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FREDDIE KING: BLUES MASTER by Mark Humphrey

Blues historiestend to get writtenabout reg ions :M i s s i s s i p p i ’ sDelta, the Caroli-nas , the vas tsprawl o f Texasand urban centerslike Chicago, St.Louis and Mem-ph is . S ty l i s t i ctraits dominant ineach region arecare fu l ly de l in -eated by a writer,who invokes ar t-is ts to i l lustrateand suppor t dis-t inc t ly reg iona lt ra i t s . Th is ap-proach usua l lyworks wonders

with pre-War blues, but its value decreases the nearerwe come to our own time. Chicago’s electric blues bandsof the 1950s played their music with still-discernibleDelta accents, but they were no less influenced by whatthey heard via radio and related media than were otherurban musicians of their era. By the 1960s, regional pi-geonholing of blues became still less tenable. One casein point: Freddie King.

King was both musically and geographically all overthe map. He was from Texas and the “jump” of his West-ern Swing laced instrumentals tags him in the traditionof swinging electric blues guitarists spawned by T-BoneWalker, who was waxing the likes of T-Bone’s Boogieback in 1945. But listen to King’s emotion-drenchedvocals and you hear the influence of such “testifiers” asB.B. King, Bobby “Blue” Bland and Li t t le Mi l tonCampbell, all progeny of the fertile Memphis musicscene of the late 1940s and early 1950s. (“Freddie was

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more like the guys out of Memphis,” fellow Texan AlbertCollins once said.) King had no geographic link to Mem-phis, but Chicago was his home for more than a de-cade.

He arrived in his teens and experienced formativemusical influences and challenges there. King creditedMuddy Waters's sideman Jimmy Rogers and JimmyReed’s lead guitarist Eddie Taylor as his guitar tutorsand fondly recalled “trading licks” with Otis Rush andMagic Sam. “Working in Chicago,” King recalled in aLiving Blues interview, “that’s where I first started play-ing in a band, but I been playing guitar since I was six.But I picked up the style between Lightnin’ Hopkins andMuddy Waters and B.B. King and T-Bone Walker. That’sin-between style, that’s the way I play, see. So I playscountry and city.”

King polished his chops and earned his stripes inthe competitive Chicago blues club scene and even ap-peared as sideman on such legendary Howlin’ Wolf sidesas Wang-Dang Doodle and Back Door Man. But if wedidn’t know of King’s Chicago background, we mightwell not hear it in his music.

What was a Texan doing in Chicago anyway? Didn’tall Texans migrate to the West Coast? Pinning FreddieKing on the map is no small task. His music was nevernot blues, yet he was able to penetrate the “pop” mar-ket in 1961 without diluting what he played or conde-scending to white teen taste. He did it with breezy con-fidence, taking a tune named for Mel’s Hideaway Loungein Chicago to a place few blues-based instrumentals hadbeen before: the pop charts.

Hide Away was the pivotal turn in King’s career, adanceable vamp that gave him a sharp leg up on hisChicago peers. It might never have happened had Kingsuccessfully persuaded Leonard Chess to add him tohis label roster. King’s recording career began modestlyin 1956 on one of many short-lived Chicago blues la-bels, El-Bee. His sole El-Bee release, Country Boy b/wThat’s What You Think, went nowhere, though it at leastserved as a souvenir for club patrons. Chess was theplace to be: home base to Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolfand other “elder statesmen” who sometimes deigned tolet King sit in with them. King wanted the cachet of be-

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ing a Chess artist, but Leonard gruffly told him hesounded too much like another King – B.B.

While it doubtless seemed otherwise at the time,Chess did King a favor, for it’s unlikely he could haveexcelled there. He wasn’t the sort of artist Chess servedespecially well, and regional accents may indeed haveplayed a role in this: the sound of the Delta, not theSouthwest, was the dominant drawl there. One Chess

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artist, Lowell Fulson, hailed from Oklahoma but carvedhis musical niche in California. He enjoyed one of hisbiggest hits, 1954’s Reconsider Baby, at Chess, but thatwas cut in Dallas. To this day Fulson expresses frustra-tion at his Chicago sessions with the Chess studio mu-sicians: their feel and his, he says, just weren’t in sync.King, a Texan at hear t, might have been similarlythwarted.

That he found a place to successfully do what hedid best on record was thanks to the intervention ofAlphonse “Sonny” Thompson (1916-1989). Thompsonwas a Chicago-born bandleader/pianist who admired thejazz of Art Tatum but waxed boogie, debuting with the1946 Sultan label side, South Side Boogie. He beganrecording for the Cincinnati-based King label in 1950and in 1959 replaced Ralph Bass as A&R director andproducer at King’s Chicago office. Thompson signedFreddie (then ‘Freddy’) King to the label in 1960 andplayed piano on all King’s 1960-64 recordings. Whilehis contribution to such tunes as Hide Away is dubious,Thompson appears as co-writer on most of King’s re-cordings of the era and even saw to it that his wife, LuluReed, joined King on a several vocal duets!

