SOUND PROJECTIONS
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE
EDITOR: KOFI NATAMBU
FALL, 2015
VOLUME TWO NUMBER ONE
Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:
LAURA MVULA
October 10-16
DIZZY GILLESPIE
October 17-23
LESTER YOUNG
October 24-30
TIA FULLER
October 31-November 6
ROSCOE MITCHELL
November 7-13
MAX ROACH
November 14-20
DINAH WASHINGTON
November 21-27
BUDDY GUY
November 28-December 4
JOE HENDERSON
December 5-11
HENRY THREADGILL
December 12-18
MUDDY WATERS
December 19-25
B.B. KING
December 26-January 1
http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/b-b-king/biography
B.B. King
Biography
Rolling Stone
B.B. KING
(1925-2015)
B.B. King is the most famous of the modern bluesmen. Playing his trademark Gibson guitar, which he refers to affectionately as Lucille, King's lyrical leads and left-hand vibrato have influenced numerous rock guitarists, including Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, and David Gilmour of Pink Floyd. A fifteen-time Grammy winner, King has received virtually every music award, including the Grammy for Lifetime Achievement in 1987.
Born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925, in Itta Bena, Mississippi, he picked cotton as a youth. In the Forties he played on the streets of Indianola before moving on to perform professionally in Memphis around 1949. As a young musician, he studied recordings by both blues and jazz guitarists, including T-Bone Walker, Charlie Christian, and Django Reinhardt.
In the early Fifties King was a disc jockey on the Memphis black station WDIA, where he was dubbed the "Beale Street Blues Boy." Eventually, Blues Boy was shortened to B.B., and the nickname stuck. The radio show and performances in Memphis with friends Johnny Ace and Bobby "Blue" Bland built King's strong local reputation. One of his first recordings, "Three O'Clock Blues" (Number One R&B), for the RPM label, was a national success in 1951. During the Fifties, King was a consistent record seller and concert attraction.
King's 1965 Live at the Regal is considered one of the definitive blues albums. The mid-Sixties blues revival introduced him to white audiences, and by 1966 he was appearing regularly on rock concert circuits and receiving airplay on progressive rock radio. He continued to have hits on the soul chart ("Paying the Cost to Be the Boss," Number Ten R&B, 1968) and always maintained a solid black following. Live and Well was a notable album, featuring "Why I Sing the Blues" (Number 13 R&B, 1969) and King's only pop Top Twenty single, "The Thrill Is Gone" (Number 15 pop, Number Three R&B, 1970).
In the Seventies King also recorded albums with longtime friend and onetime chauffeur Bobby Bland: the gold Together for the First Time...Live (1974) and Together Again...Live (1976). Stevie Wonder produced King's "To Know You Is to Love You." In 1982 King recorded a live album with the Crusaders.
King's tours have taken him to Russia (1979), South America (1980), and to dozens of prisons. In 1981 There Must Be a Better World Somewhere won a Grammy Award; he won another in 1990 for Live at San Quentin. He was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1990 he received the Songwriters Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award. In May 1991, he opened B.B. King's Blues Club in Memphis. (A second one opened in New York City in 2000.)
In 1989 he sang and played with U2 on "When Love Comes to Town," from their Rattle and Hum. The four-disc box set released that same year, King of the Blues, begins with King's career-starting single "Miss Martha King," originally released on Bullet in 1949. For Blues Summit, in 1993, King was joined by such fellow bluesmen as John Lee Hooker, Lowell Fulson, and Robert Cray.
King once said he aspired to be an "ambassador of the blues," and by the Nineties he seemed to have attained just that iconic status. In 1995 he received the Kennedy Center Honors. The next year saw the publication of his award-winning autobiography, Blues' All Around Me (coauthored with David Ritz).
In 2000 the double-platinum Riding With the King (with Eric Clapton) topped Billboard's Top Blues Albums chart. King continued to record, perform and win honors during the first decade of the 2000s. President George W. Bush awarded King the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. Two years later, he released one of the most critically acclaimed studio albums of his career, the back-to-the-basics One Kind Favor, produced by T Bone Burnett and featuring King doing stripped-down version of blues classics such as Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean."
Portions of this biography appeared in The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (Simon & Schuster, 2001). Mark Kemp contributed to this article.
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/artists/b-b-king/biography#ixzz3vLClbtE3
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http://www.allmusic.com/artist/bb-king-mn0000059156/biography
B.B. KING (1925-2015)Artist Biography by Bill Dahl
Universally hailed as the king of the blues, the legendary B.B. King was without a doubt the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the 20th century. His bent notes and staccato picking style influenced legions of contemporary bluesmen, while his gritty and confident voice -- capable of wringing every nuance from any lyric -- provided a worthy match for his passionate playing. Between 1951 and 1985, King notched an impressive 74 entries on Billboard's R&B charts, and he was one of the few full-fledged blues artists to score a major pop hit when his 1970 smash "The Thrill Is Gone" crossed over to mainstream success (engendering memorable appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show and American Bandstand). After his hit-making days, he partnered with such musicians as Eric Clapton and U2 and managed his own acclaimed solo career, all the while maintaining his immediately recognizable style on the electric guitar.
