Little Freddie King (English version)

Little Freddie King (born Fread Eugene Martin, July 19, 1940) is an American Delta Blues guitarist. His style is based on that of Freddie King, but his approach to country blues is original.

King, a cousin of Lightning’ Hopkins, was born in McComb, Mississippi and learned to play the guitar from his father. In 1954, at the age of 14, he moved to New Orleans. He performed in juke joints with his friends Babe Stovall, Slim Harpo, and Champion Jack Dupree, playing both acoustic and electric guitar.

He recorded the first electric blues album in New Orleans with Harmonica Williams in 1969. In 1976, King undertook a European tour with Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker. His next recording opportunity came in 1996, twenty-seven years after his first, with the release of Swamp Boogie. King's Sing Sang Sung (2000) was recorded live at the Dream Palace in Faubourg Marigny.

King is a charter member of the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival and has played at the festival for 42 years. He is a member of the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame. He was selected three times as Blues Performer of the Year in New Orleans. He was honored with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker in McComb, Mississippi.

His 2012 album, Chasing tha Blues, won Best Blues Album at the 12th Annual Independent Music Awards.

King's most recent album, Messin’ Around tha Living Room, was released in 2015.

He appears in the 2015 documentary film I Am the Blues. 

From his two-toned Stacy Adams shoes to his colorful felt Homburg hat—to say nothing of his gritty guitar and vocal styles—Little Freddie King is just that, an authentic article of New Orleans.

Stirring up crowds is nothing new to King, who’s been playing the blues in the Crescent City for nearly 50 years. But since being displaced to Dallas after Hurricane Katrina, and returning to the city half a year ago to reside in the Musician’s Village, things seem to be on the rise. His fourth CD, the self-released Messin’ Around tha House, continues to spread his gut-bucket blues gospel far and wide while his self-contained band suddenly seem to be everywhere, from clubs all over town to festivals all over the country.

King, who spent his first three decades in New Orleans literally soaking up more life and near death—shootings, stabbings, jail sentences, drinking, all night rambling and plenty of hard work—than most folks who make it to a healthy 67, takes a philosophically humble view of his recent good fortune.

“I never did expect it. But when you don’t even think about it and just give it up; don’t care no more, then boom! All at once that’s when it happens.”

Not long ago, the only place King and his band could be seen was on the last Friday of every month at BJ’s Lounge, a ramshackle corner bar room buried in the bowels of the upper Ninth Ward, just a stone’s throw from the Industrial Canal. A run-down dive of the type that’s rapidly disappearing—as much due to gentrification as levee breaches—BJ’s remains the penultimate place to catch one of the most unique gigs in the whole shrinking blues world.

Past the pool table and through thick thunderclouds of cigarette smoke, Little Freddie steps to the microphone and begins finger-picking his hollow-bodied guitar, throwing in distorted, gnarled chords that ring with nasty tones snatched directly from the heyday of John Lee Hooker and Lightnin’ Hopkins. His wardrobe is Canal Street finery at its most swirling, be it purple, yellow, bright red, royal blue or any combination thereof, and is as sartorially splendid as his music is primal.

Like Hooker and Hopkins, who King cites as his two favorites, it’s immediately clear that he can stand on his own, with just his guitar and stomping foot for accompaniment. But then drummer “Wacko” Wade Wright makes his presence known with an authoritative cymbal crash and bassist Anthony “Skeet” Anderson anchors the rhythm with his ancient Vox violin-shaped bass. The final ingredient is Bobby Lewis Ditullo, who unobtrusively lays down the melody with lonesome harp wails that slowly intensify as the groove takes off.

Those who make the New Orleans nightclub scene regularly will notice that, aside from their sound, there’s something else that makes this band unique: none of its members are ever seen playing with anyone else, a rarity in a city where everyone seems to play with everyone, and more often than not, don’t really rehearse except when they’re onstage.