The King label was all over the musical map, whichmade it a natural base for Freddie King. Launched by‘the Sheppard Brothers’ (Grandpa Jones and MerleTravis) in 1945, King was an eclectic melange of coun-try, blues, bluegrass and gospel artists. When FreddieKing joined the label in 1960, his roster mates includedthe Stanley Brothers and James Brown! The founder ofthe label, Syd Nathan, was remembered by Merle Travisas “a little short man who had asthma and wore realthick glasses.” In Honkers and Shouters: The GoldenYears of Rhythm & Blue (1978, Collier Books, NewYork), Arnold Shaw wrote: “Overweight and a carelessdresser, he (Nathan) hardly looked like the man whocould transform a defunct icehouse into one of thecountry’s giant record independents. Nathan developeda plant in which he could record, master, press and pro-duce finished disks, including the printing of album cov-ers.” In his autobiography, James Brown: The Godfatherof Soul (1986, William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd, Glasgow),Brown depicts Nathan as “Little Caesar—short, fat and

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smoking a big cigar. He yelled all the time in a big,hoarse voice and everybody was afraid of him.” Still,Peter Guralnick reports in Sweet Soul Music (1986,Harper & Row, New York) that Brown wept at news ofNathan’s death: “When his chief antagonist and booster,Syd Nathan, died in 1968, he (Brown) acquired Nathan’smarble-top desk and installed a gold plaque that read: IREMEMBER THE MAN SYD NATHAN.”

N a t h a nknew the com-merc ia l ad-vantages o fe c l e c t i c i s mand since hec o n t r o l l e dKing labe lsong publish-ing , encour-aged his R&Bacts to coverh is count r yhits (and viceversa) to gen-erate fur therrevenue. Thiswas not a l -ways a suc-cess, as any-one who’sheard theStanley Broth-ers’ hilariouslyearnest cover of Hank Ballard’s Finger-Poppin’ Time cantestify. But Nathan, unlike Leonard Chess, at leastwouldn’t blanch at a blues singer-guitarist cutting a tunelike Hide Away. He certainly had no complaints whenthe record went to # 5 on the R&B charts (# 29 pop).

Both the diversity and consistent high quality ofKing’s Federal label singles and King label albums areastonishing, given the speed at which this material wasproduced. Few sessions yielded less than six titles andon a single August day in 1964 King cranked out adozen! Deep blues with searing vocals were always there

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among the danceable instrumentals and were uncom-promisingly blues-based. An interesting exception isKing’s 1963 cover of Remington Ride, originally a show-case for Western Swing steel guitarist Herb Remington.For better than five minutes King wraps an increasinglytight spiral of blues riffs around a country stomp, revel-ing in his command of two seemingly disparate idioms.It’s one of his greatest recorded performances, althoughthe more familiar ones are stunning in a funkier way. Inretrospect, tunes like 1961’s San-Ho-Zay may be seennot only as blues guitar workouts but also as pioneer-ing Soul instrumentals well in advance of Booker T andthe MGs’ Green Onions.

King’s six-year stint at the King label ended with afinal session in September 1966, the year of his spec-tacular appearances on The!!!!Beat. His national starwas on the wane (gone were the days of package tourswith pop stars like the Shirelles) and the television ex-posure was most welcome. But since The!!!!Beat airedon most stations around midnight and was regrettablyshort-lived, the program did little to revive King’s ca-reer. That task fell to saxophonist/Atlantic A&R manKing Curtis, who signed King to Atlantic’s Cotillion sub-sidiary in 1968. The recordings which ensued coincidedwith the discovery of the blues by the era’s white youthand King’s European tours were revelations to rock gui-tarists who honed their chops copying his records, no-tably Pete Green, Stan Webb, Mick Taylor and EricClapton.

A decade after Hide Away, King found himself againplaying to white audiences and his 1970-73 recordingsfor Leon Russell’s Shelter label put him in the forefrontof authoritative bluesmen who spellbound white youthraised on blues-based rock. King had always been a“heavy” guitarist and he had to change little to fit hisnew/old role. (One of King’s Shelter label songs, Big-Legged Woman, closes this video collection.) Repayinga debt to an old friend (and guitar teacher), King pro-duced and played on a 1972 Shelter label session forJimmy Rogers.

In 1974, King was in England recording for RSO withEric Clapton, with whom he also toured. “I think of allthe people I’ve ever played with,” Clapton told Guitar

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Player, “the most stimulating in an onstage situation wasFreddie King. Freddie could be pretty mean, but subtlewith it. He’d make you feel at home and then tear youto pieces.” The guitar duet/duel with Gatemouth Brownin one of The!!!!Beat episodes suggests King enjoyedhaving the last word whenever there was another gui-tarist onstage. Lowell Fulson says of King: “He was oneof the best guys to work with. The only thing, he didn’tlike competition. But he didn’t worry about me. Differ-ent style. He’d say, ‘It don’t make no difference, Lowell.We don’t clash.’ I’d say, ‘I can’t play what you play,Freddie, with all them fingers and picks and thumbs andstuff. I could do it when I was your age.’ (laughs) Wegot along together fine. He was a likable guy.”

