Albert King is my favourite of the three kings (Albert, B B and Freddie) partly because I heard him first and partly because I like his style of guitar playing best.
I bought Years Gone By (1968), with Albert in a conservative sports jacket against a psychedelic backdrop, in either 1977 or 1978 mostly, I must admit, because it was cheap, but I’d heard of him by then and the descriptions of his fierce playing style in the NME piqued my interest. Since I’ve duplicated the original vinyl LP on CD as well as digital download and as a vital example of a tough soul blues set on Stax Records in the mid-Sixties when Albert, like B B, had been “discovered” and adopted by the cool white kids, it’s still way up there.
Around the same time as I bought Years Gone By I also acquired a collection of B B King tracks from the Fifties, possibly recorded at the height of his “urban blues” period, backed by a big, horn driven band. I didn’t like this B B King stuff at all. There was too much big band riffing and too little guitar for my liking and though it was a style I came to appreciate, if not exactly love, many years later, it’s relative lushness and smoothness was a stark and, to me, unfavourable contrast to the tough, small combo backing of the Albert King album.
it was a long while before I heard anything by Freddie King. I knew of him, knew that he wrote, or made famous, “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” a huge track for Eric Clapton and that he once played support on a tour for Clapton who quite liked him. King also wrote the, instrumentals “Stepping Out” or “Hideaway,” which I knew in versions by Cream, and “San-Ho-Zay” covered by many other guitarists. When I heard Freddie King play, and by this time I’d come to love B B King’s work anyway, I realised that as good as he may have been, his energetic, busy, style of Texas blues guitar was not for me.
So, over the years I’ve acquired plenty different music by the other two Kings, from their Fifties stuff, when they were not too dissimilar, to the Seventies end Eighties, and in the case of B B also the Nineties and beyond. Albert died too young. In both cases their respective record companies did their best to update their blues stars’ sound to keep them appealing to contemporary audiences, who really only wanted to hear the old hits anyway.
In my view, B B King’s best tunes seem to be those big band jump blues he kept trotting out in live shows, along with :”The Thrill is Gone,” whereas Albert King’s best tunes are the mid- to late Sixties soul blues he’s best known for and that, like “Born Under a Bad Sign,” have been covered most by other bluesmen. in each case it’s sad that these guys seem forced to repeat, ad infinitum, the same small number of songs but I suppose that’s true of most musicians. The audience always wants to hear the over familiar hits. Having said that, I think I’d rather listen to Albert King repeating his hits, because I like them better than the B B style songs regardless of how good he is.
Years Gone By is not one of those albums that has hit after hit, with only “Wrapped Up In Love Again, “ “You Threw Your Love On Me Too Strong,” “Killing Floor” and “The Sky is Crying” that could be live standards and the last two are not specifically identified with Albert in the first place, but as an example of what Albert King sounded like at the time and how blues was being recorded and probably aimed at the White audience that gave blues a new commercial lease of life, you can hardly go wrong.
King of the Blues Guitar is the best compilation of the tracks for which Albert is known and Live Wire / Blues Power (1968) is an excellent record of what his live sound and approach was in the Sixties. The Thursday / Wednesday Night in San Francisco live albums are also excellent examples of Albert King on stage and at the height of his powers. These, and a compilation of Fifties tracks, when Albert and B B weren’t so far apart in their respective ways of playing the blues, represent my current Albert King collection and I think that’s sufficient.
in the Seventies Stax Records, and whoever else he recorded for, attempted to update the blues by recording King with funk musicians and smoothing out his rough edges and to my this was a mistake because, if the records aren’t altogether bad, they’re not gritty enough to be satisfying and most of them sound like Albert King going through the motions because of contractual obligations and perhaps a misplaced compliance with the advice from his producers who tried to convince him that he’d sell more records that way.
Obviously an artist can’t afford to be stuck in the same rut all their creative lives, although it’s true only for new record releases, as the set list for any live gig will always feature the usual suspects the audience come to hear. Unfortunately, updating an artist’s sound or approach to recording can often depend on the vision and opinion of a record producer, or a record company, and their idea of commerciality may not suit the artist or even be that successful with the public. Muddy Waters’ career was revived in the late Seventies with a new record company and Johnny Winter as a producer who went back to the roots with Muddy and simply gave his Fifties sound a contemporary vintage slant production wise. John Lee Hooker’s career had a longer and arguably more successful renaissance when producer Roy Rogers not only updated the sound, brought in well-known guest artists but found a new way to rejuvenate old familiar songs that stuck to the template and yet shone new light.
