Live in Cook County Jail

Warden Winston Moore asked King to play for the inmates after seeing him at the Chicago club Mister Kelly's, and Jerry Butler helped arrange the free show. ABC told King to bring recording equipment, and the concert was taped on the afternoon of 10 September 1970 from a remote truck run by Aaron Baron of Location Recorders. The audience was 2,117 prisoners, about 80 percent of the jail. The band was Ron Levy on piano, John Browning on trumpet, Louis Hubert on tenor saxophone, Brooke Walker on alto saxophone, Wilbert Freeman on bass and Sonny Freeman on drums.

The set leaned on early hits such as 3 O'Clock Blues, Please Accept My Love and Sweet Sixteen, with The Thrill Is Gone the one recent song. The album was released in January 1971, spent 33 weeks on the Top LPs chart and peaked at number 25. It reached number one on the R&B chart. Rolling Stone ranks it number 499 in its list of greatest albums and number 40 among live albums, and the Blues Foundation inducted it into its hall of fame in 2002. King offered free shows to other prisons afterward and co-founded the Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation in 1972.