Albert Collins playing live in 1990
Born in Leona, Texas, October 1, 1932 Albert Collins was an American electric blues guitarist and singer (and occasional harmonica player) whose recording career began in the 1960s in Texas and whose fame eventually took him to stages across the US, Europe, Japan and Australia.
A distant relative of Lightnin’ Hopkins he grew up learning about music and playing guitar. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, he absorbed the blues sounds and styles from Texas, Mississippi and Chicago.
Collins began recording in 1958 and released singles, including many instrumentals such as the million selling “Frosty” in 1962. In the spring of 1965 he moved to Kansas City, Missouri where he made a name for himself. This was also where he met his future wife, Gwendolyn.
Throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, Collins toured the United States, Canada, Europe and Japan. He was becoming a popular blues musician and was an influence for Coco Montoya, Robert Cray, Gary Moore, Debbie Davies, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Jonny Lang, Susan Tedeschi, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, John Mayer and Frank Zappa.
He regularly named John Lee Hooker and organist Jimmy McGriff, along with Hopkins, Guitar Slim and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown as major influences on his own playing.
In 1983, he won the W. C. Handy Award for his album Don’t Lose Your Cool, which won the award for Best Blues Album of the Year. In 1987, he shared a Grammy for the album Showdown! which he recorded with Robert Cray and Johnny Copeland. The following year his solo release Cold Snap was also nominated for a Grammy.
Alongside George Thorogood and the Destroyers and Bo Diddley, Collins performed at Live Aid in 1985, playing “The Sky Is Crying” and “Madison Blues”, at JFK Stadium in Philadelphia. He was the only black blues artist to appear.
He made his last visit to London, England in March 1993 and after falling ill at a show in Switzerland in late July 1993, he was diagnosed with lung cancer which had metastasized to his liver. With an expected survival time of four months parts of his last album, Live ’92/’93, were recorded at shows that September; he died shortly afterwards, in November at the age of 61.
Source: Wikipedia