For me, that didn’t happen with Albert King’s studio output towards the end of his life. The smooth sheen of the production blunted his edge into non-existence and the producer(s) couldn’t find new tunes that could, or did, become classics in the King repertoire. It’s not as if, for example, Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker made records with all new hits; they recycled tried and trusted material, but the production managed to revitalise them. Albert King’s new material had no vitality to start with.
The old bluesmen, from the earliest days to about the mid-Sixties, and excluding the odd “discoveries” like Leaf Belly, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee who were adopted by a section of the White cultural elite in the USA, played to and for their own people, the Black audience, but from the mid-Fifties when R & B and then soul gained popularity and were seen as progressive and modern compared to the down home label of blues, this includes the urban blues of B B King, T Bone Walker and others, what one might call traditional blues lost ground and its audience slowly dissipated. Where once some blues was seen as a hip, sophisticated urban music (not the raw Delta style blues, then), it was replaced by a new type of musical expression embraced by younger generations of urban blacks with little or no connection to the countryside and who wanted a music that was not their parents’ music and exemplified a modern worldview. For a while the bluesmen struggled and then fate intervened when there was an increasing large scale exposure to and adoption by young White listeners and audiences who then became the greatest supporters of blues outside of the deep country side where some musicians always managed to keep playing, even if it meant they had a day job to put food on the table, and the bluesmen were playing to larger audiences than before, made more money than before and were suddenly regarded and discussed as cultural phenomena rather than as just the providers of good times in bars and juke joints. Where the original White, intellectual and musicological interest in blues had been focused mostly on the country bluesmen, almost all of blues was brought in to the ambit of these deep cultural roots and significance, as if these people were cultural mavens and ambassadors for their people rather than just musicians who chose this form of making a living as being far better and more lucrative than the menial jobs most Blacks seemed to be stuck with.
I’ve read many books on the history of blues and all of them have at least one chapter on the origins of the music and the meaning the blues has in the community as an expression of the mood and life experiences of the people as a whole. These learned discourses often make it sound as if a Delta blues musician intentionally made art as a cultural and political expression of conditions (poverty, racism and repression) amongst his people, and was therefore a folk heritage herald, so to speak, and not just someone who chose to make music because they were interested in it and it gave them some escape from their daily grind or gave them an additional income or got the ladies interested.
For me, the blues may have originated as a cry in the wilderness, but at least from the start of the recording industry, it was as mush a commercial, show biz endeavour for the musicians as it was for the record industry. Once musicians learnt they could make money from records, the concept of blues being no more than an expression of a people’s soul blew out the window. The blues men were already for tips on the streets, and at house parties for some money, food and drink, and now there was yet another revenue stream.
When Big Bill Broonzy or Sonny Boy Williamson I were recording for Bluebird Records, or Muddy Waters and Howlin Wolf were recording for Chess Records and John Lee Hooker was recording for whomever he could cut a side or two, just to name some well-known examples, they were doing for strictly commercial reasons and when they were playing the bars and dives of Chicago and Detroit, they had the same motivation. It was a moneymaking gig, not a campaign of folk expression. It was about paying the bills, raising a family and having some of the good things in life.
I suspect that most of what we now “know” about the origin, nature and cultural impact of blues, comes from White intellectuals seeking to find deeper, hidden meaning in a very simple musical genre, because it couldn’t be just what it appears to be. Some of it may be true but eventually the blues tropes we are familiar with, seem to have been formulated by people who analysed the music and its background rather than by the people who made the music.
Albert King has a narrative in his tune “Blues Power” about what the blues supposedly is, and he gives some very banal examples, such as a crying baby, a disgruntled teenage girl or himself, who misses his main squeeze. These sound carefully constructed and sanitised to be relatable to a young White audience and do not refer to poverty, racism or repression; he does not pretend that his blues is rooted in and informed by the extremely negative experiences of his people. King is playing the gig to entertain his audience. Music is his career and blues is his chosen genre. I don’t for a moment believe that Albert King chose this particular career because he had a burning, material need to be a spokesman for his people and to expose the injustices of this world in general and the prejudice Black people in the USA suffer. His blues are braggadocio or cries of woe over a bad woman and perhaps one can see the latter as metaphors for how Black people are treated by White society but most of that seems farfetched to me. It’s professional entertainment, pure and simple.
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