Freddie King "the Texas Cannonball", and one of "The Three Kings Of Blues" (see Albert King post) is a blues guitar master and often underrated.
Freddie was a major influence on British and American blues-rock musicians Stevie Ray Vaughan and his brother Jimmy, Jerry Garcia, Ronnie Earl, Peter Green and Eric Clapton.
"King had an intuitive style, often creating guitar parts with vocal nuances.He achieved this by using the open string sound associated with Texas blues and the raw, screaming tones of West Side Chicago blues. In his early career he played a gold top Gibson Les Paul with P-90 pickups through a Gibson GA-40 amplifier, later moving on to Gibson ES-345 guitars, using a plastic thumb pick and a metal index-finger pick to achieve an aggressive finger attack. He had a relatively more aggressive and creative style of improvisation than others such as, B.B King and Albert King, considered by many to be a more exploratory and less traditional approach."
Near-constant touring took its toll on him (he was on the road almost 300 days out of the year) and Freddie died aged 42 on 28th December 1976.
Here's Freddie playing an incendiary "Boogie Funk" in the early 70's.
Big collar.. Big man.. Big sound !