The seeds of Riley B. King's enduring talent were sown deep in the blues-rich Mississippi Delta, where he was born in 1925 near the town of Itta Bena. He was shuttled between his mother's home and his grandmother's residence as a child, his father having left the family when King was very young. The youth put in long days working as a sharecropper and devoutly sang the Lord's praises at church before moving to Indianola -- another town located in the heart of the Delta -- in 1943.
Country and gospel music left an indelible impression on King's musical mindset as he matured, along with the styles of blues greats (T-Bone Walker and Lonnie Johnson) and jazz geniuses (Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt). In 1946, he set off for Memphis to look up his cousin, a rough-edged country blues guitarist named Bukka White. For ten invaluable months, White taught his eager young relative the finer points of playing blues guitar. After returning briefly to Indianola and the sharecropper's eternal struggle with his wife Martha, King returned to Memphis in late 1948. This time, he stuck around for a while.
King was soon broadcasting his music live via Memphis radio station WDIA, a frequency that had only recently switched to a pioneering all-black format. Local club owners preferred that their attractions also held down radio gigs so they could plug their nightly appearances on the air. When WDIA DJ Maurice "Hot Rod" Hulbert exited his air shift, King took over his record-spinning duties. At first tagged "The Peptikon Boy" (an alcohol-loaded elixir that rivaled Hadacol) when WDIA put him on the air, King's on-air handle became "The Beale Street Blues Boy," later shortened to Blues Boy and then a far snappier B.B.
King had a four-star breakthrough year in 1949. He cut his first four tracks for Jim Bulleit's Bullet Records (including a number entitled "Miss Martha King" after his wife), then signed a contract with the Bihari Brothers' Los Angeles-based RPM Records. King cut a plethora of sides in Memphis over the next couple of years for RPM, many of them produced by a relative newcomer named Sam Phillips (whose Sun Records was still a distant dream at that point in time). Phillips was independently producing sides for both the Biharis and Chess; his stable also included Howlin' Wolf, Rosco Gordon, and fellow WDIA personality Rufus Thomas.
the Biharis also recorded some of King's early output themselves, erecting portable recording equipment wherever they could locate a suitable facility. King's first national R&B chart-topper in 1951, "Three O'Clock Blues" (previously waxed by Lowell Fulson), was cut at a Memphis YMCA. King's Memphis running partners included vocalist Bobby Bland, drummer Earl Forest, and ballad-singing pianist Johnny Ace. When King hit the road to promote "Three O'Clock Blues," he handed the group, known as the Beale Streeters, over to Ace.
It was during this era that King first named his beloved guitar "Lucille." Seems that while he was playing a joint in a little Arkansas town called Twist, fisticuffs broke out between two jealous suitors over a lady. The brawlers knocked over a kerosene-filled garbage pail that was heating the place, setting the room ablaze. In the frantic scramble to escape the flames, King left his guitar inside. He foolishly ran back in to retrieve it, dodging the flames and almost losing his life. When the smoke had cleared, King learned that the lady who had inspired such violent passion was named Lucille. Plenty of Lucilles have passed through his hands since; Gibson has even marketed a B.B.-approved guitar model under the name.
The 1950s saw King establish himself as a perennially formidable hitmaking force in the R&B field. Recording mostly in L.A. (the WDIA air shift became impossible to maintain by 1953 due to King's endless touring) for RPM and its successor Kent, King scored 20 chart items during that musically tumultuous decade, including such memorable efforts as "You Know I Love You" (1952); "Woke Up This Morning" and "Please Love Me" (1953); "When My Heart Beats like a Hammer," "Whole Lotta' Love," and "You Upset Me Baby" (1954); "Every Day I Have the Blues" (another Fulson remake), the dreamy blues ballad "Sneakin' Around," and "Ten Long Years" (1955); "Bad Luck," "Sweet Little Angel," and a Platters-like "On My Word of Honor" (1956); and "Please Accept My Love" (first cut by Jimmy Wilson) in 1958. King's guitar attack grew more aggressive and pointed as the decade progressed, influencing a legion of up-and-coming axemen across the nation.
In 1960, King's impassioned two-sided revival of Joe Turner's "Sweet Sixteen" became another mammoth seller, and his "Got a Right to Love My Baby" and "Partin' Time" weren't far behind. But Kent couldn't hang onto a star like King forever (and he may have been tired of watching his new LPs consigned directly into the 99-cent bins on the Biharis' cheapo Crown logo). King moved over to ABC-Paramount Records in 1962, following the lead of Lloyd Price, Ray Charles, and before long, Fats Domino.
Live at the Regal
In November of 1964, the guitarist cut his seminal Live at the Regal album at the fabled Chicago theater and excitement virtually leaped out of the grooves. That same year, he enjoyed a minor hit with "How Blue Can You Get," one of his many signature tunes. "Don't Answer the Door" in 1966 and "Paying the Cost to Be the Boss" two years later were Top Ten R&B entries, and the socially charged and funk-tinged "Why I Sing the Blues" just missed achieving the same status in 1969.
Across-the-board stardom finally arrived in 1969 for the deserving guitarist, when he crashed the mainstream consciousness in a big way with a stately, violin-drenched minor-key treatment of Roy Hawkins' "The Thrill Is Gone" that was quite a departure from the concise horn-powered backing King had customarily employed. At last, pop audiences were convinced that they should get to know King better: not only was the track a number-three R&B smash, it vaulted to the upper reaches of the pop lists as well.
