Freddie King

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Freddie King
File:Freddie King.jpg
Freddie King
Photo: Chuck Pulin/Star File
Background information
Birth name Fred King
Born (1934-09-03)September 3, 1934
Gilmer, Texas, United States
Died Script error: The function "death_date_and_age" does not exist.
Dallas, Texas, United States
Genres Electric blues, blues-rock, funk
Occupation(s) Musician, singer-songwriter
Instruments Guitar, vocals
Years active 1952–1976
Associated acts Robert Lockwood, Jr., Sonny Thompson, Bill Willis, King Curtis, Leon Russell, Carl Radle, Eric Clapton, Jamie Oldaker, Tom Dowd, Mike Vernon, Steve Ferrone, Bobby Tench, P.P. Arnold, Jimmie Vaughan, Peter Green, Edd Lively
Website The official Freddie King site
Notable instruments
Gibson Les Paul guitar
Gibson ES-345

Freddie King (September 3, 1934 – December 28, 1976) was an influential American blues guitarist and singer. He is often mentioned as one of "the Three Kings" of electric blues guitar along with Albert King and B.B. King.[1]

Freddie King based his guitar style on Texas and Chicago influences and was one of the first bluesmen to have a multi-racial backing band at live performances. He is best known for singles such as "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" (1960) and his Top 40 hit "Hide Away" (1961). He is also known for albums such as the early, instrumental-packed Let's Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King (1961) and the later album Burglar (1974), which displayed King's mature versatility as both player and singer in a range of blues and funk styles.[2]

King became an influential guitarist with hits for Federal Records in the early 1960s. He inspired musicians such as Jerry Garcia, Dickey Betts, Stevie Ray Vaughan and his brother Jimmie Vaughan.[3] His influence was also felt in Britain through recordings by blues artists such as Eric Clapton,[4] Peter Green,[5] and Chicken Shack. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012.

Biography

Early life

When King was only six, his mother, Ella Mae King, and his uncle began teaching Freddie guitar. In autumn 1949, King and his family moved from Dallas to the South Side of Chicago.[6] In 1952 King started working in a steel mill, the same year he married fellow Texas native Jessie Burnett, with whom he eventually had seven children.[7][8]

According to his official birth certificate he was named "Fred King" at birth and his parents were Ella Mae King and J.T. Christian.[9]

1950s

Almost as soon as he had moved to Chicago, King started sneaking into South Side nightclubs, where he heard blues performed by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, and Sonny Boy Williamson. King formed his first band, the Every Hour Blues Boys, with guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and drummer Frank "Sonny" Scott. In 1952, while employed at the steel mill, an eighteen-year-old King occasionally worked as a sideman with such bands as the Little Sonny Cooper Band and Earl Payton's Blues Cats. In 1953 he recorded with the latter for Parrot Records, but these recordings were never released. As the 1950s went on, King played with several of Muddy Waters's sidemen and other Chicago mainstays, including guitarists Jimmy Rogers, Robert Lockwood, Jr., Eddie Taylor, Hound Dog Taylor, bassist Willie Dixon, pianist Memphis Slim, and harpist Little Walter.

In 1956 he cut his first record as a leader, for El-Bee Records. The A-side was a duet with a Margaret Whitfield, "Country Boy,",[10] and the B-side was a King vocal. Both tracks feature the guitar of Robert Lockwood, Jr., who during these same years was also adding rhythm backing and fills to Little Walter's records.[11]

King was repeatedly rejected in auditions for the South Side's Chess Records, the premier blues label, which was home to Muddy, Wolf, and Walter. The complaint was that Freddie King sang too much like B.B. King. A newer blues scene, lively with nightclubs and upstart record companies, was burgeoning on the West Side, though. Bassist and producer Willie Dixon, during a late 1950s period of estrangement from Chess, had King come to Cobra Records for a session, but the results have never been heard. Meanwhile, King established himself as perhaps the biggest musical force on the West Side. King played along with Magic Sam and supposedly did uncredited backing guitar on some of Sam's tracks for Mel London's Chief and Age labels,[12] though King does not stand out anywhere.

