B.B. King
Born September 16, 1925 — Died May 14, 2015
B.B. King — born Riley B. King — was an American blues singer-songwriter and guitarist universally regarded as the most important and influential blues guitarist of the 20th century. His singing vibrato, the fluid expressiveness of his guitar lines, and his relationship with his guitars — which he named "Lucille" — defined modern electric blues and directly inspired nearly every rock guitarist of the subsequent decades, from Eric Clapton to Jimi Hendrix to Carlos Santana.
Mississippi Roots and the Blues Inheritance
Born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925, in Itta Bena, Mississippi, on a cotton plantation where he and his family were sharecroppers, he grew up in conditions of profound poverty in the Mississippi Delta — the birthplace of the blues. He learned to play guitar as a teenager, influenced by gospel music from his local church and the recordings of Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker, and Django Reinhardt that he heard when he could. His early attraction to Walker's amplified single-string guitar lines set him on a course distinct from the more percussive, slide-heavy Delta blues style that surrounded him.
Moving to Memphis in the late 1940s, King began performing on the legendary Beale Street and secured a radio slot at WDIA, the country's first radio station programmed entirely for African American audiences. His radio persona as the "Beale Street Blues Boy" was shortened first to "Blues Boy King" and then to "B.B. King" — the name under which he would become a global figure. A recording contract with RPM Records followed in 1950, beginning a remarkable commercial run of R&B hits through the 1950s and early 1960s.
Lucille, the Technique, and Crossover Fame
The name "Lucille" was given to King's guitar after an incident at a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, in 1949, where two men fighting over a woman named Lucille knocked over a kerosene heater and started a fire; King ran back into the burning building to retrieve his guitar and later named it Lucille as a reminder never to do anything that foolish again. He applied the name to every guitar he subsequently owned — always Gibson semi-hollow body designs, most famously the Gibson ES-355.
His guitar technique — characterized by a vibrato created by rapidly bending the string while simultaneously shaking the wrist, and by a singing tone drawn from precise attack and release — influenced virtually every electric guitarist who came after him. Eric Clapton has cited him as the single most important influence on his playing; Jimi Hendrix called him the greatest of all. His 1969 recording of "The Thrill Is Gone" — a slow-burn blues arranged with strings by producer Bill Szymczyk — crossed over to mainstream pop audiences and became his signature song. The fifteen Grammy Awards he accumulated across his career reflected his standing in both blues and mainstream American music.
Did You Know?
B.B. King performed approximately 250 concerts a year for four decades — an almost incomprehensible touring schedule that he maintained well into his seventies. He estimated that by the time he slowed down, he had played more than 15,000 performances, making him one of the most-performed live artists in music history.
Legacy
King died on May 14, 2015, in his sleep at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada, aged eighty-nine. He had continued touring well into his eighties despite health complications from diabetes. He was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. As tribute, guitar players around the world held silent sixty-second pauses at their instruments. His autobiography is Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King , co-written with David Ritz, and is a moving account of a life built from absolute poverty into an art form that changed the world.