Freddie King, hard-driving and perhaps driven, wasonly 42 when he died on December 28, 1976. The in-tensity of the performances in this video suggest an art-ist who burned at full throttle every time he played andno doubt that took its toll. The recollections of King’sdaughter, Wanda, depict a man who loved life, lived itfully and probably would have penned his epitaph: “”Noregrets.” Guitarists as diverse as Michael Bloomfield andJerry Garcia have cited King as a formative influenceand the reported proliferation of ‘live’ King bootleg re-cordings in Europe bear witness to his continued popu-larity abroad. But King was quintessentially Americanand there’s no hearing his “happy blues” instrumentalswithout recalling that great bygone adolescent rite, thesock hop, at which such King albums as “Let’s HideAway and Dance Away” were once staples. There teenextroverts would joyfully jive and frug to Freddie, whilewallflower two-left-footed guys would imagine twang-ing a guitar as sharp as he did, thereby inciting ardentadmiration among the dreamiest chicks. It was a fan-tasy for most of us, but a few awkward guys actuallydid master the guitar, become rich rock stars and bedhopelessly beautiful models (cf. Layla). And the cata-lyst for it all was Freddie King, the swinging blues gui-tarist we all heard first and foremost.

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THE!!!!BEAT

Most of the video clips on this collection come froma unique time warp, a fleeting moment when SouthernR&B collided with mid-60s “Mod” and rendered a showcalled The!!!!Beat. The exclamation-point-and-asteriskset design, fringed mini-skirted, go-go booted and pais-ley bell-bottomed frugsters and the occasional “sock-it-to-me” visual edits suggest a show heavily influencedby Laugh-In, but in fact The!!!!Beat had already as-cended to video Valhalla by the time Laugh-In made its1967 debut. “We were just too early” is how its host,Bill “Hoss” Allen, assesses the brevity of The!!!!Beat’s26 show run. While the show may have been ahead ofits time, the time it brings us is one when television pro-graming for black audiences was otherwise nonexistentand blues remained a powerful force in Southern blackpopular music.

Daniel Cooper’s definitive article, “R&B’s Forgot-ten Pioneer Program,” in the February 5, 1993 Goldmine,of fers this overview: “Nearly unseen for 25 years,The!!!!Beat remains a treasure trove of incomparablecolor footage from one of the richest, most volatile erasin American music: 1960s soul.” Ironically, we owe theexistence of these great Freddie King performances toa Nashville ad agency which scored spectacular laxa-tive sales via televised hillbillies!

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Noble-Dury and Associates used their Show Biz, Inc.arm to produce the Porter Wagoner and Wilburn Broth-ers syndicated country music programs. They were ve-hicles for Noble-Dury’s client, the Chattanooga Medi-cine Company, to hawk a “moving” elixir with a fore-boding name, Black Draught. The shows were essen-tially old-time medicine shows in the television age. Andthey were so successful that, in 1966, Noble-Dury de-cided to try similar programing aimed at black consum-ers, The!!!!Beat.

Host Bill “Hoss” Allen was a legendary force inSouthern R&B whose broadcasting career began atNashville’s WLAC in 1949. The powerful station didmuch to disseminate R&B throughout the country. “Wewere 50,000 watts,” Allen recalls. “We started gettingmail from D.C. to El Paso, from the Bahamas to De-troit. We covered 28 states every night, good ‘n clear.”Allen’s connections with artists and their labels madehim a natural to enlist talent, including the house band.Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown was a Texas bluesmanthen working in Nashville and guitarist Johnny Jonesand the King Kasuals were a Nashville staple who oftenworked sessions for Allen. Cooper writes: “Brown wroteand performed the show’s staccato blues theme and setthe head arrangements for the lively instrumentalsthroughout. Jones took charge of the charted vocal num-

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bers since Brown didn’t read music...Brown—the vet-eran showman—says he had trouble adjusting to thecameras. ‘I was working with machines and I couldn’tsee no one,’ he says. ‘I like to work to my audience.”’

Shot between May and August 1966 at Dallas’sWFAA because of i ts color product ion faci l i t ies,The!!!!Beat initially offered stunning performances byOtis Redding, Carla Thomas, Little Milton, Etta Jamesand Louis Jordan (among others) to thirteen stations,Cooper reports, “distributed evenly among major urbanmarkets and mid-size Southern cities...” (A few otherstations picked it up later.) Slotted on weekend mid-nights or afternoons, the show fared poorly in ratingsand several late-summer cancellations doomed it. Rac-ism or indifference? “We were just too early,” is Allen’ssummation.

Freddie King was 31 at the time of The!!!!Beat, play-ing and singing in prime form. Excepting his guitar duelwith Gatemouth and instrumental version of JamesBrown’s 1965 hit, Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag, all theperformances are of his King/Federal titles. The funkyopening tune (reprised as the 13th) is Funny Bone, a1964 recording which appeared on the album Bonanzaof Instrumentals. (No, Freddie never recorded the TVwestern theme!) King’s intense vocals are then broughtto bear on a rhetorically powerful blues, Have You EverLoved A Woman. The song was cut at his initial Cincin-nati session in 1960 and was his first Federal single. Itwas actually the flip side that provided Freddie his firstmodest chart success (You’ve Got to Love Her with aFeeling revamped a 1950 Tampa Red song and made itto #93 on the pop Hot 100), but Have You Ever Loved aWoman was such a dramatic show-stopper that Kingkept it in his repertoire to the end of his career. (Hereprises it in the 1973 Swedish concert seen in thisvideo.) The third performance offers a slow and sexySan-Ho-Zay, King’s 1961 instrumental follow-up to HideAway. The record only made it to #47 on the pop charts,but soared to #4 on the R&B charts. (King offers aninspired reprise as the 12th workout in this video.)

