King's signature vibrato developed as a result of his failure to master White's slide technique. Already a famous musician, White took King under his wing. By the mid-1940s, King moved to Memphis and sought out his cousin, Bukka White. King bought his first guitar for $15 when he was 12 and played it while singing tenor with the Elkhorn Jubilee Singers, a gospel group he organized with a cousin and two friends. Other key influences were Gypsy guitarist Django Reinhardt from Belgium and saxophonists Lester Young and Louis Jordan. The swinging Texan who pioneered the electric guitar along with Charlie Christian. They entered my soul and stayed." As a teenager, King fell under the spell of T-Bone Walker, Their guitars were hooked up to their feelings, just like their voices … No one melded my musical manner like Blind Lemon and Lonnie. I heard them talking to me," King said in his autobiography, Blues All Around Me. "Blind Lemon and Lonnie hit me the hardest, I believe, because their voices were so distinct, natural, and believable. He listened to the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson on an aunt's Victrola. His earliest musical memories were the hollers of fellow field workers and his first exposure to the guitar came in church, where he heard the Reverend Archie Fair play. He then lived with his maternal grandmother, his father in nearby Lexington, and on his own, supervised by an extended family of aunts, uncles, and caring white plantation owners. His parents separated when he was four, and he lived with his mother until her death when he was nine. King was born September 16, 1925, on a farm near Itta Bena, Mississippi.
His rise from picking cotton in Mississippi to touring the world has become part of the mythology of the American Dream. His story is one of the most amazing in American music. King is credited with bringing vibrato to the electric guitar, and the stinging, fluttering sound of his guitar, named Lucille, was totally unique and instantly recognizable. Although he never attained the widespread commercial success enjoyed by others, King rose to his billing "King of the Blues" without compromising his style or musicianship. His fusion of acoustic country blues with jazz set the stage for a half century of development in African American music. No blues or rock 'n' roll musician in the postwar era in America could escape his influence, either directly or indirectly. King is the literal personification of blues.
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