ALBERT KING
With his trademark overbending technique, he made his guitar scream and holler
Nicknamed ‘The Velvet Bulldozer’ and standing somewhere between 6 ft 4 in and 6 ft 7 in, Albert King was a literal giant of the blues and a man of seriously unique musical talent. Against his considerable stature, his guitars often looked like miniscule toys, but he wrenched from them some of the biggest and boldest notes you’re ever likely to hear.
V’s up
As a left-handed player in the mid-20th century, King would hardly have been spoiled for choice when it came to instruments designed speci cally for his needs, particularly early on in his career. But he got around this issue of accessibility by ipping a regular right-handed Gibson Flying V upside-down, dropping into some unorthodox open tunings and guring out an approach that was altogether his own.
Because of the way his upside-down guitar was strung, with the bass notes at the bottom and the treble notes at the top, he couldn’t fret chords in quite the same way as his righthanded contemporaries and he chose not to make rhythm a focus of his playing. Instead, King doubled down on dramatic lead playing, making his guitar scream, holler and sing with his trademark overbending technique. Unlike most blues guitarists, who mine emotional nuance from a mixture of mostly quarter-, half- and full-tone bends, King went big, often bending his notes one-and-a-half or two tones wide. Really, it’s enough to make your ngers bleed just thinking about it! Certainly, his muscular brawn played a part in this ability, but he also bene ted from an advantage known only to lefties…
Left-handed benefits
With the highest pitched strings at the skyward edge of the fretboard, he was able to pull down on them to execute bends, rather than pushing them upwards, as is common practice for right-handed players. The hand is naturally much stronger when working in this direction, making it much easier for him to incorporate th