I’m Tore Down is performed at a more frenetic pace(all the better to encourage the teenaged go-go danc-ers) than was King’s 1961 recording. That song made it

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to #5 on the R&B charts, though this jump blues pre-dictably left no trace on the pop charts. The writer cred-its are to Sonny Thompson, but one suspects the craftyhand of Syd Nathan recycling his back catalogue. Us-ing the same driving tune but new lyrics, the song re-vamped a 1956 Federal label hit by Ike Turner’s Kingsof Rhythm (Billy Gayles was vocalist), I’m Tore Up.

Hide Away gets a breezy kick here in a pricelessperformance where Freddie, the Beat Boys and thefringed go-go girls are all delightfully “in the spirit.”

Deeper blues from his first King label session is de-livered in a performance of I Love the Woman (no chartaction this time), while the “new breed sound” of JamesBrown is acknowledged with Papa’s Got a Brand NewBag. King recorded this at his first 1968 Cotillion ses-sion, but it remains unissued.

The kicking See See Baby is another song Kingwaxed at his initial King session. This rockin’ revampof one of the oldest blues reached the #21 slot on theR&B charts in October 1961 and was one of a half-dozenR&B (and three pop) chart hits King enjoyed that year.Sittin’ On The Boatdock was recorded in January of1962, a Sonny Thompson song obviously inspired bythe recent success of Lee Dorsey’s Ya Ya. While it failedto duplicate it, perhaps it inspired Otis Redding’s (Sittin’on the) Dock of the Bay a few years later. And King’sTexas roots are laid bare in a brief up-down vocal in-flection on the word “shining” (he used it more often onthe recording) which sounds akin to the phrasing of BlindLemon Jefferson.

The f ina l Federa l s ing le K ing revamped fo rThe!!!!Beat inspired one of the most scorching show-cases on the program. She Put the Whammy On Me wasrecorded at the same 1962 session as Sittin’ On TheBoatdock, but what different songs! King surely playslike a man possessed, lending credence to his complaint.Pre-War blues lovers may want to compare King’sWhammy to Clifford Gibson’s 1929 recording, Don’t PutThat Thing on Me, as well as other vintage “jinx” songs.Whammy-putting women had been after bluesmen for along time.

King’s brilliant “whammy” as a guitarist can be stud-ied closely in these performances. Listeners often as-

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sume King used af la tp ick, but heevolved his ap-proach from a fin-gerstyle tradition.Watching his righthand thumb andfinger work in tan-dem is not d is-similar to watch-ing such “mono-tonic bass” Texastraditionalists asMance Lipscombplay, even thoughthe resultant mu-s ic i s en t i re lysomething e lse!“ I t comes f romthe wrist ,” Kingexplained in a Liv-ing Blues inter-v iew, “ f rom thefingers here andthen I don’t useany straight pick,I use two. I use fingerpicks, steel, on this and a plasticpick on the thumb. And then I knock the tone down withthe back of my hand. A lot of these rock groups, theyhit wide open, whereas, you see, I can hit it open. I canturn it up to 10 and it still won’t be too loud, see, be-cause I can keep the sound down with the back of myhand like that.”

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HOSS ALLENinterviewed by

Mark Humphey March 18, 1994

“Ah, everything is movin’ ‘n groovin’ tonight, darlin’,I wanna tell you like a friend.” - Hoss Allen on The!!!!Beat

“I had been in the business since 1949 playing R&B,primarily blues and up until we did The!!!!Beat I hadnever heard of Freddie King. And on top of that, I workedfor three years for King Records, did record promotionand never heard of Freddie King. And actually, I wrotesome liner notes. Hal Neely told me later, he said,‘Goddamn, you wrote liner notes for him!’ And I said,‘Man, I cannot believe it!”’

(Hoss’s notes to the King ‘best of’ compilation called“Hideaway”, actual ly fol lowed his st int as MC ofThe!!!!Beat: “I think it was his frequent appearances on

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my TV show, The!!!!Beat, along with another super-bluesguitarist, Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, that reallyhooked me forever,” Hoss wrote. He praised the album’ssongs as “all freewheeling—groovy—and above all,gassy good! You can blow your mind on the pulsing gy-rations of Remington Ride, with licks and bending ofchords reminiscent of the late Django Reinhardt...Well,if you aren’t ready for your own Hideaway after listen-ing to this album of Freddie’s best....you ain’t what’shappening, baby!”)

“He’d be hanging out there (at WFAA) every timewe came to cut...He’d just be waiting. He’d find out andhe’d be there when we arrived to go to work. We’d usu-ally cut on Saturdays and Sundays when the studio wasfree. So finally somebody from the staff there said, ‘Thisguy really plays great guitar. His name is Freddie King.’So I said, ‘I never heard of the son-of-a-bitch.’ I askedone of the guys in the band, Johnny Jones, who playedguitar in the band and also Billy Cox, who later playedbass for Jimi Hendrix and was my bass man on the band.And he said, ‘Oh God, yeah, Freddie King. Haven’t youheard Freddie King?’ I said, ‘Naw.’

