This weeks featured blues artist is left handed guitarist Albert King , who along with BB King and Freddie King was one of the ‘three kings’ of blues . The 3 Kings were unrelated , but bizarrely Albert once maintained he was the half brother of ‘BB’ although there is no truth in this . He even named his guitar ‘Lucy’ when BB named his ‘Lucille’ .  He was born in Mississippi probably in 1923 but the family moved to a cotton plantation in Arkansas when he was eight years old. It seems that he wasnt even born with the name King … rather his name was Albert Nelson and he certainly began his blues career in the 1940s with that name , changing it to Albert King in 1953 … and often was billed as ‘BB King’s brother’ !

His early musical career began with the Groove Boys in Arkansas and during this period he became interested in the work of Delta blues artists such as Elmore James and Robert Nighthawk. By 1956 he formed his own band playing the nightclubs of St Louis along with Ike Turner’s Kings of Rhythm and Chuck Berry. He signed up with the Bobbin label in 1959,and released some singles, none of which had any success . His first real chart success wasnt until 1961 with King Records which released his single “Don’t Throw Your Love on Me So Strong”.This blues number has become a real enduring classic . The original recording features Ike Turner on piano . Strangely little success followed and so King moved to Memphis, where he signed with the Stax . Here King joined with Booker T. & the MGs and recorded dozens of singles, including “Crosscut Saw” and “As the Years Go Passing By”. In 1967, Stax released an album ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’, which is a  collection of all the singles King recorded at Stax. The famous title track of that album became King’s best-known number and of course has been covered by many artists perhaps most famously by Cream ( and incidentally also by Homer Simpson ) . 

In 1968 Bill Graham offered him $1,600 to play three nights at The Fillmore Auditorium in San Francisco. He released three live albums from those concerts.

In 1970, he released an Elvis Presley tribute album, ‘Albert King Does the King’s Things’ which was a collection of Presley’s 1950s hits reworked in King’s style. However the 1970s were a real low point in King’s career , he experimented with funk and pop music but without any popular success . The 1980s saw him return to his roots with traditional 12 bar blues and touring , In 1983 he recorded an hour long studio programme for Canadian TV, featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan  . The following year King released the album, ‘I’m in a Phone Booth, Baby’, which was nominated for a Grammy Award.

King’s increasing health problems led him to consider retirement in the 1980s, but he continued to tour and appear at blues festivals . His final album, Red House (named after the Jimi Hendrix song) was released in 1991.

King died of a heart attack on December 21, 1992, in his Memphis home. His final live appearance had been in Los Angeles two days earlier. He was given a funeral procession with the Memphis Horns playing “When the Saints Go Marching In” and was buried in Paradise Gardens Cemetery in Edmondson, Arkansas, near his childhood home.