Love Me Tender
King was one of a precious few bluesmen to score hits consistently during the 1970s, and for good reason: he wasn't afraid to experiment with the idiom. In 1973, he ventured to Philadelphia to record a pair of huge sellers, "To Know You Is to Love You" and "I Like to Live the Love," with the same silky rhythm section that powered the hits of the Spinners and the O'Jays. In 1976, he teamed up with his old cohort Bland to wax some well-received duets. And in 1978, he joined forces with the jazzy Crusaders to make the gloriously funky "Never Make Your Move Too Soon" and an inspiring "When It All Comes Down." Occasionally, the daring deviations veered off-course; Love Me Tender, an album that attempted to harness the Nashville country sound, was an artistic disaster.
Blues Summit
Although his concerts were consistently as satisfying as anyone in the field (King asserted himself as a road warrior of remarkable resiliency who gigged an average of 300 nights a year), King tempered his studio activities somewhat. Nevertheless, his 1993 MCA disc Blues Summit was a return to form, as King duetted with his peers (John Lee Hooker, Etta James, Fulson, Koko Taylor) on a program of standards. Other notable releases from that period include 1999's Let the Good Times Roll: The Music of Louis Jordan and 2000's Riding with the King, a collaboration with Eric Clapton. King celebrated his 80th birthday in 2005 with the star-studded album 80, which featured guest spots from such varied artists as Gloria Estefan, John Mayer, and Van Morrison. Live was issued in 2008; that same year, King released an engaging return to pure blues, One Kind Favor, which eschewed the slick sounds of his 21st century work for a stripped-back approach. A long overdue career-spanning box set of King's over 60 years of touring, recording, and performing, Ladies and Gentlemen...Mr. B.B. King, appeared in 2012. Late in 2014, King was forced to cancel several shows due to exhaustion; he was later hospitalized twice and entered hospice care in the spring. He died in Las Vegas, Nevada, on May 14, 2015.
https://rockhall.com/inductees/bb-king/bio/
B.B. KING BIOGRAPHY
B.B. King (guitar, vocals; born September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015)
Riley “B.B.” King has been called the “King of the Blues” and “Ambassador of the Blues,” and indeed he’s reigned across the decades as the genre’s most recognizable and influential artist. His half-century of success owes much to his hard work as a touring musician who consistently logged between 200 and 300 shows a year. Through it all he’s remained faithful to the blues while keeping abreast of contemporary trends and deftly incorporating other favored forms - jazz and pop, for instance - into his musical overview. Much like such colleagues and contemporaries as Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker, B.B. King managed to change with the changing times while adhering to his blues roots.
As a guitarist, King is best-known for his single-note solos, played on a hollowbody Gibson guitar. King’s unique tone is velvety and regal, with a discernible sting. He’s known for his trilling vibrato, wicked string bends, and a judicious approach that makes every note count. Back in the early days, King nicknamed his guitar “Lucille,” as if it were a woman with whom he was having a dialogue. In fact, King regards his guitar as an extension of his voice (and vice versa). “The minute I stop singing orally,” King has noted, “I start to sing by playing Lucille.”
There have been many Lucilles over the years, and Gibson has even marketed a namesake model with King’s approval. King selected the name in the mid-Fifties after rescuing his guitar from a nightclub fire started by two men arguing over a woman. Her name? Lucille.
King doesn’t play chords or slide; instead, he bends individual strings till the notes seem to cry. His style reflects his upbringing in the Mississippi Delta and coming of age in Memphis. Seminal early influences included such bluesmen as T-Bone Walker (whose “Stormy Monday,” King has said, is “what really started me to play the blues”), Lonnie Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson and Bukka White. A cousin of King’s, White schooled the fledgling guitarist in the idiom when he moved to Memphis. King also admired jazz guitarists Charlie Christian and Django Reinhart. Horns have played a big part in King’s music, and he’s successfully combined jazz and blues in a big-band context.
“I’ve always felt that there’s nothing wrong with listening to and trying to learn more,” King has said. “You just can’t stay in the same groove all the time.” This willingness to explore and grow explains King’s popularity across five decades in a wide variety of venues, from funky juke joints to posh Las Vegas lounges.
More than any other musician of the postwar era, King brought the blues from the margins to the mainstream. His influence on a generation of rock and blues guitarists - including Eric Clapton, Mike Bloomfield and Stevie Ray Vaughan - has been inestimable. “We don’t play rock and roll,” he said in 1957. “Our music is blues, straight from the Delta.” Yet without formally crossing into rock and roll, King forged an awareness of blues within the rock realm, particularly in the Sixties and Seventies.
Born on a cotton plantation in tiny Itta Bena, Mississippi, in 1925, King moved to Memphis, Tennessee in his early twenties with the intention of making his living playing the blues. He landed a regular spot as a deejay and performer on radio station WDIA, where he became known as the Beale Street Blues Boy (hence, “B.B."). King also built a reputation as a hot guitarist at the Beale Street blues clubs, performing with a loose-knit group known as the Beale Streeters. This group included vocalist Bobby Blue Bland, a longtime peer and collaborator.