Besides white R&B singers like Byrne and Ford, Wright and Anderson backed local black stars like Eddie Bo, Bobby Mitchell and Irma Thomas. Wright even played drums for Huey “Piano” Smith and the Clowns one night, but the parallel universe of the New Orleans blues scene might as well have been miles away.

In reality, like everything in the Crescent City, the two worlds existed right on top of one another, but rarely co-mingled. New Orleans blues was truly an underground phenomenon, a back alley world populated by artists like Babe Stovall, Lil’ Son Jackson, Boogie Bill Webb and Polka Dot Slim. Their countrified styles may have originated other places, but were somehow uniquely New Orleans, shot through with an urban electricity that could have come from nowhere else.

Though his father, Jessie James Martin, was an itinerant blues man himself, King developed his style wholly in his adopted city.

“When I first came down here I was looking for a job,” says King. “Our school had given a picnic down here and I took a liking to New Orleans. I told my mama, ‘I like it down in New Orleans. I’m going back down there and stay.’ She said, ‘You’ve got no business down there. Someone will kidnap you and kill you.’ I said, ‘I’m going to go.’ And sure enough I did.”

Over the years, King would do everything from slinging bananas on the riverfront to repairing television sets in his home, but in the first weeks that he arrived in New Orleans, his interest in music ignited.

As for the records that King listened to most during this period, he cites Muddy Waters, Jimmy Reed and Blind Lemon Jefferson as favorites. “But I also loved country music like Lonnie Glosson, Ernest Tubb and Wayne Raney; I’d listen to it at work to help me concentrate.”King’s first gig came about through local musician Lloyd “Curly” Givens, who owned a thrift shop on Conti Street that also specialized in corn liquor.

“My friends would come by my house with some drinks,” says King. “I’d be playing my guitar and when we ran out of alcohol, we’d go buy this corn liquor that Givens was bootlegging, He found out I could play a little bit because I was doing pretty good on two or three songs.”

Things improved vastly when King began gigging with Big Joe Williams, Boogie Bill Webb and Polka Dot Slim. “Polka Dot played spoons and harmonica and when he got a job, a lot of the guys he played with wouldn’t show up so he would call me. We played a lot on Bourbon Street.”

Though King made some never-released recordings for the tiny Booker/ Invicta concern on South Rampart Street, he debuted on record in 1966 playing “chop guitar” on Slim’s fantastic reading of Earl King’s “Trick Bag,” released on the Baton Rouge-based Apollo label. It was around this time that King began playing with Harmonica Williams, with whom he’d form his first band and cut the first electric blues album in New Orleans history.

Wright and Anderson began playing with King in the mid-1990s when he needed a band for the Fest. “He came off with a lot of original stuff which we really liked,” says Wright. “We were used to slick R&B, but Freddie was all over the place.”

The lineup was finalized with the addition of Ditullo, whose bartending job at BJ’s presented them with the now-legendary monthly gig that solidified their sound. Since the bar had no live music license, the band played for tips, but the synergy they developed was priceless. Orleans Records’ Carlo Ditta had already put King back on the map with his first solo CD Swamp Boogie, but it was 1999’s Sing Sang Sung, also released on Orleans, that first captured the band in full lowdown swing.

 “I call Freddie’s music trance blues,” he concludes. “You can sit down with him for a couple of hours and he’ll play rhythms and sounds that you’ve never heard before. It’s just hypnotic.”

Discography

• Harmonica Williams and Little Freddie King (1969), Ahura Mazda Records
• Swamp Boogie (1996), Orleans Records
• Sing Sang Sung (live album) (2000), Orleans Records
• FQF Live (2003), WWOZ (Library of Congress Recording)
• You Don't Know What I Know (2005), Fat Possum Records
• Messin' Around tha House (2008), Madewright Records
• Gotta Walk with Da King (2010), Madewright Records
• Jazzfest Live (2011), MunckMix, Inc.
• Back in Vinyl, LP (2011), APO Records
• Chasing tha Blues (2012), Madewright Records
• Messin’ Around tha Living Room (2015), Madewright Records