Federal records

In 1959 King got to know Sonny Thompson, pianist, producer, and A&R man for Cincinnati's King Records and King owner Syd Nathan signed King to the subsidiary Federal label in 1960. King recorded his debut single for the label on August 26, 1960: "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" backed with "You've Got to Love Her with a Feeling" (again as "Freddy" King). From the same recording session at the King Studios in Cincinnati, Ohio, King cut the instrumental "Hide Away," which the next year reached #5 on the R&B Charts and #29 on the Pop Singles Charts, an unprecedented accomplishment for a blues instrumental at a time when the genre was still largely unknown to white audiences. "Hide Away" was originally released as the B-side of "I Love the Woman". "Hide Away" was King's conglomeration of a theme by Hound Dog Taylor and parts by others, such as from "The Walk" by Jimmy McCracklin and "Peter Gunn", as credited by King. The song's title comes from Mel's Hide Away Lounge, a popular blues club on the West Side of Chicago.[13] Willie Dixon later claimed that he had recorded King doing "Hide Away" for Cobra Records in the late 1950s, but such a version has never surfaced.[14] "Hide Away" has since become a blues standard.

After their success with "Hide Away," King and Sonny Thompson recorded thirty instrumentals, including "The Stumble," "Just Pickin'," "Sen-Sa-Shun," "Side Tracked," "San-Ho-Zay," "High Rise," and "The Sad Nite Owl".[15][16] They recorded vocal tracks throughout this period, but often released the instrumentals as albums on their own merits. During the Federal period. King toured with many R&B acts of the day, such as Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and James Brown.

Cotillion, Shelter, RSO Records

King's contract with Federal expired in 1966, and his first overseas tour followed in 1967. King's availability was noticed by producer and saxophonist King Curtis, who had recorded a cover of "Hide Away," with Cornell Dupree on guitar, in 1962. Curtis signed King to Atlantic in 1968, which resulted in two LPs, Freddie King Is a Blues Master (1969) and My Feeling for the Blues (1970), produced by Curtis for the Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion Records.[17]

In 1969 King hired Jack Calmes as his manager, who secured him an appearance at the 1969 Texas Pop Festival, alongside Led Zeppelin and others,[18] and this led to King's being signed to Leon Russell's new label, Shelter Records. The company treated King as an important artist, flying him to Chicago to the former Chess studios for the recording of Getting Ready and gave him a backing line-up of top session musicians, including rock pianist Leon Russell.[19] Three albums were made during this period, including blues classics and new songs, such as "Goin' Down," written by Don Nix.[20]

King performed alongside the big rock acts of the day, such as Eric Clapton[21] and Grand Funk Railroad (whose song "We're an American Band" mentions King in its lyrics) and for a young, mainly white audience, along with white tour drummer Gary Carnes for three years, before signing to RSO. In 1974 he recorded Burglar, for which Tom Dowd produced the track "Sugar Sweet" at Criteria Studios in Miami, with guitarists Clapton and George Terry, drummer Jamie Oldaker and bassist Carl Radle. Mike Vernon produced all the other tracks.[22] Vernon also produced a second album Larger than Life[23] with King, for the same label. Vernon brought in other notable musicians for both albums such as Bobby Tench of the Jeff Beck Group, to complement King[24]

Death

Near-constant touring took its toll on King (he was on the road almost 300 days out of the year), and in 1976 he began suffering stomach ulcers. His health quickly deteriorated and he died on December 28 of complications from that and acute pancreatitis at the age of 42.[25]

According to those who knew him, King's untimely death was due to stress, a legendary 'hard-partying lifestyle',[26][27] and poor diet (he was in the habit of consuming Bloody Marys in lieu of solid food so as not to waste time when setting up shows).

Playing style and technique

King had an intuitive style, often creating guitar parts with vocal nuances.[28] He achieved this by using the open string sound associated with Texas blues and the raw, screaming tones of West Side, Chicago blues. As King combined both the Texas and Chicago sounds, this gave his music a more contemporary outlook than many Chicago bands who were still performing 1950s-style music, and he befriended the younger generation of blues musicians. In his early career he played a gold top Gibson Les Paul with P-90 pickups through a Gibson GA-40 amplifier, later moving on to Gibson ES-355 guitars,[29] using a plastic thumb pick and a metal index-finger pick to achieve an aggressive finger attack, a style he learned from Jimmy Rogers.[citation needed]

