Texas Blues Guitar

`Don’t you ever sleep?’” King got his first electric guitar at age
seventeen, and in 1956 he began accompanying harmonica
player Earle Payton. In 1958 King quit his job at the steel mill
and formed his own band, performing at such West Side clubs
as the Casbah, the Squeeze Club, and one he immortalized,
Mel’s Hideaway Lounge.
King had tried without success to interest Chess in re-
cording him. However, pianist/bandleader Sonny Thompson
signed King to Federal in 1960 and his first session yielded
three hits, “Have You Ever Loved a Woman,” “See See Baby”
and the instrumental “Hide Away.” 1961 was King’s year on
the charts; he had six top 10 R&B hits, a remarkable run for a
new artist. He appeared on package tours with the likes of
Jimmy Reed and Gladys Knight. “I did fifty of those one-nighter
tours at $250 a night,” King recalled. In 1963, he moved his
family to Dallas.
Even if he never reprised his 1961 chart success, King
frequently returned to the Federal-King studios in Cincinnati
to record. Between August 1960 and September 1966, King
recorded 77 titles for King and Federal, 30 of which were in-
strumentals. His friendship with King Curtis led to two late
1960s albums for Atlantic’s Cotillion label, but they didn’t of-
fer King’s career the push it needed at a time when ‘the counter
culture’ was discovering blues. That impetus came via an ap-
pearance at 1969’s Texas Pop Festival, where King shared the
bill with Led Zeppelin and Ten Years After, among others. “All
of Led Zeppelin’s guys were standing there watching him with
their mouths open,” recalls King’s longtime manager Jack
Calmes. The Shelter label, formed jointly by Leon Russell and
Joe Cocker’s producer, Denny Cordell, signed King in 1970
and offered his career a new lease on life. Getting Ready in-
troduced “Going Down,” later covered by Jeff Beck, and King’s
new ‘heavy’ blues sound took him from the Texas chitlin and
frat party circuits to the Fillmore and rock arena circuit, open-
ing for the likes of Creedence Clearwarer Revival and Grand
Funk Railroad.
The debt of England’s blues-based rockers to King was
partly repaid when Eric Clapton’s RSO label signed him in 1974.
King made two albums for RSO and appeared at such venues
as London’s Crystal Palace Bowl alongside Clapton. He toured
internationally while continuing to be a legend in Texas, where
a mural of King appeared on the wall of Austin’s legendary
Armadillo World Headquarters. Robust and always immensely