weeks; it was the first of a list of successes such as Please Love Me, You Upset Me Baby and Sweet Sixteen . On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history. He was always ready to praise the musicians who had influenced him and would usually mention T-Bone Walker first. “I’ve tried my best to get that sound,” he told the Guitar Player magazine. “I came pretty close but never quite got it.” In an interview in 2001, he said: “If T-Bone Walker had been a woman I would have asked him to marry me.” But he would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. He once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style, like Elmore James and Booker White. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” He was similarly self-deprecating about his singing, a sumptuous blend of honey and lemon, mixed half-and-half from crooners such as Nat King Cole and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll. Throughout the 1950s, King was the