“He came in and hit about two licks and I realizedthat I should have known him anyhow. He’s on a lot ofshows, just because he was so good and then a lot oftimes we’d have acts that were supposed to show thatdidn’t show up.”So he was the pinch hitter.

“Yeah, but then after he’d been on a couple of showswe just kept putting him on.”

How was he to work with?

“Oh, God, fantastic. Just a great big happy kid.Yeah, just a wonderful guy. So easy to get along withand do anything you said. We just let him play what hewanted to, because I didn’t really know his repertoire.Then I found out some of the things he’d done on Kingthat had been great records. And, of course, he redidsome of those. I’ve forgotten what the hell they werenow.”

What were the rehearsals like?

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“Well, it was pretty primeval, to tell you the truth.”

Freddie would just say, ‘It’s a shuffle in E’?

“Yeah, that’s all. We’d run the show down. Theymight get a key together, then we’d do a dress. Andthen we’d shoot it. Sometimes we didn’t even dress forsome of the top acts.”

How did you come to MC the show?

“I was hired primarily because I could get all theacts free. I had worked for Chess on the road and hadbeen on the air so long and none of these black actshad ever been on TV. Also it was great exposure fromthe standpoint of the record companies. I could callanybody and say, ‘Look, I want so-’n- so.’”

Who were The Beat Boys?

“The band was a band of local Nashville musicians.(guitarist) Johnny Jones, his band (The King Kasuals) Iused as a studio band here in town. I cut a lot of ses-sions that never really amounted to anything. But weused to get together every Saturday afternoon and justlay down a lot of stuff. Gatemouth was working over atthe New Era for about 25 bucks a night. He just didn’thave anything to do and I think he got about a hundredbucks a show to lead the band. We paid all the expensesfor the band to go down there. As a matter of fact, I had

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to get those guys in the (musicians) union. They werethe first black members of the union here in Nashville.

“The show was a little before its time. We had somepretty good shows, considering the production facilitiesin those days and everything. We had a lot of great acts.It started off big time. I mean, we were in Chicago andDetroit and New York...Not so many markets in theSouth. Montgomery, Alabama, they burned a cross onthe damn lawn of the TV station because it was an all-black show. But it went along the first 8 or 10 weekspretty good. Then it started fading away. We did 26shows, but it was just sort of barely hanging on. We werejust too early. But there’s fantastic stuff there.”

Did you run into Freddie King after The!!!!Beat?

“No, I haven’t seen him to my certain knowledge sincethen. I don’t know whether he’s even still living or not.”

You’re still there at WLAC radio?

“Yeah, I still keep an office. I retired six, seven yearsago, but I still do freelance commercial work. I went togospel in ’71. The blues were gone, so I went to blackgospel and I had a show midnight to 5 of black gospel.And I still have a little show I tape. But primarily I’mdoing freelance. Just having something to get the hellout of the house.”-

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FREDDIE KING’S DAUGHTERREMEMBERS

Wanda King interviewed byMark Humphrey

March 18, 1994

“I’ve Always Believed That He Was a Great Father.”

I’ve read that Freddie King was born September 3rd inGilmer, Texas and also that he was born September30th in Longview.

“He was born in Gilmer, Texas on the 3rd of Sep-tember, 1934. He was born Freddie Christian. My father’sfather is not the same as my uncle’s father. Mygrandmother’s side of the family, their name is King.They had a fallout or a family feud, like most thingshappen. And he took his mom’s name. To this day I don’tknow if he legally took it or it was just ‘I’m going to bea King from now on.’ He was a Christian and then hedecided to be a King. And my grandmother married aTurner and all the other kids were Turners.

“His mother, Ella and his uncle Leon I believe playedguitar, the acoustic or the box guitar. He picked up thebeginning steps of playing from them. I spoke with myuncle (Bennie Turner, seen playing bass in the 1973

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video performances here) about that. He said that hepurchased his first guitar, a Roy Rogers guitar, when hewas six or seven. He picked cotton...until he earnedenough money to buy his guitar and then he began toplay more and more. I remember him telling me thathis idol was Louis Jordan. He blew the horn. He listenedto him on the radio on the weekends and tried to matchhis blowing with the fingering, with the notes on the gui-tar.

“My father craved attention to the point where, atthe age of eight he went to the country store and pur-chased $5 worth of candy and put it on my stepfather’stab. And back then, in the country, that was a lot ofmoney, $5 of candy! He took it to school and in order toget the kids’ attention, he’d throw candy out: ‘Hey, here’ssome candy!’ They went to Freddie King. ‘Freddie’s gotcandy!’ He did these kind of things. He craved atten-tion.”

So when the candy ran out he picked his guitar.

“That’s it. He always found some way to keeppeople’s attention on him.”

When did his family move to Chicago?

“My uncle told me they moved to Chicago in thewinter of ’49, ’50. He was a teenager, but he alwayslooked older than his actual age. And because he wasso fascinated with the guitar and the night life of Chi-cago, he could pretty much go to the clubs and theywould let him in. He would work in the steel mill under-age during the day and at night hit the taverns or theblues clubs. So his apprenticeship was really sitting inwith the bands and watching different styles. Anyonefrom the scene of Chicago of that period, he workedwith ‘em in some form or fashion. Howlin’ Wolf, my unclesaid, took my father under his wing and said, ‘Anythingyou want to know, I’ll show you.’ They were friends tothe end until Howlin’ Wolf died. Magic Sam was an ac-tual neighbor in the apartment flat. I recall when he died,because it affected my father, he was so upset about it.

