Albert King once said Jimi Hendrix couldn’t play the blues
B.B. King is the blues star who you could barely imagine rock ‘n’ roll without. While he never stood in the middle ground, something about his cutting approach to the scared 12-bars heralded the future. He yielded his fateful axe – Lucille – with individualism like no other until Albert King came along.
“He called his guitar ‘Lucy,’ and for a while, he went around saying he was my brother,” B.B. King mused. “That bothered me until I got to know him and realised, he was right; he wasn’t my brother in blood, but he sure was my brother in the blues.” This made King the master’s apprentice, and his own unique blues stylings had him brushing shoulders with many of rock’s greatest guitarists.
One fateful night, however, he had had enough with these showman charlatans and decided that it was about time the mighty Jimi Hendrix was taught a lesson (all of this, of course, was purely in Albert King’s eyes). “He put out that song ‘Foxy Lady’, that wasn’t the blues,” King once cuttingly recalled.
The esteemed ‘Born Under a Bad Sign’ bluesman continued: “Everybody says, ‘Well, he’s a hell of a blues player.’ No way, man. We played many shows together, and that night, I taught him a lesson about the blues. Now I could’ve very easily played his songs, but he couldn’t play mine.”
While Hendrix was not strictly a blues player, he occasionally ventured into the traditional style, but Albert bashed even this. “‘Red House’? I think I heard it one time,” he said of Hendrix’s blues outing. “[It was lacking] oh yeah, oh yeah.”
It was Albert King’s opinion that his rock had the show but not enough of the core. “Big tall amplifiers staked up on one another. He’d punch a button and get some smoke, punch a button and get something else, take his guitar and set it on fire, ram it through his amplifier. But I know what he was leaving out. He was leaving out the basic part of the blues,” he said.
Hendrix, however, didn’t want to play the blues. “I’m just playing the way I feel and if that sounds like blues well you can call it anything you want, but it’s no revival kit. Why go back into the past?” he questioned.
Continuing: “Why go back there and drag out ‘Blue Suede Shoes‘ just because you want to be hip to be defined rock which is a drag in the first place because those people aren’t offering you anything this very instant are they?” This desire to bring something new to guitar playing is an element that made his illuminating ways soar.
