The Definitive Albert King on Stax follows 15 years worth of recordings - from 1961 to 1975, plus a final track from 1984 - by a bluesman who'd spent the early part of his career playing to an African-American fan base in the roadhouses and theaters of the chitlin' circuit. But by the latter half of the 1960s, the genre "was now attracting the rapt interest of young white listeners, their sensibilities opened wide by the muscular, in-your-face blues rock of the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, and Jimi Hendrix," says roots music historian Bill Dahl in his liner notes for the collection. "These new converts were gravitating to the best the idiom had to offer. No single blues guitarist made a more stunning impact during that tumultuous timeframe than Albert King."

"For as paradoxical as it might sound, you could make the case that Albert King was a cheery blues guy," says Chris Clough, Concord's manager of catalog development and producer of the Albert King collection. "He had that wry smile, and he often smoked a pipe. He was always well dressed and dapper. He was genuinely interested in putting on a show for his audience, and that sensibility comes through on these tracks."

Dahl suggests that the years between 1966 and 1975 were a "Golden Decade" for King. "He was with Stax that entire time," he says, "right up to the Memphis label's unfortunate demise, cutting one enduring blues classic after another as he scaled the charts over and over again. In the process, King deeply influenced countless up-and-coming blues axemen, even though the ringing licks he coaxed out of his futuristic Gibson Flying V were all but impossible to accurately recreate."