B. B. King

B. B. King (born 1925) is one of the most successful artists in the history of the blues. Today his ability as a blues guitarist is remains unparalleled.

"B. B. King is widely recognized as the greatest living blues guitarist," Dimitri Ehrlich of Interview asserted. "This title derives not only from his mastery of the guitar but from the generosity of spirit he brings to the blues." Musician magazine named King "the common man's blues titan since the '50s" as well as one of the top 100 guitarists of all time. Such praise is not uncommon for King; his biting lead guitar, passionate vocals, and genteel presence have epitomized the blues for many listeners since his arrival on the music scene more than four decades ago. In addition, he has helped to popularize the blues with rock audiences, playing over the years with such rock artists as Jimi Hendrix and U2. Blues-rock guitarists such as Eric Clapton have also cited him as a crucial influence. "His is the hardest music to fake because—at its core—it's pure feeling," wrote Colin Escott in the liner notes for King's 1992 four-CD boxed set, B. B. King: King of the Blues.

King arose from humble circumstances but has remained philosophical about his success. "I felt that this was what I wanted to do, to make a living playing the guitar," he recollected in an interview for Ebony magazine. "My father was born on the plantation, I was born on the plantation. I wanted more for my children. This—the guitar—was my way out."

The plantation in question was located between Itta Bena and Indianola, Mississippi, where Riley B. King was born on September 16, 1925. His parents split up when he was a small child, and though he lived for a few years with his mother in the Mississippi hills, he found himself alone at age nine after she died. His father retrieved him from a tenant farm a few years after that. Working as a farmhand on a cotton plantation in Indianola, he earned $22.50 a week. "I guess the earliest sound of blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be pickin' cotton or choppin' or somethin'," King noted in a 1988 Living Blues interview cited in Contemporary Musicians. "When I sing and play now I can hear those same sounds that I used to hear then as a kid."

Early on, King was forbidden to sing the blues; among deeply religious southern black communities in the 1930s and 1940s, it was largely thought of as "the Devil's Music." He obediently sang gospel music in church and even performed professionally with groups like the Famous St. John Gospel Singers. "I didn't want to disrespect my [father and stepmother], so I never played blues around the house," King explained to Interview, "but I knew then, same as I know today, that I wasn't doing anything wrong. I think that before they died they both felt very proud of me."

Ironically, it was the sound of a "sanctified preacher" playing the guitar—as he informed Ebony's Lynn Norment—that first aroused the interest that would make King an exponent of the infernal blues. Recordings by early blues masters like Robert Johnson, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and King's favorite, Sonny Boy Williamson, were often playing on his Aunt Jemima's Victrola. King's farm boss agreed to loan him $30 to buy a guitar from the Sears and Roebuck catalog and sign up for music lessons. "My Darling Clementine" was the first song he learned on the instrument, but the budding musician quickly developed an impressive blues technique. It wasn't long before he was earning more singing and playing guitar Saturdays on Indianola street corners than he could make all week on the plantation. "I would play whatever somebody would ask me to," King noted in an interview with Escott and Andy McKaie for the boxed set booklet. "They'd ask me to play a gospel song, which I'd be glad to, and they would compliment me highly. People would ask me to play and sing the blues, and they'd give me a tip, sometimes even a beer."

Discussing his youth in Interview, King was at pains to dispel the myth that Indianola was a rural nowheresville. "You didn't have to go to bed with the chickens in the evening," he insisted. "Usually, when the sun went down, you could go to one of the cafés or clubs [in town], which was something I was crazy about."

The elegant attire sported by patrons of clubs like Johnny Jones' Nightspot presented a beguiling contrast to King's work-stained overalls. But it was the racial violence of the Mississippi region, not the economic divergence, that eventually drove him away: "I saw lynchings, seen people hanging, seen people drug through the streets," he told Ed Bradley on the television program Street Stories. "Blues music actually did start because of pain, and especially the black people in the South that started to singing." Besides, the lure of another place became stronger and stronger. A city called Memphis—and in particular the club-strewn Beale Street—promised the excitement and musical atmosphere of which he dreamed. He visited there for the first time in 1946, but didn't decide to stay until two years later.

