ALBERT KING Was He The Greatest Ever?
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.
