Essay · Music & Lives
The Velvet Bulldozer
Albert King was six feet four inches tall and played a right-handed guitar upside down and left-handed, without a pick, bending strings that were already fighting him — strung the wrong way, the tension reversed, producing a sound so specific and so irreducible that no one who has spent any time with it can hear Eric Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan without catching, beneath the surface, the shadow of the man who made it possible. He spent forty years on the cotton fields and the club circuit before anyone outside the blues world paid serious attention. The attention, when it came, was enormous. It was also never quite enough.
By Bergotte · Indianola & Memphis · Music & Lives
He was born Albert Nelson, in Indianola, Mississippi, in 1923, one of thirteen children on a cotton plantation, and the first guitar he played was a cigar box with a wire string nailed to it — a diddley-bow, the one-string instrument that served as the entry point to music for children in the Delta who could not afford anything with tuning pegs. He taught himself, which is to say that everything that would later electrify Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan and Eric Clapton was arrived at through a process of invention rather than instruction, through the particular creativity of a person who cannot do things the conventional way and therefore finds another way that turns out, in retrospect, to have been better.
The unconventional way was this: he was left-handed, and he played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, held upside down, which meant that when he bent a string — the technique at the absolute centre of his style, the thing that made his playing identifiable from the first note — he was bending against the conventional direction, pulling up rather than pushing down, with the result that the note stretched and strained in a way that no right-handed player could reproduce, that carried in its physical difficulty a quality of strain and yearning that the blues required and that King’s biology provided. He also played without a pick, using his thumb and fingers, which gave the notes a softness at the attack and a warmth in the sustain that picks could not produce. He could not have designed a more distinctive sound if he had tried. He was not trying. He was simply playing the only way available to him, and the way available to him turned out to be unlike anything else.
The Cotton Fields, the Bulldozer, and the Long Road to Memphis
The biography of Albert King in the years between Indianola and Stax Records is the biography of a man making his way through an America that had made very specific arrangements for Black men from Mississippi, and navigating those arrangements with the stubbornness of someone who has decided that the music is worth whatever the navigation costs. He moved to Osceola, Arkansas, as a child, with his mother and sisters after his father left. He worked in the fields. He drove a bulldozer — the nickname “Velvet Bulldozer” acknowledges both his physical scale and this chapter of his working life, the combination of smoothness and mass that characterised his playing as much as his day job. He played in a local group called the In the Groove Boys, learning the three chords he knew at fast and slow and medium tempos to fill out the set.
He moved north, as the Mississippi Delta’s musicians moved north in the postwar decades, following the Great Migration toward the cities where Black life was still constrained but differently constrained — Gary, Indiana, where he briefly played drums behind the bluesman Jimmy Reed; Chicago, where he made his first record, “Bad Luck Blues,” for the Parrot label in 1953; St. Louis, where he settled for years and recorded for the local Bobbin label. The St. Louis years produced his first national hit, “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong,” which reached number fourteen on the R&B charts in 1961. He was thirty-eight years old. Most musicians have either made it or given up by thirty-eight. Albert King was just getting started.
“I knew I was going to have to create my own style, because I couldn’t make the changes and the chords the same as a right-handed man could. I always concentrated on my singing guitar sound — more of a sustained note.” — Albert King, in interview with Guitar Player magazine
Stax, Booker T. & the MGs, and the Sound That Changed Everything
The decisive event in Albert King’s career was his signing with Stax Records in Memphis in 1966, and the decisive event within that signing was the pairing of King’s blues guitar with Booker T. & the MGs — Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald “Duck” Dunn on bass, Al Jackson Jr. on drums, Booker T. Jones on organ — the house band that had already defined the sound of Memphis soul and that brought to King’s blues the rhythm, the groove, the soulful precision that transformed him from a regional club act into something that could cross over without selling out.
The transformation is audible in the first session. “Laundromat Blues,” the initial Stax single, is a different kind of blues from anything King had previously recorded: the guitar is still unmistakeably his, the bends and the sustained notes and the upside-down physics of the Flying V he called Lucy, but behind it is a rhythm section of extraordinary tightness and sophistication, a groove that opened the music to listeners who had never set foot in a Mississippi juke joint and who heard in the combination of King’s blues guitar and the MGs’ soul rhythm something that spoke to them directly and immediately. The Memphis Horns were added to subsequent recordings, and the sound deepened further — warmer, fuller, the horns providing a cushion of brass beneath which King’s guitar moved with the freedom of something being supported rather than accompanied.
“Crosscut Saw,” “Born Under a Bad Sign,” “Oh, Pretty Woman,” “The Hunter,” “I’ll Play the Blues for You” — the Stax singles of 1966 to 1974 are among the essential recordings of postwar American music,
My World of Interiors 