"Beale Street Blues Boy"

King served briefly in the U.S. Army but soon made his way to Memphis with his guitar, moving in with his cousin Booker (Bukka) White, himself a blues artist. King's attempts to emulate Bukka's slide guitar technique helped him develop what Musician called his "trademark," namely "a first-finger vibrato that shakes at the wrist and punctuates the blues as recognizably as very few other sounds." He sought out Sonny Boy Williamson, who had a radio show on WDIA in West Memphis, and asked to play a song for him. Williamson was sufficiently impressed with King's rendition of " Blues at Sunrise" to offer him his own radio show and a spot in the line-up at Miss Annie's 16th Street Grill. "Twelve dollars a night," he exclaimed to Bradley. "I'd never heard of that much money in the world before."

King had landed a regular performing spot on the club circuit. As a disc jockey, he was able to advertise his own gigs on radio, and soon he and his trio had amassed a following. "Memphis and Beale Street were for me the college of hard knocks, the college of learning," he recollected in the Ebony interview with Norment. "This is where I got my formal training." Known on the radio as the "Beale Street Blues Boy," which was shortened to "Bee-Bee," and then to his famous initials, King actually went on the road briefly to promote a tonic called Pep-Ti-Kon, for which he had written a jingle. Almost immediately, though, he wanted to make records.

After he had badgered the WDIA staff long enough, he was signed to Bullet Records and in 1949 recorded four sides at the radio station, including "Miss Martha King" and "I've Got the Blues." He performed in the area, as he recalled to Escott and McKaie, going "any place where I could get back to Memphis the next day by 8 o'clock." Musician and talent scout Ike Turner connected King with the Bihari brothers of the Kent/Modern/RPM group, and his 1951 single for his new label, "Three O'Clock Blues," became a Number One hit. He scored several other hits during these years, and by the mid-1950s was playing about 300 shows a year; he would maintain this schedule for over two decades.

Most of King's fans know that his Gibson guitar is named "Lucille." Several of the special hollow-bodied electric instruments have inherited the name, and King noted in Ebony on Lucille's 40th anniversary how it all came about. He was playing at a dance in Twist, Arkansas, when two men got into a fight and knocked over a heater, starting a fire that spread through the dancehall. King escaped the burning building, then remembered his $60 guitar and ran back in, nearly perishing in an attempt to rescue it. When he discovered that the belligerents who had started the blaze were quarreling over a woman named Lucille, he gave the name to his guitar—"to remind myself never to do anything that foolish."

Appreciated by Rock Audiences

At first King distanced himself from the new musical style—rock 'n' roll—that emerged in the latter half of the 1950s. Gradually, however, he began incorporating some of the stylistic traits of influential early rockers like Little Richard and Fats Domino. In 1962 he moved to the large ABC label (which was later absorbed by MCA), and, after releasing a number of singles, put out his first album, 1965's Live at the Regal. In 1968, after the assassination of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., he played an all-night blues benefit with rock innovator Jimi Hendrix and fellow blues guitarist Buddy Guy to raise money for King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

During the late 1960s, English rock's absorption of the blues—showcased in the work of British guitar heroes like Clapton, Jeff Beck, Jimmy Page, and others—rekindled interest in the blues among mainstream U.S. audiences. King found himself playing rock festivals with the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Jefferson Airplane, Black Sabbath, Jethro Tull, Santana, and ill-fated singer Janis Joplin, with whom he had developed a close friendship. As black audiences moved away from the blues, King courted young white listeners. Asked by Clarence Waldron of Jet if he felt African Americans had abandoned the music to whites, he replied: "Anything that we stop supporting and others start, I don't know if you call it giving it away or we just leave it out there and let somebody else have it."

In 1969, "The Thrill Is Gone" was released; the blues-with-strings number fetched a 1971 Grammy and became King's biggest hit and a concert standard thenceforth. "If I didn't sing that song," he quipped to Ebony, "they would throw tomatoes at me."

Throughout the late '60s and the early '70s, King also recorded with supportive rock musicians like Carole King, Joe Walsh, and Leon Russell; the latter wrote the soulful single "Hummingbird." During this time, King maintained his punishing performance schedule and released albums like B. B. King in London, featuring former Beatles drummer Ringo Starr. In 1971, with attorney F. Lee Bailey, King founded FAIRR (Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation), an organization dedicated to the improvement of prison conditions. This work corresponded with regular prison performances; his Live at San Quentin is considered a classic representation of such shows.

