Little Freddie King
New Orleans, Louisiana, United States | INDIE
Music
Press
"Freddie was one of the highlights of the Blues Estafette 03, and he has that MAGIC juke joint sound that is rarely heard at festivals."
"It's hard to reconcile the gentle and talkative LFK I interviewed in 2004 with stories of his early days when he was known as 'Rough & Tumble'. For years, he was a hard drinking, angry man and his body bears many scars from these younger days."
- Cella Huggins/Scott M. Bock
King's dirty guitar plunks and hey-there-see-ya-later relationship to conventional intonation immediately set him apart from the pack of sorry-ass pretenders who've turned da blooze into the soundtrack for truck commericals. - Rob Cambre
It's a testimony to the perfect fit of these two entities that neither gets changed much on "You Don't Know What I Know". Fat Possum has let Freddie be Freddie, and the label's money means that he's never sounded better than ever. He plays hypnotic, repetitive, sometimes atonal blues on a pawnshop guitar. His songs are simple, loose, unstructured, cantankerous, and happily unenlightened when it comes to the fairer sex. And his life story is completely fucking frightening." - Robert Fontenot / blues writer
New releases from Little Freddie King are as rare as tours by the Mississippi-by-way-of-New Orleans blues-guitar LEGEND. King talk-sings these low-down songs with appropriate gruffness. Tough yet tensile, he finds common ground between the sparse backwoods blues of his Delta birthplace and the more urban but still crude funk-strains of the Crescent City's dark alleys. - Hal Horowitz / N.Y.
"Bluesman like Little Freddie King are, unfortunately, a disappearing breed, which makes this disc important both as a good-time blast of backstreet grit and as a document of an artist who is among the last of his kind." - David Whiteis
"Fat Possum prides itself on producing "authentic" raw blues albums short on studio polish but long on feeling. With "You Don't Know What I Know," King obliges. - Keith Spera/Music writer
Like a lot of other artists in Mississippi-based Fat Possum stable, he plays with raw, primal urgency. He combines the sparse, no-frills Hill Country style with a John Lee Hooker-type endless boogie, which he presumebly picked up while touring with the Boogieman. - Jeff Johnson
"As soon as the music started, the crowd and myself started to dance and clap our hands. He already gained his public with his very energetic show. Then there has been few standing ovations even after people were asking for more the group left with thier accomplished mission." - Gamillah's Review/WVOF 88.5 FM
“You never quite know what you're going to get when the Fat Possum label introduces a new artist to the mix, but the brain trust of Matthew Johnson and Bruce Watson never fails to come up big. Little Freddie King might be the luckiest find yet, if You Don't Know What I Know is any indication. This is certainly one of the best blues albums of 2005, one that will hypnotize your mind and move your body”. Lou Friedman / Jul 05 - Lou Friedman
"I don't know exactly where to start because I'm beside myself with enthusiasm for every track. Once again Fat Possum have discovered a long forgotten blues man of the old school and produced yet another dynamic album of the real thing." - unknown
Discography
INTERNATIONAL RECORDING ARTIST:
LP/ CDs
HARMONICA WILLIAMS and LITTLE FREDDIE KING (1970), Ahura Mazda Records, produced by Eldridge Johnson III for Snakeroot Productions
SWAMP BOOGIE (1997) Orleans Records
SING SANG SUNG (2000) Orleans Records
YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I KNOW (2005),
Fat Possum Records, produced Bruce Watson/Matthew Johnson
MESSIN' AROUND THA HOUSE (2008) MadeWight Records
"Wacko" Wade, producer
GOTTA WALK WITH DA KING (2010) MadeWright Records
COMPILATIONS:
EH LA BAS! - WWOZ Critics Choice - OrleansRecords
DREAM PLACE Live Vol.11 - Frenchmen St. Records
SAME OLD BLUES CRAP 3 - Fat Possum Records
BLUES ESTAFETTE (2003) - Jaap Hindriks (Holland)
BLUES To BOP (2002) - Norman Hewitt (Switzerland)
LIVE AFTER HOURS - Ogden Museum (New Orleans)
FILM/BROADCASTING
Wide World of Blues - radio interview with Peter Black, Boston, Mass.
Film Documentary - Japanese PBS-TV "The Last Bluesman" Kazuyuki Nozawa, Dir.
World Wide Broadcasting - internet with Josh Buckley, Settle, Wash.
Canadian TV Documentary - "New Orleans Bluesman" Jacques Thivierge
BBC-TV Documentary "Little Freddie" Alan Howarth
ABC-TV - Peter Jennings segment on Music Maker Relief Foundation with LFK.
Route 66 RDL 103.5fm - David Baerst (France) radio interview.
