📍Forrest City, AR 72335, USA
1931 – 1950“I was born Albert Nelson on a cotton plantation near Indianola, Mississippi, in April 1923, one of thirteen children. My father played guitar in a family gospel group, and I sang with them at church, but he left when I was five. When I was eight, my mother, Mary Blevins, took me and two of my sisters to the country around Forrest City, Arkansas, on the edge of the Delta, where we picked cotton on the plantations from sunup to sundown. I loved music, but we had no money for instruments, so I made my first guitar out of a cigar box, a piece of a bush and a strand of broom wire. I'm left-handed, and nobody taught me, so I just turned the guitar upside down and played it that way, with the low strings at the bottom, bending the notes with my strong fingers. Later I bought a real guitar for a dollar and a quarter. I listened to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson, and later T-Bone Walker, and I worked all kinds of jobs, picking cotton, driving a bulldozer and working construction. I was a big man, six foot four and around two hundred and fifty pounds, and they later called me the Velvet Bulldozer. I started playing professionally with a group called the Groove Boys in Osceola, Arkansas, and later moved to Gary and St. Louis. My records for Stax in Memphis, like Born Under a Bad Sign and Crosscut Saw, played on my Flying V guitar, which I named Lucy, made me one of the three great Kings of the blues, alongside B.B. and Freddie, and influenced Stevie Ray Vaughan, Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.”
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