King was faced with a heartbreaking variation on a theme in 1992 when he played at a Gainesville, Florida, correctional facility; among the inmates there was his daughter Patty, who was serving time for a drug violation. "I've got 15 children scattered about," King told Bradley. "I love my family. I love my children. And I wished I could have been a better father than I have been in some ways." As he commented in Ebony, "Due to my job, I just was never there in person. In spirit, yes, and financially, yes. I've been told by my children that just being there in person would have been better." King has been married and divorced twice, though he suggested to Ebony and Jet in the early 1990s that he might consider marrying again; he told the latter publication, "The happiest times of my life were when I was married."

A Blues Institution

By the 1980s King was formally recognized as a blues institution. He won the a 1984 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Recording for Blues 'n' Jazz; he appeared on the album Rattle and Hum with the Irish rock band U2—the video for the song on which he performed took an MTV award—and worked in the studio with members of the cutting-edge rock band Living Colour; he also received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1988 Grammy festivities and another at the Songwriters Hall of Fame dinner two years later. Along with the former honor came profound praise: King was hailed as "one of the most original and soulful of all blues guitarists and singers, whose compelling style and devotion to musical truth have inspired so many budding performers, both here and abroad, to celebrate the blues."

In the early 1990s, King was inducted into the Rock 'n' Roll Hall of Fame, received a Presidential Medal of Freedom from George Bush, and was granted a National Heritage Fellowship Award from the National Endowment for the Arts; he even earned a star on Hollywood's Walk of Fame. Live at San Quentin, released in 1990, twenty years after it was recorded, earned him another Grammy. And Beale Street by now featured a popular establishment called B. B. King's Blues Club and Restaurant.

MCA released B. B. King: King of the Blues, a four-CD boxed set, in 1992, and King participated in the ambitious B. B. King's Blues Summit recording, a live-in-the-studio celebration laid down in Memphis and Berkeley, California, that paired him with such legends as John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, Etta James, Robert Cray, and Lowell Fulson, who had written "Three O'Clock Blues." Andy McKaie, who organized and co-produced the project, noted in the CD's booklet that the invited guests unanimously replied: "If B. B. wants me, tell me when and where!" McKaie added: "The King of Blues himself, possibly the most gracious man in all music, then treated each guest like royalty."

By the time he reached his late sixties, King had scaled back his performance schedule somewhat—he was briefly hospitalized due to diabetes in 1990—though he still toured regularly. In the spring of 1994, he brought the blues to Red China, playing an invitation-only concert at the Beijing Hard Rock Cafe. Although he had come a very long way from the plantation and the segregated hothouse of the early blues scene, he told Bradley on Street Stories that onstage, little had changed over the years. "I've forgotten what I look like. In fact, I don't even exist. It's just the guitar and myself in that setting." He was by now on Lucille the Fifteenth. "We've spent 40 years together," he noted to Ebony." She likes younger men but puts up with me."

King was on hand to celebrate the 1994 opening of "B.B. King's Blues Club," a new, three-level location on Universal Studios' glitzy City Walk, according to Down Beat. King started the original club on Beale Street in Memphis in 1991. Earlier in 1994, King opened one of his clubs on Sunset Strip.

In December of 1995, a 70-year old King was named a recipient of the 18th annual Kennedy Center Honors along with Neil Simon, Sidney Poitier, Marilyn Horne, and Jacques d'Amboise. King said of the event, "Meeting the President of the United States is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. … Anytime the most powerful man in the world takes 10 to 15 minutes to sit and talk with me, an old guy from Indianola, Mississippi, that's a memory imprinted in my head which forever will be there. To go be honored, to have people playing for you, for the things you may or may have not done in your lifetime, that's the greatest honor to be paid to me."

Further Reading

Contemporary Musicians, volume 1, edited by Michael L. LaBlanc, Gale, 1989.

Rock Movers and Shakers, edited by Dafydd Rees and Luke Crampton, Billboard Books, 1991.

Billboard, August 24, 1991, p. 38.

Ebony, November 1969, p. 55; February 1992, pp. 36-50.

Interview, March 1991, p. 22.

Jet, November 11, 1991, pp. 36-39.

Musician, February 1993, p. 52.

