33 Facts About Freddie King

Freddie King was an American blues guitarist, singer and songwriter.

Mostly known for his soulful and powerful voice and distinctive guitar playing, King had a major influence on electric blues music and on many later blues guitarists.

Freddie King started learning the guitar from his mother and his uncle.

Freddie King moved to Chicago when he was a teenager; there he formed his first band the Every Hour Blues Boys with guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and drummer Frank "Sonny" Scott.

Freddie King based his guitar style on Texas blues and Chicago blues influences.

The album Freddy Freddie King Sings showcased his singing talents and included the record chart hits "You've Got to Love Her with a Feeling" and "I'm Tore Down".

Freddie King later became involved with producers who were more oriented to rhythm and blues and rock and was one of the first bluesmen to have a multiracial backing band at performances.

Freddie King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by ZZ Top in 2012 and into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1982.

Freddie King's instrumental "Hide Away" was included in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's list of "500 Songs that Shaped Rock".

Freddie King was ranked 25th in the Rolling Stone magazine's 2003 edition of "100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time" and 15th in the 2011 edition.

When Freddie King was six years old, his mother and his uncle began teaching him to play the guitar.

Almost as soon as he had moved to Chicago, Freddie 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.

Freddie King formed his first band, the Every Hour Blues Boys, with the guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and the drummer Frank "Sonny" Scott.

In 1952, while employed at a steel mill, the eighteen-year-old Freddie King occasionally worked as a sideman with such bands as the Little Sonny Cooper Band and Earl Payton's Blues Cats.

Freddie King was repeatedly rejected in auditions for the South Side's Chess Records, the premier blues label, which was the home of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter.

The bassist and producer Willie Dixon, during a period of estrangement from Chess in the late 1950s, asked Freddie King to come to Cobra Records for a session, but the results have never been heard.

Meanwhile, Freddie King established himself as perhaps the biggest musical force on the West Side.

Freddie King played along with Magic Sam and reputedly played backing guitar, uncredited, on some of Sam's tracks for Mel London's Chief and Age labels, though King does not stand out on them.

Freddie 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".

Willie Dixon later claimed that he had recorded Freddie King performing "Hide Away" for Cobra Records in the late 1950s, but such a version has never surfaced.

Freddie King's availability was noticed by the 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 and My Feeling for the Blues, produced by Curtis for the Atlantic subsidiary Cotillion Records.

In 1969 Freddie King hired Jack Calmes as his manager, who secured him an appearance at the 1969 Texas Pop Festival, alongside Led Zeppelin and others, and this led to Freddie King's signing a recording contract with Shelter Records, a new label established by the rock pianist Leon Russell and the record producer Denny Cordell and recorded at their studio, The Church Studio in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Freddie King treated King as an important artist, flying him to Chicago to the former Chess studios to record the album Getting Ready and providing a lineup of top session musicians, including Russell.

Freddie King performed alongside the big rock acts of the day, such as Eric Clapton and Grand Funk Railroad, and for a young, mainly white audience, along with the white tour drummer Gary Carnes, for three years, before signing with RSO Records.

Freddie King had an intuitive style, often creating guitar parts with vocal nuances.

Freddie King achieved this by using the open-string sound associated with Texas blues and the raw, screaming tones of West Side, Chicago blues.

Freddie King later played several slimline semi-hollow body Gibson electric guitars, including an ES-335, ES-345, and ES-355.

Freddie King used a plastic thumb pick and a metal index-finger pick.

Freddie King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, and placed 15th in Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.

In Michael Corcoran's words, Freddie King "merged the most vibrant characteristics of both [Chicago and Texas] regional styles and became the biggest guitar hero of the mid-sixties British blues revivalists, who included Eric Clapton, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac".

Freddie King was among many pioneering African-American blues musicians to embrace the British blues scene and tour its club circuit in the late 1960s.

Freddie King's lasting influence has insured Freddie King's recognition as one of the great postwar blues masters.