King began recording in 1949 and signed with West Coast record man Jules Bihari a year later. He would record prolifically for the Bihari brothers’ labels - RPM, Kent and Crown - through 1962. King’s first hit, “Three O’Clock Blues,” topped the rhythm & blues chart for five weeks in 1952. Other classics cut by King in the Fifties include “Sweet Black Angel,” “Every Day I Have the Blues” and three more R&B chart-toppers: “You Know I Love You,” “Please Love Me” and “You Upset Me Baby.”
Dissatisfied with royalty rates and songwriting credits, King signed with ABC-Paramount in the early Sixties, when his contract with the Biharis expired. At that time, ABC was cultivating a stable of black artists that included Ray Charles, Lloyd Price and Fats Domino. They paired King with an arranger, and his studio records took on a more polished, sophisticated and eclectic tone. Pushing the blues in new directions, King was rewarded with such breakthrough hits as “The Thrill Is Gone,” which featured his soulful voice and guitar over a backdrop of strings. He also cut raw, energetic concert LPs - Live at the Regal (1965) and Live at Cook County Jail (1971) - that are classics of the genre.
Live at the Regal, recorded before a lively crowd at a black Chicago nightspot of longstanding, is the perfect match between performer and audience, with the latter’s enthusiasm fuelling the former’s fire. Other highlights of his lengthy tenure at ABC include a pair of mid-Seventies live albums with Bobby Blue Bland and Midnight Believer, a jazzy collaboration with the Crusaders. Blues purists treasure such back-to-the-roots efforts as Lucille Talks Back (1975) and Blues ‘n’ Jazz (1983). Favorites of rock fans include Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970), which found King joined by Leon Russell, Joe Walsh and Carole King; B.B. King in London (1971), made with a host of British rock musicians; and Riding With the King (2000), a collaboration with Eric Clapton. King won Grammy Awards for Best Traditional Blues Recording for Live at the Apollo (1991) and Blues Summit (1993).
Through it all, King has toured as prolifically as any performer in history. The road has been him home since the mid-Fifties. He reportedly performed 342 shows one year, and he’d average more than 200 shows annually even into his seventies. Each June he sets aside a few weeks for himself, going back to Indianola for what he calls “the Mississippi Homecoming.”
At the start of his career, King’s reach didn’t extend beyond the network of clubs and juke joints known as the chitlin’ circuit. Somewhat prophetically he noted, “We don’t play for white people…. I’m not saying we won’t play for whites, because I don’t know what the future holds. Records are funny. You aim them for the colored market, then suddenly the white folks like them, then wham, you’ve got whites at your dances.”
Sure enough, in the mid-Sixties, King’s hard work, musical genius, affable persona and revered stature among rock icons broadened his base of support to include a new audience of white listeners who tuned into the blues and stuck with King for the long haul. King came to the attention of yet another generation of younger listeners when he recorded “When Love Comes to Town” in 1988 with U2 for their Rattle and Hum album and movie.
“B.B. King’s achievement has been to take the primordial music he heard as a kid, mix and match it with a bewildering variety of other musics, and bring it all into the digital age,” Colin Escott wrote in his essay for the King of the Blues box set. “There will probably never be another musical journey comparable to [King’s].”
The final word belongs to King himself, testifying on the healing quality of the genre he embodies. “I’m trying to get people to see that we are our brother’s keeper,” King has said. “Red, white, black, brown or yellow, rich or poor, we all have the blues.”
B.B. King passed away on May 14, 2015. He was 89.
- See more at: https://rockhall.com/inductees/bb-king/bio/#sthash.kzFSiZQC.dpuf
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2015/05/bb_king_dead_at_89_remembering_live_at_the_regal_s_three_song_medley_the.html
Culturebox
Arts, entertainment, and more
May 15 2015
B.B. King’s Greatest Performance
The three-song medley at the heart of his masterpiece may be the best 12 minutes of live musical performance ever recorded.
by Jack Hamilton
SLATE
B.B. King performs in Germany in 1971.
B.B. King, a titan of American music who died Thursday at 89 years old, lived for so long, did so much, and was so deeply woven into our cultural fabric that it was easy to take him for granted. “The King of the Blues,” he was called, although too often in the offhanded and unthinking tone in which people call Budweiser the King of Beers. King was a singer and guitar player of unfathomable depth and dimension, and his music was a watershed: In the middle part of the 20th century, no performer so effortlessly melded country blues to the more urban, “modern” sounds of post–World War II rhythm and blues than King: not Muddy Waters, not Howlin’ Wolf, not the still-missed Bobby “Blue” Bland. Already on his first major hit, 1951’s “3 O’Clock Blues,” King exemplified this fusion in spades: the urbane and jazz-inflected guitar playing, the lush and billowing horns, the vocal performance that seems to channel Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson out of one lung, Jimmy Rushing and Frank Sinatra out of the other.