New York Times Magazine, October 27, 1968, p. 36.

Additional information for this profile was taken from a transcript from the television program Street Stories, first broadcast on August 6, 1993, and from materials accompanying the recordings B. B. King: King of the Blues, 1992, and B. B. King's Blues Summit, 1993. □

B.B. King

Guitar, singer

For the Record…

Return to Memphis

The Thrill Arrived

Private Interests

Selected discography

Sources

In the late 1940s Riley B. King worked his way from the cotton fields of Mississippi to Memphis, Tennessee, where he was dubbed B.B. (short for Blues Boy) and earned a reputation as a first class blues man. For more than 50 years the name B.B. King would remain synonymous with blues music everywhere. King started his career on Memphis’s Beale Street and became a blues legend. He became known as the King of the Blues, a rank of music royalty he would share with another Memphis legend, Elvis Presley, the King of Rock and Roll. There are, in fact, ten-foot high bronze statues of both Kings—B.B. and Elvis—on Beale Street. King, with the help of his guitar “Lucille,” developed a singular musical style. Without the fullness of chords, King combined just the right combination of guitar picking, string stretching, and powerful singing to emote his blues message. King’s art stems from the powerful sentiment of his life and times, which he renders through his music.

King was born on September 16, 1925, in the Mississippi Delta area—a place which he called in his autobiography as “the most Southern place on earth.” By some reports King was born in Indianola, Mississippi, and by others he was born in Itta Bena. The truth, according to King, isthathewas born between In dianola and Greenwood, near Itta Bena, “[O]n the bank of Blue Lake.” King, was named Riley by his father, Albert Lee King, in memory of a deceased brother. Although B.B. King had a younger brother, the sibling died in infancy, and King was raised as an only child. King’s mother, Nora Ella, left his father when King was very young, and the two moved in with her family. While there, King was raised by three generations of kin: his great grandfather and great grandmother who were former slaves, his grandmother, and his mother. The family lived as sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. King learned as a youngster that music was a trademark of his ancestors and not simply a way to pass the hours of backbreaking cotton picking. On a southern plantation, music was an exclusive means of communication between the African American community, a language not totally understood by the white society.

King worked on the plantation from early boyhood. At age six he milked cows every morning and every night, and he attended the nearby one-room Elkhorn Schoolhouse in between chores. King’s mother died when he was ten years old, and his grandmother died shortly thereafter, leaving King to fend for himself. He elected to live in solitude in the cabin he once shared with his mother, working for a tenant farmer. After five years on his own, King moved back to Indianola to live with his father and stepmother Aida Lee. While at his father’s home King attended Ambrose Vocational High School, but he soon returned to the Mississippi Delta, to a cotton plantation where he lived with his aunt, uncle, and his cousin, fellow blues singer Bukka White. It was here that King’s uncle introduced him to the guitar.

At age 14 King fell in love with a neighbor girl named Angel. The relationship ended tragically when Angel along with her entire family were killed in a terrible accident. Emotionally isolated once again, King, who bought his first guitar at age 12 only to have it stolen, bought another guitar and joined the Famous St. John Gospel Singers. He played music constantly as a means of expression, perhaps because of a speech impediment. Surprisingly, King found he could sing easily without stuttering.

The Indianola city life eventually beckoned King, and he laid claim to a street corner where he played his guitar and sang songs for the passers-by. Initially he sang gospel music, but he came to the realization that the simple modification of lyrics from “Lord” to “baby” transformed gospel songs into blues fare. He learned quickly that people on the street paid to hear blues songs, not gospel music.

In 1943—during World War II—the 18 year old King enlisted in the army. He was released after basic training because he drove a tractor, an essential civilian skill during wartime. When King grew increasingly

For the Record…

Born Riley B. King September 16, 1925, in Itta Bena, MS; son of Albert Lee and Nora Ella King; married Martha Lee, (divorced); married Sue Hall, June of 1958 (divorced 1966).

Started as a street musician in Memphis, TN; nicknamed “Blues Boy,” and later, B.B., 1947-50; disc jockey for WDIA in Memphis, 1948-50; signed with ABC Records, 1961; released B.B. King Live at the Regal, 1965 Confessin’ the Blues, 1966; other releases include, Blues on top of Blues, Bluesway, 1968; Completely Well (includes “The Thrill Is Gone”), Bluesway, 1969;B.B. King Live at the Appol-lo, GRP, 1991;There’s Always One More Time, MCA, 1991;B. B. King—King of the Blues, MCA, 1992; (with others) Blues Summit, MCA, 1993; first overseas tour, 1972.