“Chicago was still into that Delta (blues style), butkind of urbanized. My father wanted a break. I think hetried several times to record for Chess. I’ve heard dif-

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f e ren t vers ionsthat he soundedtoo much like B.B.K ing . The on lyl ikeness to h imwas his last name,King. His style wasmore upbeat. Hewas more whatthey ca l l nowTexas blues style.He had a jump tohis blues. I don’tthink that fit intothe Chess mental-i ty. My fa thercame on the sceneand i t ’ s l ike ,‘Who’s this youngguy, this maverickhere? He’s a mav-erick on the scene,

trying to give blues more of a contemporary sound.”’

Once your father began to record for King, did he evermention Syd Nathan?

“I remember several things just from being in ear-shot of conversations between my mom and father aboutNathan and how he shorted my father out of his goldrecord on Hide Away. He actually made the millionmark, but Nathan didn’t want to pay the IRS on thecount. (laughs) Things like this happen. You make somemoney, but you don’t own up to it on paper, ‘cause ifyou do, you’ve got to pay the IRS on it. But Nathanwasn’t completely bad. He bought my father a brand-new station wagon. They had ‘Freddie King’ in bold blueand red letters on the side and Hide Away and ‘KingRecording Artist’ written on the side. It was like a mov-ing neon sign! To me as a child, I said, ‘Wow! This isbeautiful!’ That car was like a moving bus with a neonsign on it. When you saw it, you knew Freddie King wasin town!

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“He only had that station wagon a few weeks. Backthen, the situation was that black people couldn’t juststay anywhere. Instead of trying to find a place to stay,‘cause you had to go across the tracks, they decided tohit the road, do the gig and leave. Well, my father wasalways a fast driver. It was one of those narrow moun-tain type highways and there was an oncoming truckthat was weaving. He tried to avoid the truck and wentout of control. He smashed the station wagon up againstthis mountain. The station wagon hit with such forceagainst the mountainside, it popped off the mountainand was getting ready to take off on the side of the drop.My father was trying to control the car. The door on thepassenger side flies open and my uncle Bennie is aboutto fall out of the car. So my father grabs him. And theyhad a little poodle in the car and my Uncle Bennie grabsthe poodle. So it’s like a train of three. He’s trying topull ‘em both back in the car. He finally gets ‘em bothback in there. When he gets the car settled down andstopped, he realizes that he’s totaled his car. He’s onlyhad this car a month. So he called Nathan and toldNathan what happened. Nathan sent him another car,but he paid for this one.

“My mom got frustrated with the whole lifestyle ofthe Chicago scene. My father, he was a partier. My momdidn’t drink, she wasn’t a partier, but she loved my fa-ther. She called herself leaving my father to give him awake-up call. She made her way back to Texas whereshe’s originally from as well. My mom was always thetype of person who wouldn’t say anything until she gotticked off. Once she got mad, you couldn’t stop her fromsaying what she wanted to say. So she made a call upto Cincinnati and told Syd Nathan that she wanted tobuy a home in Dallas. She felt like that he owed myfather something for all the money he’s made. So shejust went off on Nathan and told him that he had usedhim and deserved something more than what he gave‘em. My understanding is that he sent down a couple ofthousand dollars for a down payment on a home. Andmy father moved back home. That was in ’62. He wasalready known in Dallas, ‘cause he had traveled on likethe chitlin circuit, but when he finally came here withhis family, he said, ‘This is it. I’m going to stay here.’

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“My father always had a unique way of getting alongwith everybody. It was hard to dislike him. When I saythat, I mean among the whites. Once he went to Okla-homa and I think because of car problems they werestopped in the middle of the night and they thought forsure they were goners because, you know, we’re talk-ing about the South. These guys came along and theythought they were going to have problems and prob-ably would have, but this one guy realized that my fa-ther could play a guitar. So he told my father and the

Courtesy of W

anda King

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band to follow him back to the city and they could gettheir car fixed. My father was skeptical of the situationand wasn’t quite comfortable, but once he got back tothe city, one of the white guys asked him: ‘Why don’tyou come over to the bar and show me what you cando? You say you can play the guitar, huh?’ I guess hedidn’t believe him. So they went to this club: ‘We got aguy who claims he can play the guitar.’ And my fathergot up there and star ted playing something l ikeRemington Ride, that’s a Country & Western tune!(laughs) And just blew ‘em away! And this guy, fromthat point on, whenever Freddie King came throughtown, he was there. Couldn’t nothing keep him awayfrom Freddie King. This was when he began playing(Tulsa’s) Cain’s Ballroom and Cain’s Ballroom was al-most officially Country & Western. That was like, youknow, cowboy land! but when he came to town, he waswelcome with open arms at Cain’s Ballroom. He wasnot your typical bluesman.