Writing about 89-plus years of B.B. King’s life quickly starts to feel like writing a history of American pop music itself—he spent his boyhood picking cotton in the Mississippi Delta and his twilight years as a capitalized National Treasure, a living metonym for the blues. So instead I will write about a scant 12 minutes of B.B. King’s life, the three-song medley of “Sweet Little Angel,” “It’s My Own Fault,” and “How Blue Can You Get?” that sprawls over the first side of King’s masterpiece, Live at the Regal. This medley is, in my completely subjective and admittedly grief-stricken opinion, the greatest 12 minutes of live musical performance ever recorded. It should be mandatory listening today, and for everyone of every generation to come.
Live at the Regal, recorded at Chicago’s Regal Theater in 1964 and released in 1965, kicks off, first, with a blisteringly fast rendition of “Every Day I Have the Blues.” The dust settles and the crowd is already convulsing; the band starts noodling behind B.B., who announces his intention to go back and “pick up some of the real old blues. If we should happen to play one that you remember, let us know it by making some noise.” Noise shall soon be made.
“Sweet Little Angel” comes in like a thunderbolt. B.B. plucks an ascending triplet line, drummer Sonny Freeman detonates his snare drum on the downbeat, and we’re off. B.B. plays an opening chorus of guitar solo, then leans into the first verse. “I’ve got a sweet little angel/ I love the way she spreads her wings,” he croons, a line that’s older than the Delta soil but sounds newly exquisite each time you hear it. (A quick, woefully incomplete genealogy: Lucille Bogan sang, “I’ve got a sweet black angel/ I like the way he spreads his wings,” on 1930’s “Black Angel Blues,” probably the earliest recorded instance of the line. King claimed to have nicked the phrase from Robert Nighthawk, who recorded his own version of “Black Angel Blues” but changed the name to “Sweet Black Angel.” The Rolling Stones then borrowed that title—after their 1969 tour with King—for their tribute to Angela Davis on 1972’s Exile on Main St. A mindboggling amount of musical history ran through and around B.B. King.)
It’s 1964, and B.B.-mania is in full swing.
King was 39 when he recorded Live at the Regal—not exactly a spring chicken, but he was at the apex of his abilities as a singer. His control on “Sweet Little Angel” is virtuosic, shifting from gospel belt to sultry croon to his swooping, heavenly falsetto. His voice quivers, growls, thrills, teeters on the brink of combustion. “Sweet Little Angel” is a song of tribute and awed devotion—“I asked my baby for a nickel/ and she gave me a $20 bill”—until we hit the last verse. “If my baby quit me, I do believe I would die/ If you don’t love me, little angel/ Please tell me the reason why.” A plot-twist ending: It’s a goddamn breakup song. And right as the realization hits, the guitar solo comes in, and the whole world falls away.
No one has ever played electric guitar quite like B.B. King—what he lacked in technical chops he made up for with gifts of melody, phrasing, and cerebral precision that, among improvisational soloists, place him in the company of Miles Davis and no one else. The solo coming out of “Sweet Little Angel” is a masterpiece of tone, range, and above all restraint. The spaces between King’s phrases are as thrilling as the phrases themselves; he lingers and sustains where a less assured musician would dash to the next idea; his mastery of dynamics is so complete that each string seems to have its own voice, and its own breath. Every note is perfect from the moment it appears to the moment it recedes.
And he’s just getting started. As King’s solo ends, the band keeps playing the groove, the great pianist Duke Jethro sprinkling fills as B.B. works the crowd with stage patter. Soon they go into “It’s My Own Fault,” a hammy catalog of romantic misbehavior: “She used to make her own paychecks/ and bring them on home to me/ I would go out on the hillside/ and make every woman drunk.” A tenor saxophone weaves call-and-response with King’s vocal, Sonny Freeman cracks the two and four with increasing ferocity. On the heels of the last verse, King takes another guitar solo, this one gnarlier and more flamboyant than the last, with scalding 16th-note runs nestled against what is now an avalanche of female screams. It’s 1964, and B.B.-mania is in full swing. Pulling out of the turnaround, the band modulates up a half-step, into the medley’s closing number, “How Blue Can You Get?”
B.B. instructs the audience to “pay attention to the lyrics, not so much my singing or the band,” then rips off yet another chorus of guitar solo that revels in the absurdity of this request. And the lyrics aren’t even that good: As blues standards go, “How Blue Can You Get?” is a little too direct, too single-entendre, its famous opening line—“I’ve been downhearted, baby/ ever since the day we met”—bereft of the vague, sumptuous poetry of a couplet like “I’ve got a sweet little angel/ I love the way she spreads her wings.”
But good Lord, does B.B. sell this one. “How Blue Can You Get?” on Live at the Regal is pure incendiary ecstasy, all the way through to its shattering, stop-time climax. Everyone in this club knows this song; everyone in this club is reacting as though it is being written on the spot. When we reach the song’s applause line—“I gave you seven children/ and now you want to give them back” (God, who says this to someone?)—B.B. leans into “gaaave” with such force it seems to upend the whole building.
“How Blue Can You Get?” doesn’t end so much as collapse into a heap of exhaustion. The crowd goes berserk, the only conceivable response to 12 minutes of music that does just about everything one could ever hope music to do. John Lennon once described the blues as “a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair. … You sit on that music.” Somewhere right now B.B. King is sitting on that chair, like a throne.
