I've been seeing Albert King on PBS a lot recently, playing with Stevie Ray Vaughan for the television series known as In Session (1983), and it's just great. Albert King is rarely given the respect that he deserves by the media (although that's not the case among musicians), so I'll make a simple statement here. No blues guitarist has been more influential on the generation of blues-rockers to follow. His time-feel, vocabulary, attack and pitch control have been studied and emulated by Hendrix, Clapton, Vaughan and many, many others. I'm not saying that B.B. (no relation) and Robert Johnson weren't as important - they were - but not more. And it's astonishing to realize that, like Hendrix, he was left-handed and played a right-handed guitar upside down. But unlike Hendrix, he didn't re-string it! You can see it clearly in this video from the show mentioned above: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Odemgv5eLok&feature=related. And here's "Born Under a Bad Sign", from the album of the same name recorded with the formidable Booker T. and the M.G.'s in 1967: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-f3XipcBqA&feature=related.