“The unique thing about was father’s music, it wasunheard of, a bluesman traveling with people likeFrankie Valli & the Four Seasons. A revue along withmaybe the Shirelles. Back then they had revues. Thewould have maybe ten people on the show, everyone anumber one draw. So on this show amongst all the so-called pop entertainers would be Freddie King, who fitright in with ‘em. He also did a lot of concerts and col-lege things. I remember a lot of college engagements.To me that was unique. Unlike anyone else, he couldalways get a gig on the college scene. I think he cre-ated envy and jealousy. He got that from the otherbluesmen, because they couldn’t get to that level. Hehad just expanded his horizons, that’s all.”

Did your father ever talk about other bluesmen?

“Oh, he loved ‘em. He loved B.B. King and AlbertKing. I think the greatest respect that he could pay themwas the fact that he would record their songs. I knowmy mom told me a story about when they were per-forming, T-Bone Walker and Howlin’ Wolf and MuddyWaters and my father. It was like a big blues revue. And,of course, my father had probably recorded a song byeveryone of them. So T-Bone Walker looked back and

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saw my father coming towards the stage. He said, ‘Oh,man! You better get out there quick before Freddie Kinggets there, ‘cause he’ll take your song and keep it!’(laughs) And to my father that was the funniest thing,‘cause he didn’t realize that they felt that way. They wereteasing, but still you felt some sincerity in the state-ment. Once Freddie King plays it, it’s no longer yours.So you better get up there and play your song first, beathim to it.”

What was your father doing at the time of his appear-ances on The!!!!Beat?

“He had kind of fell back down to the local scene,traveling around the areas of Texas and Oklahoma, backand forth. That’s how he got on The!!!!Beat and was onthere so many times. It was because of The!!!!Beat thatpeople like Steve Miller and Boz Scaggs got their firstopportunity to see the blues with a jump, with a con-temporary style. Steve Miller would come over quiteoften looking for my father. And my mom would say,‘Well, son, I’m sorry. He’s not here.’ So one Saturdaymy father’s in the bed asleep. He’d just come in fromplaying at one of the local clubs. And Steve Miller andthis other guy that I later learned was Boz Scaggs wereat the door and they said, ‘Is Freddie King here?’ Andmy mom said, ‘My God, they’re here again!’ So she goesback to the bedroom and says, ‘Freddie, will you pleasecome see what these boys want?’ So he gets up andgoes in there and Steve was saying something like he’strying to learn to play the guitar and he wanted to see ifhe could show him a few things on the guitar.”

Did your father have a special ‘home base’ club inDallas?

“There were a club called the Ascot Room, whichchanged its name to the Empire Room. The Bridgeport.They played the Longhorn Ballroom, which was alsoknown for years as a Country & Western place. In the’70s, a couple of hippies opened this club, Mother Blues.They were Freddie King fanatics and they said, ‘FreddieKing, you play here a few nights.’ So from the first nightuntil the day it closed, Freddie King was the biggestdraw. That’s where I first saw Stevie Ray and Jimmie

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Vaughn. They were a little older than me, but they werestill kids. These guys cut their teeth on Freddie King’smusic. There was this black booking agent and what hewould do when my father was not in the area to catch

h im do ing th i s , hewould take Jimmie outto these clubs in littleout-of-the way townsl ike Sher man andGreenville, Texas. He’dtake him to these blackc lubs and have h imper fo r m as Fredd ieKing , J r. Of courseonce he got there, theyknew he wasn’t FreddieKing! But he played thesongs close enough toFreddie that they didn’tcomplain too much. “Upstairs at MotherBlues, they had a gam-bling room where theyplayed poker. My fatherwas a gambler. Fromday one, even in Chi-cago, he gambled. Andthe owner (of Mother

Blues) was a gambler. And there were nights when hewould actually own the club, because the owner lost thebet and lost the club to him. He would be the owner ofMother Blues for months at a time, then the guy wouldsay, ‘Well, I need my club, Freddie.’ He’d say, ‘OK, man,we’ll make this deal.’ And it would go back and forth.They called it ‘Mother Blues, the Club That Freddie KingBuilt.’ It was closed right after my father died.”

When did he start touring Europe?

“His first tour I think was in ’69. He really got a kickbehind it. I saw a new look on my father, he just took ona whole new style once he came back from England. Hedidn’t know that he was that popular. I think he beganto realize the rotation of fans from black to white that

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the blues were taking. Blues was no longer a black mu-sic. If he didn’t know it during the King era, when hecreated a whole different type of blues, he knew it oncehe went to England. These young white guys like EricClapton and Mick Taylor were showing up at the clubs.He had an influence across the board overseas. I waswatching Good Morning, America and this rhythm &blues singer from England, Paul Rodgers, says his in-fluence as a singer was Freddie King. I’m saying, ‘Hedoesn’t even play the guitar!’

“His first tour overseas was like in ’69 and he wasstill wearing that pompadour. When he came back, hewas wearing a natural and shocked the heck out of us!(laughs) I said, ‘My God, my father’s gone black!’ JamesBrown at that time was being hush-hushed on the EdSullivan Show for doing Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’mProud and doing the black power sign. And my fathercame back from overseas with an Afro! Shocked theheck out of us. At one point he spent more time overthere than he did in the United States.”

When he was home with his family, what did FreddieKing enjoy?

