King based
his guitar style on Texas blues and Chicago blues influences. His best-known
recordings include the early instrumentals “Hide Away” (1961),
“San-Ho-Zay,” (1961) and “The Stumble” (1962). The album
Freddy King Sings showcased his singing talents and included the record chart
hits “You’ve Got to Love Her with a Feeling” and “I’m Tore
Down”. He later became involved with more rhythm and blues- and
rock-oriented producers and was one of the first bluesmen to have a multiracial
backing band at live performances.
According to
his birth certificate, he was named Fred King, and his parents were Ella Mae
King and J. T. Christian. When Freddie was six years old, his mother and his
uncle began teaching him to play the guitar. In autumn 1949, he and his family
moved from Dallas to the South Side of Chicago.
In 1952 King
started working in a steel mill. In the same year, he married another Texas
native, Jessie Burnett. They had seven children.
Almost as
soon as he had moved to Chicago, King started sneaking into South Side
nightclubs, where he heard blues performed by Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf,
T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, and Sonny Boy Williamson. King formed his first
band, the Every Hour Blues Boys, with the guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and the
drummer Frank “Sonny” Scott. In 1952, while employed at a steel mill,
the eighteen-year-old King occasionally worked as a sideman with such bands as
the Little Sonny Cooper Band and Earl Payton’s Blues Cats. In 1953 he recorded
with the latter for Parrot Records, but these recordings were never released.
As the 1950s progressed, King played with several of Muddy Waters’ sidemen and
other Chicago mainstays, including the guitarist’s Jimmy Rogers, Robert
Lockwood Jr., Eddien Taylor, and Hound Dog Taylor; the bassist Willie Dixon;
the pianist Memphis Slim; and the harmonicist Little Walter.