ALBERT KING Was he the greatest ever?
Breaking out the Flying V and using ideas from eight all-time blues legends, Jon Bishop seeks to answer the contentious question, “Was Albert King the greatest electric bluesman of them all?”
He’s influenced household name guitarists, while many more have used elements of his style in their playing. We show how top players tip their hats to a giant, and how you can too.
Albert King is perhaps the quintessential electric blues guitarist. Raised on a Mississippi cotton plantation he learnt the guitar as a child. But with no obvious influences around him this natural leftie simply picked up a regular guitar and turned it over, so the thin strings were at the top and the thick ones down below. He made his first guitar out of a cigar box, a tree branch, and a length of wire.
The style he devised was powerful and unique, and a big influence on other players. You can clearly hear him in the playing of Eric Clapton, Gary Moore, SRV and others, but several factors helped to forge his style.
First, his playing of a right-handed guitar left-handed, meant that large string bends were easier as the fretting hand is stronger when pulling down. In addition Albert used thin strings and had powerful hands. This made it possible to execute large bends using his first finger, as well as second and third.
Albert’s use of sparse phrasing is also hugely imitated. His use of a back-to-front guitar possibly limited the chances for crazy runs and lots of notes. So he often used two or three main motifs in a solo, recycled with various elements being developed on the fly.
Studying the styles of great musicians can unlock their playing secrets. Look at some of the phrases from this month’s examples. You may notice that many of the phrases start on the offbeat. This provides a sophisticated sound and adds an element of surprise. If you count the quavers, 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + most lines start on the ‘and’ of 4 and the ‘and’ of 1’. This sounds less predictable than starting on the downbeats. Limiting the rhythmic and tonal palette to simple things such as this and the Minor Pentatonic scale, helps to free up the creativity. Albert is famed for his use of space. The phrases are expertly placed with gaps for the listener to digest the ideas.
String bending became popular with the advent of the electric guitar and guitarists like T- Bone Walker. Other bluesmen such as BB King soon caught on and the technique was adopted by early blues, rock and roll and country guitarists. ( See Boxout).
In this article we have recorded an Albert style solo over a track with a rhumba feel. We then recorded solos in the style of seven iconic players who have been touched by the Albert influence. These are: Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Gary Moore, Jeff Beck, Billy Gibbons and Eric Gales. We play a solo in the style of each one in turn focusing on areas that have ‘a bit of Albert’ about them. We finish with a 24-bar piece imagining our guitarists feeding off of each other as they play a phrase each. We stay in the blues friendly key of A, and the scales used are:
A Major Pentatonic (A-B-C#-E-F#) A Minor Pentatonic (A-C-D-E-G) Albert favoured A Minor Pentatonic fingerings and simply bent the notes to fit when Major sounds were required. For the last few examples we stretch out and put the ideas to the test by including a couple of different keys, tempos and blues feels.
With the exception of SRV on some tracks and perhaps Clapton on the Cream number, Strange Brew, our guitarists aren’t direct copyists; rather they turn the Albert influence into something of their own. Hopefully there will be a phrase in here to spark your own creativity, and maybe help you answer the burning question: Was Albert King the greatest electricctric blues guitarist of all?
“Albert’s playing of a right-handed guitar left-handed, meant that large string bends were easier as the fretting hand is stronger when pulling down”