King moved to Chicago when he was a teenager; there he formed his first band the Every Hour Blues Boys with guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and drummer Frank "Sonny" Scott.

Almost as soon as he had moved to Chicago, King started sneaking into South Side nightclubs, where he heard blues performed by Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, T-Bone Walker, Elmore James, and Sonny Boy Williamson.

King formed his first band, the Every Hour Blues Boys, with the guitarist Jimmie Lee Robinson and the drummer Frank "Sonny" Scott.

[8] King was repeatedly rejected in auditions for the South Side's Chess Records, the premier blues label, which was the home of Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Little Walter.

The bassist and producer Willie Dixon, during a period of estrangement from Chess in the late 1950s, asked King to come to Cobra Records for a session, but the results have never been heard.

After their success with "Hide Away", King and Thompson recorded thirty instrumentals, including "The Stumble", "Just Pickin'", "Sen-Sa-Shun", "Side Tracked", "San-Ho-Zay", "High Rise", and "The Sad Nite Owl".

During the Federal period, King toured with many notable R&B artists of the day, including Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, and James Brown.

The company treated King as an important artist, flying him to Chicago to the former Chess studios to record the album Getting Ready... and providing a lineup of top session musicians, including Russell.

[17] King performed alongside the big rock acts of the day, such as Eric Clapton[18] and Grand Funk Railroad (whose song "We're an American Band" mentions King in its lyrics), and for a young, mainly white audience, along with the white tour drummer Gary Carnes, for three years, before signing with RSO Records.

In 1974 he recorded Burglar, for which Tom Dowd produced the track "Sugar Sweet" at Criteria Studios in Miami, with the guitarists Clapton and George Terry, the drummer Jamie Oldaker and the bassist Carl Radle.

Vernon brought in other notable musicians for both albums, such as Bobby Tench of the Jeff Beck Group, to complement King.

According to those who knew him, King's untimely death was due to stress, a legendary "hard-partying lifestyle",[22] and a poor diet of consuming Bloody Marys because as he told a journalist, "they've got food in them.

[31] He later explained: "When I started playing electric guitar the second time, with the Warlocks, it was a Freddie King album that I got almost all my ideas off of, his phrasing really.

According to music critic Cub Koda, King has influenced guitarists such as Eric Clapton, Mick Taylor, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and Lonnie Mack.

[4] In Michael Corcoran's words, King "merged the most vibrant characteristics of both [Chicago and Texas] regional styles and became the biggest guitar hero of the mid-sixties British blues revivalists, who included Eric Clapton, Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack, and Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac".

[33] Clapton said in 1985 that King's 1961 song "I Love the Woman" was "the first time I heard that electric lead-guitar style, with the bent notes ... [it] started me on my path."

"[This quote needs a citation] As Rolling Stone later wrote, "Clapton shared his love of King with fellow British guitar heroes Peter Green, Jeff Beck and Mick Taylor, all of whom were profoundly influenced by King's sharpened-treble tone and curt melodic hooks on iconic singles such as 'The Stumble,' 'I'm Tore Down' and 'Someday, After Awhile.

[34] Robert Christgau credited King's embrace of Britain with creating his renown as a pioneer of electric blues guitar.

[36] John Swenson, writing in The Rolling Stone Jazz & Blues Guide (1999), also recommended the Electric Ballroom recording, along with "Home Cooking's Live at the Texas Opry House (documenting a 1976 show in Houston)", saying they are "the best antidotes to King's lackluster studio work from these years".