MOJO Station, Rome, Italy radio interview by Gianluca and Moroncelli
American Routes Radio, Nick Stizer (2010)
Big Easy Blues Performer of the year 2008 and 2009
Eessence Festival 2008 n 2009
RADIO AIRPLAY IN EUROPE & USA
Crack Head Joe
Chicken Dance
Do She Ever Think Of Me
Fox Hunt
Sing Sang Sung
Walkin With Freddie
Use to Be Down
Mean Little Woman
(All songs written by Fread E. Martin - BMI)
Photos
Bio
"One of the last great country blues players, Little Freddie King...not only plays the blues, he IS the blues. He stays in a run-down apartment, in a deteriorating neighborhood, with a domineering wife. He rides a rickety bicycle several miles to and from a downtown garage, where he rebuilds alternators. He is tormented by ulcers and headaches, but playing his cheap pawn shop guitars always makes him FEEL better at the end of the day." Jeff Hannusch, Offbeat Magazine
Little Freddie's real name is Fread E. Martin and he was born in McComb, Mississippi, July 19, 1940 down the road from Bo Diddley's place. His father, Jessie James Martin (named by a plantation owner after the outlaw), was a blues guitarist that worked the weekend black southern circuit in the Delta. His father would bring him out on the town when he was out there playin. "I would go out there and sit around on the outside around the juke joints and listenin." He's be playin and drinkin and everyone was havin' fun. Freddie eventually taught himself how to play guitar and develop his country-style blues or as he calls it "Gut Bucket Blues".
At the age of 14, Freddie "hoboed" a train from the sharecropper farm to New Orleans to stay with his sister. There he met such upcoming musicians as Buddy Guy and close friend, Slim Harpo. However, adapting to life in the big city wasn't easy as Freddie explains. "I got lost all the time." he said. "All the houses looked the same. I had to get the police to take me home or else they's arrest me. Finally one of the policeman told me to look at the street sign and the number on the houses. It got easy to get around after that".
It was in the early 1960's that Freddie was hung with the "Little Freddie King" appellation as he's been using his real name on gigs up to that point. "Freddy King was really hot then with songs like Hideaway and San-Ho-Zay" said Freddie. People kept telling me I sounded just like Freddy King, because I new all his songs, so they started calling me "Little Freddie King". Big Freddy use to visit New Orleans a lot in those days. He use to hang out at a bar in my neighborhood. One day a friend of his asked if he would play in Marrero (across the river from the city) and Freddy asked me to play bass. After that, I played a couple of jobs around N.O. with him. He wanted me to go to Texas with him but I counld't because of my job.
Generally the 60's were busy years for Freddie, as he played with the likes of Babe Stoval, Polka Dot Slim, Guitar Grady, Guitar Ray, Snooks Eaglin, Billy Tate, Harmonica Williams (from Jackson, Miss.) Boogie Bill Webb, Rev Charles Jacobs (his cousin), Harmonica Slim and Eddie Lang.
"I pretty much stayed lit up all the time back then," said Freddie. I played a lot around N.O. area with Harmonica Williams, and then after the job we'd go to Logtown or Bayou Liberty and play in juke joints. Then we'd come back to N.O. around one or two in the morning and play the Dew Drop Inn. where Guitar Shorty had the house band. I'd go get a pint of corn liquor. Then I'd wake up and we'd do it all over again."
Little Freddie King became a charter member an annual attraction at the New Orleans Jazz Festival and toured Europe with Bo Diddley, John Lee Hooker in 1976 in support of his first LP. His most amazing gig though occurred in 1981, when he embarked on a six month tour of the Western States when he hosted college workshops on the Blues. His 1970 recording titled "Harmonica Williams and Little Freddie King" is believed to be the first electric blues album recorded in New Orleans. His "Born Died in Mississippi" became a regional hit.
Since the new millennium 2000, Freddie has performed at the N.O. Jazz Festival and French Quater Festival (USA), Montreal Jazz Festival and Ottawa Blues Festival (Canada), Blues to Bop Festival (Switzerland), Nancy Jazz Pulsation Festival, JVC Festival and Festival de Lille (France), Blues Estafette (Holland), Burnley Blues Festival (England), Debrecen Jazz Festival (Hungary) Portsmouth Blues Festival, Savannah Music Festival, King Biscuit Blues Festival (USA). Terra Blues Club (New York), JVC Festival and New Morning Cafe' (Paris), Castel San Pietro in Blues, Bologna Italy, Mojo Station - Rome, Italy -Zapperswil-jona and Zogengin Blues Fest. in Switzerland
JEFF HANNUSCH author of "I Hear You Knockin" The Sound of New Orleans R&B
MANAGEMENT CONTACT:
"Wacko" Wade Production, LLC
6751 Louis XIV Street
New Orleans, Louisiana, U.S.A.
email: wackowade@yahoo.com
phone: 504-914-7282
Reference: JANGO AIRPLAY (add me to your station)
www.conceptentertainment.net (artist booking)
www.vimeo.com/11075520 (video short)
www.littlefreddieking.com
www.sonicbids.com/littlefreddieking (Artist Bio)
www.acaciafilms.com (video black n white)
Band Members
Links