Awards: Jazz & Pop, Best Male Jazz Singer of the Year, 1968; French Academie du Jazz Award, Best Album of the Year (Lucille) 1969; Grammy Awards, 1970, 1981, 1983, 1987 (Lifetime Achievement), 1990-91, 1993; Ebony Blues Hall of Fame, 1974; NAACP Image Award, 1975, 1981, 1993; Blues Foundation Hall of Fame, 1980; W. C. Handy Award, 1983, 1985, 1987-88, 1991; Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame inductee, 1987; MTV Video Music Award, Best Video from a Film, 1988/89; Songwriters’ Hall of Fame, Lifetime Achievement Award, 1990; Hollywood Walk of Fame, 1991;Ebony awards, Best Male Blues Singer, Best Blues Instrumentalist, Best Blues Album, 1974-75; honorary doctorates: Tougaloo College, L.H.D., 1973; Yale University, Music, 1977; Berklee College of Music, 1982; Rhodes College, Fine Arts, 1990.

Addresses: Management —Sidney A. Seidenberg, 1414 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10019.

frustrated with the tiresome life in Mississippi, he hitched a ride on a grocery truck to Memphis in 1947. Just 20 years old, he was awed and inspired by the big city. He left Memphis after a few months, but vowed to return one day as a blues singer after settling his accounts in Indianola.

Return to Memphis

King returned to Memphis, and good fortune, in 1948. Almost immediately upon his arrival he found work singing on commercials at the African American radio station WDIA, where he would later become a disc jockey. His nights were spent performing at local clubs with his band, which included Solomon Hardy, Earl Forrest, Ford Nelson, and Johnny “Ace” Alexander. King’s free time was spent on Beale Street. Industrious and healthy, he often picked cotton between radio shows and gigs. He made a recording for Bullet Records, and in time he was known as the Beale Street Blues Boy, soon shortened to Blues Boy, then simply B.B.

King eventually purchased a Gibson electric guitar and an amplifier. He dubbed the guitar Lucille after a fateful performance at a dance in a Twist, Arkansas, barn in December of 1949. A fight broke out between two men over a woman named Lucille, during which a kerosene stove was knocked over, setting the barn aflame. King escaped the fire, but leaving his guitar behind, he risked his life entering the burning structure to salvage the instrument. Ever afterward he would call his guitars Lucille. While the original Lucille was stolen soon after the fire, King has played at least 17 Lucilles during the decades of his career. The guitar has become so synonymous with King that Gibson manufactured a Lucille model in his honor.

By now an up and coming blues man, King spent the early 1950s on the road. He played wherever blues fans gathered—clubs, roadhouses, and barns—sometimes sleeping in his car, in the hopes of building a reputation. In 1951, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips produced King’s first single, “3 O’Clock Blues,” which held the number one position on the Billboard R&B chart for several weeks. By 1952, his reputation had grown to the point where he was now performing at an elite circuit of clubs, including the Apollo Theater in Harlem. A few years later King teamed up with the successful producer and musical arranger Maxwell Davis, assembled a band, and purchased a bus called “Big Red.” As the 1950s came to a close, however, blues music slowly lost its appeal with large audiences. The popular music of the times evolved from the simple southern music style proliferated by King, into a lively rock and roll beat with catchy lyrics. King’s popularity waned, his style of music now characterized as “urban blues.”

The Thrill Arrived

In 1961, King inked a recording contract with ABC Records. He released three albums for ABC, Mr. Blues in 1963, B.B. King Live at the Regal in 1965, and Confessili the Blues in 1966, before company executives moved him to their Bluesway label. In 1969, King seemed to truly come into his own with the breakthrough album Completely Well. That album featured the single “The Thrill Is Gone”, which would prove to be one of his biggest hits and launched King into the collective American musical conscience. Later that year, King released the successful Live and Well, which Downbeats James Powell called, “the most important blues recording in a long time.”

