Excerpted from Blues Unlimited: Essential Interviews from the Original Blues Magazine, edited by Bill Greensmith, Mike Rowe, and Mark Camarigg. Copyright © 2015 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Used with permission of the University of Illinois Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reprinted, reproduced, posted on another website or distributed by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
From an interview conducted by Mike Leadbitter originally published in Blues Unlimited magazine Oct/Nov 1974
Like most of his contemporaries, Freddie King is just a plain old country boy. Born on a farm outside Gilmer, a small town near Longview, Texas, he was raised in a rural environment and his first experience of city life came at the age of 16, when he defied migratory patterns and moved North East rather than West. Shaking with cold, he arrived in Chicago during the December of 1950, clutching a Harmony guitar and wishing he’d never left the South. But he had little choice in the matter: his mother was determined to join her relations in that town.
Freddie’s grandmother lived on the West Side and the King family settled there at Bishop Street and Adams. The first thing they all had to do was find work, but big for his age, Freddie had few problems. He just said he was 18 and was quickly hired by a local steel mill. In spite of getting his legs scarred in an accident, he stayed on at the same place for seven years relying on the money earned for the buying of new guitars and other fresh and exciting indulgences. Then, amazed by the amount of music to be heard in his new home, he really fell in love with the blues and at night ran wild, walking the streets to hang out at neighborhood bars though well under age. Wherever there was music you’d find him, and during 1951 he began to polish his technique, borrowing freely from men like Eddie Taylor, Jimmy Rogers, and Robert Jr. Lockwood while developing a pretty unique blues style first learned in Texas. In the habit of really hitting the strings on his acoustic box in an attempt to achieve more volume, he found it difficult to come to terms with electric models and eventually found himself abandoning the softer, mellower, yet amplified approach of his heroes in favor of the harsher more astringent sounds beloved by other youngsters of his age. His became the “new” Chicago blues and he would join the ranks of Magic Sam, Otis Rush, Buddy Guy, Syl Johnson, and so many others, building his reputation alongside theirs. How this all came about is quite fascinating and best left to Freddie to explain.
We always kept two or three guitars around our house in Texas all the time. They all played—my mother, my uncles, they all played guitars. Leon King—he got killed in a car wreck when I was 11 years old—he taught me a lot of stuff. I played in church and in school—there was nothing going on in school that I wasn’t in. Lots of guys played around there. There was one guy about the same age as my mother. They called him Shorty, Shorty Brown. He was a piano player and every time they give something like a minstrel show in school, they got him to play piano. He and I would play together. He could dance, too, and he’s still living in Longview.
I’d always go to Chicago when school was out, after I started high school. My grandmother, my mother’s brothers and things, they lived there. So when I finished school, after I was 16, we all just went there. I was playing like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Muddy Waters when I got to Chicago, but Jimmy Rogers and Eddie Taylor were different. They really inspired me. I stayed around them all the time. Every time they look up, I’m coming. If I couldn’t catch one, I’d catch the other. They’d say, “Don’t you ever sleep?” There was a guy in Chicago, identical to T-Bone Walker, L. C. McKinley. He was playing the same stuff and he used to go as “T-Bone Jr.,” but, see, I wasn’t thinking too much of that, because I wanted to play like those other two cats. That was the style I wanted to play in. Open key of “E” or “A.” Those were the only keys I played in then. Those clamps—capos—used to call ’em “cheaters”—I seen where they changed keys with them. So I went and bought me one. Same thing Eddie was doing, I was doing, too.
Eddie was playing at the Kitty Kat on Madison Street then with Willie Foster and Floyd Jones. I’d go in there, but so many people crowded in, the cat told me not to come in anymore as I was under age. His name was Mike, too. But I’d slip through all this crowd anyway and make my way around to the bandstand, where I could sit and just watch Eddie. And then I was at a backyard party once and he brought his whole band down there to jam some numbers. So Eddie was showing me how to play in “E” and I said to him, “Say, man, where you live?” He acted like a fool and gave me his address, and after that I was up his house so much they thought I lived there.
See, after that I worried Jimmy Rogers at the clubs. He was showing me how to use these picks. He was playing with Muddy Waters and in intermission he’d go to walk off and I’d grab him, make him show me this and that. And then there was Robert Jr. Lockwood. I worried him pretty bad, too, but you couldn’t really worry Robert Jr. He liked helping people. He loved showing people. Now, this is when I really got into the T-Bone Walker, B. B. King style. Robert had a weird sound like them and I wanted to learn some of that, too. So we got to talking and laughing and he was showing me how to make these chords and Johnny Shines did, too. They said if I could play in the keys they showed me, I could get rid of the clamp—throw the son of a bitch away. They showed me how to play without it. I’d sit up all night practicing, but it was hard for me to do that. But finally, I caught on to it.
I was 17 when I got my first electric guitar, and Willie D. Warren (mistakenly referred to as “Willie Wine” in earlier Freddie King articles) signed for it (acted as guarantor). It was a Kay, but it got stolen and then I turned around and got me another one. A Sunnyland guitar—they’re made by Kay too, but that got stolen, too. And I lost my amplifier at the same time. So then, I got me another one. A friend, Lee Edward Brown, signed for me to get it. He worked for the Curtis Candy Company, he didn’t play anything. I kept that one for about a year and then I got me a Les Paul (Gibson) and that’s when I was playing with Earlee Payton—’56, I started playing with him.
The first guy I ever played with was Sunnyland Charles at a place called Red’s Playhall on Madison. He was with a harmonica player named Johnny Dee—really good harmonica player. Charles plays guitar and, really, his was the first electric guitar I played. When I first met him he had some cousins living in the same building as me, and he came in there with his guitar and I said, “Let me see your guitar.” He said, “Come go with me,” and he taken me to a club called the Spot. It was on Maple and do you know who was playing there? It was Johnnie Temple and Baby Face Leroy. I’d never played electric before, but Charles said, “Get up there and play one.” I said, “I’m not good enough to play with those cats, man,” but they pulled me up there anyway. A couple of months later I met Charles again and he said, “Hey, man, I’m playing down on Madison there. Why don’t you come by?” So I started playing with him. I was 17 years old.
About a block down from where Charles was playing at Red’s was the Kitty Kat. I met Sonny Cooper there before I did Sonny Scott. See, I’d go from Red’s to the Kitty Kat, and on down the street from there was Ralph’s Club, where Memphis Slim was playing, and he had Lee Cooper (guitar) with him. They had a really good band, but on every corner at Damen and Madison there was a band playing. There was the Cedar Club, the Royal Revue—King Kolax was there. And over the other side of the street was the Paris Club, where Danny Overbea was playing. Then I’d go over to Lake Street—go straight across—and there’s Elmore James playing over there. Elmore had Johnny Jones’s band. There was Ernest Cotton, Boyd Atkins blowing the horns, and then there was Odie Payne. But Odie was working with Jimmy Rogers for a while, and they used Kansas City Red until he came back. Didn’t have no car then. I was walking, man, I was always walking. I wasn’t frightened of anything. They call it skid row down there, but it was home to me.