Albert King: The Velvet Bulldozer

Albert King held his guitar wrong.Left-handed, he played a right-handed Flying V flipped upside down — never restrung, strings running backward, bends pulled in a direction no method book ever taught. It wasn't a style choice. It was what a poor kid in Depression-era Arkansas did when there was no money for the "e;correct"e; instrument and no one around to say otherwise.That accident became one of the most stolen sounds in American music.Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1923, King spent two decades on the edges of the blues before Memphis's Stax Records — a soul label with no blues artists on its roster — paired him with a house band tight enough to let a single bent string carry an entire bar. The record they made together, Born Under a Bad Sign, became a songbook other people got famous from. Eric Clapton built Cream's version of the title track out of it. Jimi Hendrix studied King from the crowd. A teenage Stevie Ray Vaughan begged to sit in one night in Austin and got a lesson he carried for the rest of his life.King spent the next twenty-five years watching younger, richer guitarists sell out arenas playing variations of a vocabulary he'd invented — and waiting for an industry that was in no hurry to say his name. It finally did, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, twenty-one years after he was gone to hear it.The Velvet Bulldozer is the story of how a "e;wrong"e; way of holding a guitar became one of the rightest sounds in American music — and how long it took the world to catch up.Know the story. Hear the blues differently.