King’s career continued unabated during the 1970s as he managed to gain favor among young people and other musicians. Guitar Player magazine called him the world’s best blues guitarist in 1970. He became a perennial entertainer on college campuses and emerged as an icon for many young musicians of that era, even touring for ten days with the Rolling Stones. King’s influence on the blues and rock guitarists who followed him is inestimable. From the Rolling Stones’ Keith Richards to blues man Albert King, who only halfjokingly claimed to be King’s half-brother, his staccato picking style, bent notes, and numerous riffs have been borrowed copiously.

As for his own influences, King lists jazz legends Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, as well as blues men T-Bone Walker and Lonnie Johnson. His musical tastes, in fact, were even more varied. “I was crazy about the Hawaiian guitar, and I’m equally crazy about the country lap steel guitar,” King told Musician in 1998. “And all those other guys who could use the bottleneck [slide], I loved that sound.” Despite the wide diversity of musical influences, or perhaps because of it, King forged a sound and style that was unique.

Private Interests

King married for the first time at age 17, to Martha Lee of Europe, Mississippi. The marriage dissolved eight years later, from the strain of constant separation caused by King’s musical career. He married Sue Hall in Detroit in 1958 at a wedding presided over by Reverend C. L. Franklin (father of singer Aretha Franklin). In 1966, that marriage also ended in divorce, for similar reasons. King sired no children from either marriage, yet in 1949, he fathered a son out of wed lock— the first of 15 children tha the would father by 15 different women.

King’s popularity and legendary status continued to grow with each passing year. His 70th Birthday Bashon October 27, 1995, at the Orpheum Theater was orchestrated as a benefit for children with sickle cell anemia. The four-hour celebration featured an array of popular entertainers and attracted a sellout audience. Such an extravagant affair might have seemed strange for the humble blues king, or maybe not. As he told Time in 1969, “Blues is what I do best. If Frank Sinatra can be tops in his field, Nat Cole in his, Bach and Beethoven in theirs, why can’t I be great, and known for it, in blues?”

Selected discography

B.B. King Live at the Regal, ABC, 1965.

Confessili’ the Blues, ABC, 1966.

Blues on Top of Blues, Bluesway, 1968.

Completely Well, Bluesway, 1969.

B.B. King Live at the Apollo, GRP, 1991.

There Is Always One More Time, MCA, 1991.

B.B. King—King of the Blues, MCA, 1992.

(With others) Blues Summit, MCA, 1993.

The Best of B.B. King, Vol. 1, Virgin.

King of the Blues, MCA.

Sources

Books

King, B. B., with David Ritz, Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B. B. King, Avon Books, New York, 1996.

Santelli, Robert, The Big Book of Blues: a Biographical Encyclopedia, Penguin Books, New York, 1993.

Periodicals

Business Wire, November 17, 1997.

Downbeat, Aug 7, 1969.

Star Tribune, 20 August 1996.

Time, Jan 10, 1969.

Tri-State Defender, 25 October, 1995; 8 November 1995.

Online

MCA Records—“B.B. KING”, htt://www.mca.com/mca_rcords/library/copy/bbking.copy.html.

http://www.island.net/~blues/bb.html

—Gloria Cooksey

B.B. King

Blues singer and guitarist

For the Record…

Selected discography

Sources

“Riley B. King is the world’s preeminent blues guitarist,” wrote Tom Wheeler in Guitar Player.”There is hardly a rock, pop, or blues player anywhere who doesn’t owe him something.” B.B. King was born in 1925 in the area between Itta Bena and Indianola, Mississippi. When he was four his parents separated, and his mother took him to the hills near Kilmichael to be with her family. She died when King was nine. After he turned thirteen his father found him, and together they went to Lexington, Mississippi, to live. They stayed together for only a few years before King ran away back to Indianola.

Until he was inducted into the Army in 1943, King had spent his entire childhood as a laborer on farms, where he was first exposed to the blues. “I guess the earliest sound of blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be pickin’ cotton or choppin’ or somethin’,” he told Living Blues.”When I sing and play now I can hear those same sounds that I used to hear then as a kid.”

His first musical influence, however, came through religion. A member of the Church of God In Christ, he was forbidden to play blues at home. He sang in spiritual groups like the Elkhorn Singers and Saint John’s Gospel Singers. A relative who was a guitarist and a preacher showed King his first chords on the instrument. As a teenager he began playing streetcorners for coins, combining gospel songs with the blues. When he started making more money playing in one night than he would in a week on the farm, he decided to head to Memphis. After a few years, King went back to Indianola to work and repay some debts, eventually returning to Memphis to stay.