Jack Hamilton is Slate’s pop critic. He is assistant professor of American studies and media studies at the University of Virginia. Follow him on Twitter.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/15/bb-king-obituary-mississippi-farmhand-blues-legend
BB King obituary
Self-deprecating but with a magisterial stage presence, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history
A look back at the life of blues guitarist and singer BB King
by Tony Russell
15 May 2015
The Guardian
VIDEO: <iframe src="https://embed.theguardian.com/embed/video/music/video/2015/may/15/blues-bb-king-dies-aged-89-video-obituary" width="560" height="315" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>
BB King, who has died aged 89, was the most influential blues musician of his generation and the music’s most potent symbol. He represented the blues as Louis Armstrong once represented jazz, a single performer who could nevertheless stand, and speak, for the whole genre.
'We all have the blues': tributes pour in after BB King dies aged 89
Although much of his work, and arguably nearly all the best of it, was firmly within the discipline of the blues, King was unfailingly open-minded and interested when he found himself in other settings, bridging musical and cultural differences with affability and skill untainted by self-importance. More than 50 years ago the death of Big Bill Broonzy prompted writers to speak of “the last of the bluesmen”: it was premature then, as it would be to say it now, but it is hard to imagine any future blues artist matching King’s sway, in a career spanning 65 years, over musicians by the thousand and audiences by the million.
Son of Albert and Nora Ella, Riley B King (the B did not seem to stand for a name) was born near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and grew up with the limited prospects of an African-American agricultural worker, a barrier he gradually worked to overcome as he learned the basics of guitar from a family friend and honed his singing with a quartet, the St John Gospel Singers of Indianola. In his early 20s he moved to Memphis, at first staying with the blues singer and guitarist Booker White, his cousin.
Within a couple of years, thanks to some help from Sonny Boy Williamson, he had secured a residency at the Sixteenth Street Grill in West Memphis, Arkansas. He also became a disc jockey, presenting a show on the Memphis radio station WDIA. His billing, “The Beale Street Blues Boy”, was whittled down to “Blues Boy King” and thence to “BB”. After a single session in 1949 for the Nashville label Bullet, King began recording for the West Coast-based Modern Records in 1950.
BB King was that rare thing – a game-changer who was also beloved
He had his first hit in 1952, with a dramatic rearrangement of Lowell Fulson’s Three O’Clock Blues, which topped the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it headed a list of successes such as Please Love Me, You Upset Me Baby, Ten Long Years, Sweet Little Angel and Sweet Sixteen. On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history. He was always ready to extol the musicians who had influenced him, and would usually mention T-Bone Walker first.
“I’ve tried my best to get that sound,” he told Guitar Player magazine. “I came pretty close, but never quite got it.” In an interview in the Guardian in 2001, he said: “If T-Bone Walker had been a woman I would have asked him to marry me.” But he would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.
Disarmingly, he once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style, like Elmore James and Booker White. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” He was similarly self-deprecating about his singing, a sumptuous blend of honey and lemon, mixed half-and-half from crooners such as Nat King Cole or Al Hibbler and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose buoyant, funny music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll.
Throughout the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist on the circuit of black-patronised theatres and clubs, wearing out buses, if not bandsmen, on interminable series of one-nighters. In 1956 he is supposed to have filled 342 engagements. In 1962. he ventured to change that working pattern, rather like Ray Charles, by signing with a major label, ABC, but the first records under that contract, which tried to reshape him as a mainstream pop singer, were as unsatisfactory to his admirers as they were to ABC’s accountants.
The 1965 album Live at the Regal, however, proved the durability of King’s core blues repertoire as well as his magisterial stage presence, and has become iconic, a turning-point in the early listening of many younger musicians. He had further R&B hits with blues numbers including How Blue Can You Get?, Don’t Answer the Door and Paying the Cost to Be the Boss, and in 1969 he hit the upper reaches of the pop charts – territory where no blues artist had stepped for many years – with the subtly orchestrated The Thrill Is Gone.
It took him a while to establish himself with a rock audience, for whom the blues was largely defined by the Chicago school of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but he was brought forcibly to their attention by musicians who admired him. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “all of a sudden kids started coming up to me saying, ‘You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.’ And I’d say, ‘Who told you that?’ And they’d say, ‘Mike Bloomfield’, or ‘Eric Clapton’. It’s due to these youngsters that I owe my new popularity.” He acquired further rock credibility with the 1970 album Indianola Mississippi Seeds, on which he collaborated with Carole King and Joe Walsh and scored another enduring hit with Leon Russell’s song Hummingbird.
BB King at 87: the last of the great bluesmen
From then on, King was immovably established as, in someone’s neat phrase, “the chairman of the board of blues singers”. Imaginatively steered by his manager Sidney Seidenberg, he embarked on international concert tours that took him to Japan and Australia, and eventually to China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners at the Cook County jail in Chicago and at San Quentin, experiences that led to his long involvement in rehabilitation programmes.
A dedicated player of Gibson guitars, he was featured in advertisements for the company, which created a special model named after the succession of Gibson ES 355s that he called Lucille. He also lent his name to advertising campaigns for Pepsi-Cola, the AT&T communications network and Cutty Sark whisky, and to clubs in Memphis and Los Angeles.
