Albert King and B.B. King were both born in the Mississippi Delta two years apart, both grew up picking cotton before the guitar changed everything, and both ended up defining the electric blues in ways that could not be more different from each other. They shared a surname Albert had borrowed as a stage name, possibly as a tribute, possibly as a hustle. B.B. let it go with the dry observation that his name was King before he was famous. What they could not borrow from each other, and never tried to, was the way they played. The two men arrived at the electric blues guitar from completely different directions, built completely different techniques, and between them defined the vocabulary that every blues and rock guitarist who came after them had to reckon with.
B.B. King, born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925, on a plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, earned the nickname "Blues Boy" as a disc jockey at Memphis radio station WDIA in the late 1940s, and the name compressed itself into the initials he carried for the rest of his life. His approach to the guitar was rooted in conversation. He described it plainly: "The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille." The guitar answered the voice, and the voice answered the guitar, and the two traded places across every song. His vibrato was so distinctive that a single sustained note told you immediately who was playing. He used small, precise bends and played with a restraint that made every note feel like a considered choice. B.B. hit a note and let it breathe. That economy was the whole point.
Albert King, born Albert Nelson on April 25, 1923, in Indianola, Mississippi, came at the instrument from a direction that was almost physically improbable. He was left-handed and played a right-handed guitar flipped upside down, strings unreversed, which meant the low strings were at the bottom of his grip and the high strings at the top. He kept his tunings secret, most likely some variation of an open dropped tuning, and the result was a setup that allowed him to bend strings upward with a force that no right-handed player could replicate. Al Jackson Jr., the drummer on Albert's Stax sessions, put it simply: "Albert's guitar was always out of tune with everything else, but he was such a strong man he would just bend the notes back in." That physical aggression was the whole point. Where B.B. whispered, Albert shoved.
The record that made Albert King's reputation was "Born Under a Bad Sign," released by Stax in August 1967. The album was assembled from five sessions recorded between March 1966 and June 1967 at Stax Studios in Memphis, produced by Stax co-owner Jim Stewart, with Booker T. & the MGs providing the backbone: Booker T. Jones on keyboards, Steve Cropper on guitar, Donald "Duck" Dunn on bass, and Al Jackson Jr. on drums. The Memphis Horns filled out the sound: Wayne Jackson on trumpet, Andrew Love on tenor saxophone, and Joe Arnold on baritone saxophone. Isaac Hayes also contributed piano across the sessions. The title track was written by William Bell and Booker T. Jones, who confirmed they finished it in Jones's den the night before the recording session. Albert walked in the next day and played the licks that Clapton, Hendrix, and Stevie Ray Vaughan would spend years studying. The album failed to chart as an LP, because the R&B market still ran on 45s, but three singles from it reached the Hot R&B chart: "Laundromat Blues," "Born Under a Bad Sign," and "Crosscut Saw."
By 1968, Cream had covered "Born Under a Bad Sign" on "Wheels of Fire," and Eric Clapton had lifted Albert's solo from "Oh, Pretty Woman" and inserted it into Cream's "Strange Brew." Musicologist Robert Palmer described Clapton's playing on Cream's cover of "Born Under a Bad Sign" as "practically Albert King parodies." Albert played the Fillmore West in early 1968, and the rock world had discovered him. The discovery was complete. Meanwhile B.B. King was navigating his own crossover, playing the same venues, reaching audiences who had never heard either man before.
The deeper truth is the one worth sitting with. These were two men from the same patch of Mississippi Delta, working the same circuit, playing the same rooms, and producing sounds that could not be more different. B.B.'s vibrato was melody. Albert's bends were something close to violence, a physical argument with the instrument. Stevie Ray Vaughan absorbed Albert so completely that the debt is audible in nearly everything Vaughan recorded. Albert himself taped a television session with Vaughan on December 6, 1983, at CHCH-TV in Hamilton, Ontario, later released as the album "In Session," and the generational handoff is audible in every bar. The electric blues guitar needed both the whisper and the shove, and the two men from Indianola supplied them.