He moved in with his cousin Booker (Bukka) White, the famous slide guitarist. In an attempt to duplicate the stinging sound of the steel slide, King developed the trilling vibrato which has since become his trademark. With the help of the late Sonny Boy Williamson he began singing radio commercials on station WDIA, which led to a three-and-a-half year stint as a disc jockey. He was known as “the blues boy from Beale Street,” later shortened to B.B. The records he spun on his show would come to have a great impact on his own playing. Artists as diverse as Frank Sinatra, Roy Brown, Louis Jordan, Nat Cole, Django Reinhardt, and especially T-Bone Walker, were absorbed, interpreted and presented in the polished sound now known as the “B.B. King style of blues”.

“Technically, harmoncially, conceptually far in advance of his postwar contemporaries, B.B. King developed the single most satisfying, popular and influential of all modern blues approaches,” wrote Guitar World’s Pete Welding. Many critics have cited King’s wide range of

For the Record…

Full name, Riley B. King; born September 16, 1925, near Indianola, Miss. ; son of Albert and Nora Ella (Pully) King; married twice; children: eight.

As a child, worked as a farmhand, began singing in spiritual groups, and learned to play guitar; as a teenager, played for money on streetcorners; sang on radio commercials; disc jockey, 1949-53; began recording while working as a disc jockey; played in small clubs from the mid-1950s until the mid-1960s; began playing larger venues in the mid-1960s; has toured extensively throughout the United States and around the world, appearing in concerts, at blues festivals, on television, and in films. Co-founder of Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation (FAIRR); has made more than 40 concert appearances at San Quentin prison. Columist for Guitar Player magazine, 1983. Military service: U.S. Army, 1943.

Awards: Golden Mike Award, National Association of Television and Radio Artists, 1969 and 1974; Academie du Jazz award (France), 1969; Grammy Award for best rhythm & blues vocal, male, 1970, for “The Thrill Is Gone”; a “Day of Blues” was established in his honor by the city of Memphis, Tenn., 1971; presented with key to city of Cleveland, Ohio, 1971; “B.B. King Day” was established by the governor of Mississippi, 1972; honorary doctorate from Tongaloo College, 1973; Humanitarian Award, B’nai B’rith Music and Performance Lodge of New York, 1973; NAACP Image Award, 1975; “B.B. King Day” was established in city of Berkeley, Calif., 1976; honorary doctor of music, Yale University, 1977, and Berkley College of Music, 1985; Grammy Award for best traditional blues recording, 1986, for “My Guitar Sings the Blues”; Lifetime Achievement Award, National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, 1987; has received awards from numerous magazine reader polls.

Addresses: Office –c/o MCA Records, 100 University City Plaza, North Hollywood, CA 91608.

influences, from jazz to gospel to country blues, as the main reason for his widespread popularity.

While at WDIA King recorded four sides for the Bullet record company. He was starting to gather a small following, but it wasn’t until the 1951 release of “Three O’Clock Blues” that things started to really happen. The single was a number one hit, staying on the charts for over four months. Like many of King’s hits, he did not write it. It was penned by Lowell Fulson, as was “Everyday I Have the Blues,” another hit for King. In fact, many of the songs that have become synonymous with King were non-originals, but all contained his stylistic stamp: “How Blue Can You Get” by Louis Jordan, “Rock Me Mama” by Arthur Crudup and Lil Son Jackson, “Sweet Little Angel” by Tampa Red, and “Sweet Sixteen” by Big Joe Turner.

King recorded for the Bihari brothers’ Modern label (and its subsidiaries—RPM, Kent, and Crown) from 1950 to 1961 and settled finally with ABC (MCA). In 1964 he released the blues benchmark album “Live at the Regal.” In Guitar Player Dan Forte called it The classic album of urban blues…. The master works the throng into a frenzy, like an evangelist at a tent revival.”