Awards and recognition

In 1993 by proclamation from the Texas Governor Ann Richards September 3, 1993, was declared Freddie King Day. This is an honor reserved for Lone Star legends, such as Bob Wills and Buddy Holly.[30] Freddie King placed 15th in Rolling Stone magazine′s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time[31] and in 2012, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Discography

Studio albums

Date Title Label & Cat. no. Chart no.
R&B Pop
1961 Freddy King Sings King 762
Let's Hide Away and Dance Away with Freddy King King 773
1962 Boy – Girl – Boy
Freddy King, Lulu Reed & Sonny Thompson		 Federal 777
1963 Bossa Nova and the Blues Federal 821
Freddy King Goes Surfin' Federal 856
1965 Bonanza of Instrumentals Federal 928
Freddie King Sings Again Federal 931
1969 Freddie King Is a Blues Master Cotillion SD 9004
1970 My Feeling for the Blues Cotillion SD 9016
1971 Getting Ready Shelter SW8905
1972 The Texas Cannonball Shelter SW8913
1973 Woman Across the River Shelter SW8921 54 158
1974 Burglar RSO SO4803 53
1975 Freddie King Larger than Life RSO SO4811

Compilation albums

Date Title Label & Cat. no. Chart no.
R&B Pop
1965 All His Hits King 5012
1976 Freddie King 1934–1976 Polydor 831817-2
1987 Freddie King 17 Original Greatest Hits Federal Records
1989 Just Pickin' Modern Blues
1993 Hide Away: The Best of Freddie King Rhino
1995 King of the Blues EMI/Shelter
1997 Staying Home with the Blues Universal/Spectrum
2000 The Best of Freddie King: The Shelter Records Years The Right Stuff
2008 The Best of Freddie King MCA
2009 Taking Care of Business Bear Family
2012 The Complete King Federal Singles Real Gone Music

Singles

Date Title A-side / B-side Label & Cat. no. Chart no.
R&B Pop
1956 "Country Boy" / "That's What You Think" El-Bee 157
1960 "Have You Ever Loved a Woman" Federal 12384
"You've Got to Love Her with a Feeling" Federal 12384 92
1961 "Hide Away" / "I Love The Woman" Federal 12401 5 29
"Lonesome Whistle Blues" /

"It's Too Bad (Things Are Going So Tough)"

 Federal 12415 8 88
"San-Ho-Zay" Federal 12428 4 47
"See See Baby" Federal 12428 21
"I'm Tore Down" / "Sen-Sa-Shun" Federal 12432 5
"Christmas Tears" / "I Hear Jingle Bells" Federal 12439 28

References

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  13. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  14. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
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  23. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  24. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  25. ↑ Freddie King at Find a Grave
  26. ↑ NPR. Freddie King's Rock-Hall-of-Fame induction
  27. ↑ Gibson Guitars 10 Reasons why blues legend Freddie King was a genius
  28. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  29. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  30. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
  31. ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.

Bibliography

  • Busby, Mark. The Southwest. Greenwood Publishing Group (2004). ISBN 978-0-313-32805-3
  • Clapton, Eric. Clapton: The Autobiography. Broadway Books (2007). Digitized September 4, 2008.ISBN 978-0-385-51851-2
  • Corcoran, Michael, Joseph, All Over the Map: True Heroes of Texas Music. University of Texas Press (2005). ISBN 978-0-292-70976-8
  • Koster, Rick. Texas Music. St. Martin's Press (2000). ISBN 978-0-312-25425-4
  • Hardy, Phil. Laing, Dave. Stephen, Barnard. Perretta, Don. Encyclopedia of Rock. Edition 2 (revised). Schirmer Books (1988). Digitized December 21, 2006. ISBN 978-0-02-919562-8
  • O'Neal, Jim and Van Singel, Amy . The Voice of the Blues: Classic Interviews from Living Blues Magazine. Edition 10. Routledge (2002). ISBN 978-0-415-93653-8
  • Lawrence, Robb . The Early Years of the Les Paul Legacy 1915–1963. Hal Leonard Corporation (2008). ISBN 978-0-634-04861-6
  • Pruter, Robert. Chicago Soul. Edition 5 (reprint). University of Illinois Press (1992). ISBN 978-0-252-06259-9

External links

  • Freddie King at AllMusic
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