Cream recorded "Born Under a Bad Sign" for their third album, Wheels of Fire. The group's record company, which also distributed Stax records, requested that they record it, according to guitarist Eric Clapton. Cream's rendition follows , except for bassist and singer Jack Bruce combining two verses into "I've been down ever since I was ten" and an extended guitar solo by Clapton. Cream recorded this and released it on their 1968 album Wheels Of Fire. Clapton idolized American Blues artists and often performed their songs. It marked a change of guitar style for Clapton, who adopted a harder, attacking style on this song in place of the sweeter, sustaining notes he called "woman tone," which were more apparent on Cream's first two albums. Cream played this when they were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on January 12, 1993 in tribute to Albert King, who died the previous year.
When Albert King signed with Stax Records in Memphis, Booker T. Jones, who was a member of the Stax house band Booker T. & The MGs, was assigned his producer. In an interview Jones explained: "At that time, my writing partner was William Bell. He came over to my house the night before the session. William wrote the words and I wrote the music in my den that night. That was one of my greatest moments in the studio as far as being thrilled with a piece of music. The feeling of it, it's the real blues done by the real people. It was Albert King from East St. Louis, the left-handed guitar player who was just one of a kind and so electric and so intense and so serious about his music. He just lost himself in the music. He's such a one of a kind character. I was there in the middle of it and it was exhilarating."
Bell recalled, "We needed a blues song for Albert King ... I had this idea in the back of my mind that I was gonna do myself. Astrology and all that stuff was pretty big then. I got this idea that :
Lord if it wasn't for bad luck, I wouldn't have no luck at all
You know bad luck has been followin' poor Lightnin', ever since I began to crawl
Now folks I was born in the last month of the year
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