Albert King

Albert King played left-handed on a guitar strung for a right-handed player, held upside down, a method he taught himself after buying his first real guitar for $1.25 at nineteen. He earned his living driving a bulldozer and recorded for several small labels before moving to Memphis in 1966 and signing with Stax. The 1967 album Born under a Bad Sign made him famous with Black and white audiences alike. He called his Flying V Gibson Lucy, and he once performed with the St. Louis Symphony. The marker stands on Front Avenue in Indianola.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center — 0.3 mi
  A museum built around the brick cotton gin in Indianola where B.B. King worked in the 1940s, with his grave in a memorial garden on the grounds.
• Dockery Farms — 19 mi
  The plantation on the Sunflower River where Charley Patton lived and played from about 1900, now a working farm, a National Register district and a Mississippi Blues Trail stop.
• Fannie Lou Hamer Memorial Garden — 21 mi
  The small park on Byron Street in Ruleville where Fannie Lou Hamer is buried beside her husband, with a Freedom Trail marker and a 2012 bronze statue.
• Winterville Mounds — 24 mi
  A Mississippian ceremonial center north of Greenville, built by hand from about AD 1000, with a 55-foot Temple Mound and twelve of its original twenty-three mounds still standing.

More markers nearby

• Craig Claiborne — steps away
• Irene Magruder — 0.3 mi
• Club Ebony — 0.3 mi
• Wayne and Minnie Cox Park — 0.4 mi