Albert King

Albert King held his guitar wrong.

Left-handed, he played a right-handed Flying V flipped upside down - never restrung, strings running backward, bends pulled in a direction no method book ever taught. It wasn't a style choice. It was what a poor kid in Depression-era Arkansas did when there was no money for the "correct" instrument and no one around to say otherwise.

That accident became one of the most stolen sounds in American music.

Born on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1923, King spent two decades on the edges of the blues before Memphis's Stax Records - a soul label with no blues artists on its roster - paired him with a house band tight enough to let a single bent string carry an entire bar. The record they made together, Born Under a Bad Sign, became a songbook other people got famous from. Eric Clapton built Cream's version of the title track out of it. Jimi Hendrix studied King from the crowd. A teenage Stevie Ray Vaughan begged to sit in one night in Austin and got a lesson he carried for the rest of his life.

King spent the next twenty-five years watching younger, richer guitarists sell out arenas playing variations of a vocabulary he'd invented - and waiting for an industry that was in no hurry to say his name. It finally did, at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, twenty-one years after he was gone to hear it.

The Velvet Bulldozer is the story of how a "wrong" way of holding a guitar became one of the rightest sounds in American music - and how long it took the world to catch up.

Know the story. Hear the blues differently.