“His thing was fishing. He just totally enjoyed fish-ing. I would go out to the lake with him and my brothersand my mom (King had seven children). When we didn’tgo, he would go out there with the band boys. Theywould fish for 24 hours at a time, then he would bringhome a hundred or more fish. He would bring home thishumongous basket of fish and he would tell us, ‘All right,girls, y’all clean the fish.’ Then he would turn aroundafter we’d cleaned the fish, gutted them and everything,he would give ‘em out to the neighbors. So the neigh-bors loved my father.

“He had this thing about westerns! I think that car-ried over from his childhood. He used to tell me how onSaturday afternoons he and his brother would go to thecountry theater, the movie house. And back then theycouldn’t sit down on the bottom. They had a balcony.And there was one particular time of day that they couldgo to see the westerns, the matinee. His favorite personwas Smiley Burnette. Everytime a western came on andSmiley Burnette was in it, he’d point him out to me:

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‘That’s Smiley Burnette! That’s him right there!’ And Ithink he was fascinated with the code of ethics of thecowboy. Fair play; do the best you can. I think that’show he carried himself through life.

“I believe that’s why he loved Country & Westernmusic. On Saturday afternoon when Buck Owens andPorter Wagoner hit the scene, Dolly Parton, he was thefirst one who told me: ‘You know that little girl rightthere? That girl can sing!’ I said, ‘No, she can’t!’ He says,‘’That little white girl can sing!’ (laughs) He would sitthere and point out people: ‘That fellow right there canplay the guitar. That fellow there, he’s going to be some-thing.’ And these were Country & Western people.

“I’ve always believed that he was a great father. Hewas a disciplinarian, which means that you pretty muchhad to do what he said on the first try. There were nosecond chances. He took time with us, the (four) girlsand the (three) boys. He was down to earth and most ofhis friends were everyday people. He was very openhearted. He could be generous up to a point, but hewasn’t generous to a fault. He didn’t believe in buyingfriendship. He was a high caliber talent. I believe he wasone of the greatest, if not the greatest actual blues playeras far as the guitar is concerned. It’s great to know that,after 18 years, he still has that power.”

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A SELECTED FREDDIE KINGDISCOGRAPHY/VIDEOGRAPHY

RECORDINGS

Blues Guitar Hero: The Influential Early SessionsAce CDCHD 454

Freddy King Sings / The Original HitsModern Blues Recordings 722

Freddy King / Just Pickin'(Includes the complete recordings fromLet's Hide Away and Dance Away and

Freddy King Gives You A BonanzaOf Instrumentals)

Modern Blues Recordings 721

Freddy King / Blues Guitar HeroAce Records 454

Let's Hide Away and Dance AwayKing 773

Hide Away: The Best of Freddy KingRhino R271510

Woman Across The RiverShelter/DCC 5034

Freddie King Is a Blues MasterAtlantic 7 90345-2

VIDEOSFreddie King in Concert

Vestapol 13010Freddie King, Dallas, Tx 1973

Vestapol 13028Freddie King Live At The Sugarbowl

Bestapol 13072

Many thanks to Mary Katherine Aldin, Bill “Hoss”Allen, Daniel Cooper and Wanda King for their help

in putting together these notes.

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Photo byAnton Joseph Mikofsky

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FROM THE!!!!BEAT, 19661. Funny Bone • 2. Have You Ever Loved A Woman • 3. San-Ho-Zay • 4. I’m Tore Down • 5. Hide Away • 6. I Love The Woman7. Papa’s Got A Brand New Bag • 8. See See Baby • 9. Sitting

On The Boatdock • 10. Shuffle • 11. She Put The WhammyOn Me • 12. San-Ho-Zay • 13. Funny Bone • 14. Hide Away

FROM SWEDEN, 197315. Have You Ever Loved A Woman

16. Blues Band Shuffle • 17. Big Leg Woman® 2001 Vestapol Productions / A division of Stefan Grossman’s Guitar Workshop Inc.

“He taught me just abouteverything I needed toknow...when and when notto make a stand...when andwhen not to show yourhand...and most important ofall...how to make love to aguitar.” — ERIC CLAPTON

Freddie King, hard-driving and perhaps driven,was only 42 when he diedon December 28, 1976. Theintensity of the per30form-ances in this video suggestan artist who burned at fullthrott le every t ime he

played. Guitarists as diverse as Eric Clapton, Michael Bloomfieldand Jerry Garcia have cited King as a formative influence. Mostof the clips in this collection come from a unique time warp, afleeting moment when Southern R&B collided with mid-60s“Mod” and rendered a show called THE!!!!BEAT.

THE!!!!BEAT’S 26 show run in 1966 may have been aheadof its time. The time it brings us is one when television program-ming for black audiences was otherwise nonexistent and bluesremained a powerful force in Southern black popular music.Freddie King was 31 at the time of THE!!!!BEAT, playing andsinging in prime form. This video collection presents all ofFreddie King’s appearances from this unique series. The videoconcludes with three tunes performed in Sweden in 1973 andshows Freddie’s artistic growth.

VESTAPOL 13014

Front Photograph hand tinted by Diane PainterRunning Time: 60 minutes • Color

Duplicated in SP Mode/Real Time DuplicationRepresentation to Music Stores by Mel Bay Publications

Nationally distributed by Rounder Records,One Camp Street, Cambridge, MA 02140

ISBN: 1-57940-903-2

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