s alternately sassy and vindictive; in “I Wanna Get Funky,” she’s a confident, cunning seducer; in “As the Years Go Passing By,” her brooding matches Albert’s introspective vocals. That took more than proficiency; it required a grasp of the emotional impact of Lucy’s sound, and a willingness to hold back. “If you play too fast or too loud, you cancel yourself out,” King advised young players. “First, you got to get in your mind what you want to play. If you hear a good lick—even if you’re just rehearsing to yourself—and you feel it, then hit another one…. 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 in your delivery.”
It wasn’t that King played slow, but he had a spare form of expression, with the patience to build a mood. “When we’d get tired of jumping up and down in the clubs,” he told Stevie Ray, “we’d back up—reach and get one from the bottom.” The conservatism of his playing in such slow-burn tunes as “The Sky is Crying” (performed here with Vaughan, Paul Butterfield, Phil Collins, and B.B.) shows the wisdom of not confusing profusion with eloquence. “[King] can take four notes and write a volume,” said bluesman Michael Bloomfield. “He can say more with fewer note than anybody I’ve ever known.”
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