Until 1965, King played the chitlin’ circuit almost endlessly, averaging well over 300 nights per year. His early popularity had died down, but the blues revival of the sixties gave his career a second wind. Musicians like Eric Clapton and Mike Bloomfield praised King’s guitarmanship and influence and acknowledged their debt to him. White audiences rediscovered the “King of the Blues” as he started performing in larger concert halls and Las Vegas clubs. In 1969 he scored his first and only Top 20 pop hit with “The Thrill is Gone.”

King has continued touring and recording albums (over 50 to date). His late seventies efforts, produced by the Crusaders, may have disappointed traditional blues fans but showed that he was still trying to expand his audience. The early eighties saw him scoring music for the film “Into the Night.” Throughout his quest to sanctify the blues, B.B. King has fought sterotypes and forged new musical styles, all the while remaining true to his roots.

In a Rolling Stone interview King stated: “I was almost afraid to say that I was a blues singer. Because it looked like people kind of looked down on you a lot of times when you mention the word blues. But I thank God today I can stick out my chest and say, yeah, I’m a blues singer!”

Selected discography

LPs

Anthology of the Blues, Kent.

Better Than Ever, Kent.

Boss of the Blues, Kent.

Doing My Thing, Lord, Kent.

From the Beginning, Kent.

Incredible Soul of B.B. King, Kent.

The Jungle, Kent.

Greatest Hits of B.B. King, Kent.

Let Me Love You, Kent.

Live, B.B. King on Stage, Kent.

Original “Sweet Sixteen,” Kent.

Pure Soul, Kent.

Rock & Roll Festival, Vol. 1, Kent.

Turn On With B.B. King, Kent.

Super Rhythm & Blues Hits, Kent.

Underground Blues, Kent.

Live at the Regal, MCA, 1965.

Electric B.B. King, MCA, 1969.

Completely Well, MCA, 1970.

Indianola Mississippi Seeds, ABC, 1970.

Live and Well, MCA, 1970.

Live in Cook County Jail, MCA, 1971.

Back in the Alley, MCA, 1973.

Best of B.B. King, MCA.

Guitar Player, MCA.

Love Me Tender, MCA, 1982.

Take It Home, MCA.

Rhythm & Blues Christmas, United Artists.

Midnight Believer, MCA, 1984.

Sources

Books

Dalton, David, and Lenny Kaye, Rock 100, Grosset & Dunlap, 1977.

Evans, Tom, and Mary Anne Evans, Guitars from Renaissance to Rock, Facts on File, 1982.

Guralnick, Peter, The Listener’s Guide to the Blues, Facts on File, 1982.

Miller, Jim, editor, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, Random House, 1976, revised edition, 1980.

The Rolling Stone Interviews, St. Martin’s, 1981.

Periodicals

down beat, October, 1987.

Guitar Player, September, 1980; November, 1982; February, 1983; March, 1983; May, 1984; August, 1984; August 1985; May, 1986; September, 1986; January, 1987; December, 1987.

Guitar World, September, 1988.

Living Blues, May-June, 1988.

—Calen D. Stone

B. B. King 1925–, African-American blues singer and guitarist, b. near Indianola, Miss., as Riley B. King. He grew up poor in the Mississippi Delta region, began playing the guitar at 12, was a street corner performer as a teenager, and as a young man worked as a singing, guitar-playing radio disk jockey in Memphis. King came to prominence as a blues guitarist in 1952 with his chart-topping recording of Three O'clock Blues. Known as the "Beale Street Blues Boy," later simply B. B., King, along with guitarists such as Muddy Waters and "T-Bone" Walker, popularized electric blues music. Introducing the blues to pop audiences in the late 1960s and early 70s, King also greatly influenced a variety of white rock guitarists. His inability to play guitar and sing simultaneously led him to use the guitar to punctuate his songs, relying heavily on his left hand to achieve rich, textural tones with dramatic, almost vocal vibrato. Among the best known of his many albums are Live at the Regal (1965), Live at Cook County Jail (1971), and Riding with the King (2000), recorded with Eric Clapton . Playing his famous guitar, "Lucille," he has continued to record and tour into the 21st cent. King has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received the Presidential Medal of the Arts in 1990 and Kennedy Center Honors in 1995.

Bibliography: See his autobiography, Blues All around Me (1996).

King, B.B. ( Riley B.) (1925– ) US rhythm-and-blues guitarist and singer-songwriter. Among his most notable albums are There Must be a Better World Somewhere (1981) and Six Silver Strings (1985).