The “chitlin circuit” now far behind him, he appeared at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, won approving notices from Playboy magazine, sang the theme-song for the television sitcom The Associates and the title number of the 1985 film Into the Night, was elected an honorary doctor of music at Yale and received innumerable awards from blues and guitar magazines. He recorded prolifically with luminaries in other fields, from the Crusaders, Branford Marsalis and Stevie Wonder to the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson and U2, with the last of whom he made the exuberant When Love Comes to Town in 1988.
In 1990, King was diagnosed with diabetes and cut back his touring, but not so much that his followers outside the US could not catch up with him every year or two. Though he would now deliver most of his act seated, the strength of his singing and the fluency of his playing were only very gradually diminished. The celebrations for his 80th birthday in 2005 included a Grammy award-winning album of collaborations with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, a garland of tributes from musicians as diverse as Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “farewell tour” that proved not to be a farewell at all.
In 2008, the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center was opened in Indianola, and in 2009 King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012 he was celebrated in the documentary The Life of Riley; and also performed at a concert at the White House, where the US president, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago.
King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others predeceased him.
• BB King (Riley King), blues musician, born 16 September 1925; died 14 May 2015
http://panopticonreview.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-inspiring-life-art-and-legacy-of-bb.html
Saturday, May 16, 2015
The Inspiring Life, Art, and Legacy of B.B. King: 1925-2015
All,
A REAL ORIGINAL ARTIST HAS LEFT THE BUILDING. What a GIANT Mr. King was, is, and will always be. He brought a lot of joy, pride, dignity, and honor via his indelible and always captivating art to not only black folks but the entire world. Thank you forever Mr. King. Your tremendous legacy and all that it stands for and embodies will never die...May your enormously generous and profound spirit rest in eternal peace...
Kofi
A REAL ORIGINAL ARTIST HAS LEFT THE BUILDING. What a GIANT Mr. King was, is, and will always be. He brought a lot of joy, pride, dignity, and honor via his indelible and always captivating art to not only black folks but the entire world. Thank you forever Mr. King. Your tremendous legacy and all that it stands for and embodies will never die...May your enormously generous and profound spirit rest in eternal peace...
Kofi
B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89 Mr. King’s world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American blues.
http://www.nytimes.com/…/b-b-king-blues-singer-dies-at-89.h…
Music
B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89
By TIM WEINER
MAY 15, 2015
New York Times
B.
B. King, whose world-weary voice and wailing guitar lifted him from the
cotton fields of Mississippi to a global stage and the apex of American
blues, died Thursday in Las Vegas. He was 89.
It was reported on Mr. King’s website that he died in his sleep.
Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.
Related Coverage
Artists Respond to B. B. King’s Death on Social Media
MAY 15, 2015
It was reported on Mr. King’s website that he died in his sleep.
Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and leapt like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.
“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.
Related Coverage
Artists Respond to B. B. King’s Death on Social Media
MAY 15, 2015
Music Review: A Patriarch Holds Court at His Own Party (Aug. 9, 2007)
B.
B. King Blues Festival: Along with Al Green, B. B. King performed at a
one-night show at the WaMu Theater at Madison Square Garden on Tuesday
night.
In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.
The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”
B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.
Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.
He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.
Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.
When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”
“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”
By his 80th birthday he was a millionaire many times over. He owned a mansion in Las Vegas, a closet full of embroidered tuxedoes and smoking jackets, a chain of nightclubs bearing his name (including a popular room on West 42nd Street in Manhattan) and the personal and professional satisfaction of having endured.
Through it all he remained with the great love of his life, his guitar. He told the tale a thousand times: He was playing a dance hall in Twist, Ark., in the early 1950s when two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove. Mr. King fled the blaze — and then remembered his $30 guitar. He ran into the burning building to rescue it.
He learned thereafter that the fight had been about a woman named Lucille. For the rest of his life, Mr. King addressed his guitars — big Gibsons, curved like a woman’s hips — as Lucille.
He
married twice, unsuccessfully, and was legally single from 1966 onward;
by his own account he fathered 15 children with 15 women. But a Lucille
was always at his side.
Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.
By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”
In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.
The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.
Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.
Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.
He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”
Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.
Riley B. King (the middle initial apparently did not stand for anything) was born on Sept. 16, 1925, to Albert and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers, in Berclair, a Mississippi hamlet outside the small town of Itta Bena. His memories of the Depression included the sound of sanctified gospel music, the scratch of 78-r.p.m. blues records, the sweat of dawn-to-dusk work and the sight of a black man lynched by a white mob.
By early 1940 Mr. King’s mother was dead and his father was gone. He was 14 and on his own, “sharecropping an acre of cotton, living on a borrowed allowance of $2.50 a month,” wrote Dick Waterman, a blues scholar. “When the crop was harvested, Riley ended his first year of independence owing his landlord $7.54.”
In November 1941 came a revelation: “King Biscuit Time” went on the air, broadcasting on KFFA, a radio station in Helena, Ark. It was the first radio show to feature the Mississippi Delta blues, and young Riley King heard it on his lunch break at the plantation. A largely self-taught guitarist, he now knew what he wanted to be when he grew up: a musician on the air.
