Freddie King is a Blues Master

One of the three reigning Kings of blues is Freddie, who has a similar style and approach to the music as BB and Albert does, with clean but agressive guitar lines coming out of his Gibson ES335 and his soulful singing style. This record was produced by King Curtis, who also appears here and helped to write some of the numbers.

The packaging on this is really nice, with the insert folding out into the original album liner notes. Here, Curtis talks about highlighting Freddie’s voice, which he does to good effect throughout, but the man’s guitar is still the star. Spectacular playing on each and every song, with interesting licks and expressive voicings. A solid band backs him up and some songs add nice keyboards and cool horn lines from Curtis and others.

A highlight is his take on Allan Toussaint’s “Get Out of My Life Woman” with its electric piano and slashing guitar riffs. Of course, this is probably one of my faves just because I am most familiar with it, but all of the tunes are superb, with instrumentals augmenting the vocals, some funky numbers, some slower tunes and a helluva lot of great guitar playing!

Oddly, I don’t own any other of Freddie’s albums at the moment, but on the strength of this one, I will have to remedy that situation!