The King Biscuit show featured Rice Miller, a primeval bluesman and one of two performers who worked under the name Sonny Boy Williamson. After serving in the Army and marrying his first wife, Martha Denton, Mr. King, then 22, went to seek him out in Memphis, looking for work. Memphis and its musical hub, Beale Street, lay 130 miles north of his birthplace, and it looked like a world capital to him.
Mr. Miller had two performances booked that night, one in Memphis and one in Mississippi. He handed the lower-paying nightclub job to Mr. King. It paid $12.50.
Mr. King was making about $5 a day on the plantation. He never returned to his tractor.
He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”
Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.
On
the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy.
That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years
after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock
Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed
there for 15 weeks.
He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.
There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.
“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”
Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.
The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”
Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.
In addition to winning more than a dozen Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.
“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.
“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.
“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”
He began a tour of the biggest stages a bluesman could play: the Apollo Theater in Harlem, the Howard Theater in Washington, the Royal Theater in Baltimore. By the time his wife divorced him after eight years, he was playing 275 one-night stands a year on the so-called chitlin’ circuit.
There were hard times when the blues fell out of fashion with young black audiences in the early 1960s. Mr. King never forgot being booed at the Royal by teenagers who cheered the sweeter sounds of Sam Cooke.
“They didn’t know about the blues,” he said 40 years after the fact. “They had been taught that the blues was the bottom of the totem pole, done by slaves, and they didn’t want to think along those lines.”
Mr. King’s second marriage, to Sue Hall, also lasted eight years, ending in divorce in 1966. He responded in 1969 with his best-known recording, “The Thrill Is Gone,” a minor-key blues about having loved and lost. It was co-written and originally recorded in 1951 by another blues singer, Roy Hawkins, but Mr. King made it his own.
The success of “The Thrill Is Gone” coincided with a surge in the popularity of the blues with a young white audience. Mr. King began playing folk festivals and college auditoriums, rock shows and resort clubs, and appearing on “The Tonight Show.”
Though he never had another hit that big, he had more than four decades of the road before him. He eventually played the world — Russia and China as well as Europe and Japan. His schedule around his 81st birthday, in September 2006, included nine cities over two weeks in Denmark, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg. Despite health problems, he maintained a busy touring schedule until 2014.
In addition to winning more than a dozen Grammy Awards (including a lifetime achievement award), having a star on Hollywood Boulevard and being inducted in both the Rock and Roll and Blues Halls of Fame, Mr. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, awards rarely associated with the blues. In 1999, in a public conversation with William Ferris, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Mr. King recounted how he came to sing the blues.
“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.
“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.
“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”
http://www.nytimes.com/…/bb-king-bluesman-of-distinction.ht…
B.B. King, Bluesman of Distinction:
All,
B.B. King, Bluesman of Distinction:
All,
Don't
pay too much attention to the silly, reductive, and predictably shallow
editorial remarks that Jon Pareles makes in the following video clip
about what blues artists in his ill-informed opinion were "scary" and
who were not. The great B.B. King--like the rest of us who deeply love
and cherish our truly great and enduring artists-- deeply loved and
respected his fellow black geniuses and blues icons like Howlin' Wolf
and Muddy Waters, and knew all too well that both their extraordinary
art and their rich humanity were far beyond any clueless middlebrow
critic's corny notions about them or their adoring and always supportive
GLOBAL audiences...Unlike Pareles we who love and respect the music and
the musicians who make it NEVER fear our artists or what they have to
offer either on or off the bandstand...HOLLA!
Kofi
B.B. King performs "The Thrill Is Gone" in live televised performance introduced by Kenny Rogers on November 25, 1971:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pC4DDkye8FU
http://www.nytimes.com/…/bb-king-bluesman-of-distinction.ht…
B.B. King, Bluesman of Distinction:
Video - Embed Player" src="http://graphics8.nytimes.com/bcvideo/1.0/iframe/embed.html…
Jon Pareles reflects on the rawness and finesse of B.B. King, whose musical style made him approachable to audiences and propelled him to fame. By Natalia V. Osipova May 15, 2015. Photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/6312208/bb-king-dead-blues-legend
Blues Legend B.B. King Dies at 89
5/15/2015
by Phil Gallo
Billboard
Blues musician B.B. King poses for a portrait with his Gibson hollowbody electric guitar nicknamed "Lucille" in circa 1970.Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
The Mississippi guitar aficionado and father of Lucille was a tireless road warrior.
B.B. King, the last of the Southern-born blues musicians who defined modern electric blues in the 1950s and would influence scores of rock and blues guitarists, has died. He was 89.
The Mississippi-born guitarist, who had suffered from Type II diabetes for two decades, died peacefully in his sleep at 9:40 p.m. PDT Thursday at his home in Las Vegas, his attorney Brent Bryson tells the AP. In October, King fell ill during a show and after being diagnosed with dehydration and exhaustion, canceled his concert tour and had not returned to touring at the time of his death.
With his trusty Gibson guitar Lucille, King developed his audiences in stages, connecting with African-Americans region by region in the 1950s and '60s, breaking through to the American mainstream in the '70s and becoming a global ambassador for the blues soon thereafter, becoming the first blues musician to play the Soviet Union.
B.B. King Rushed to Las Vegas Hospital: Report
King, whose best-known song was "The Thrill is Gone," developed a commercial style of the blues guitar-playing long on vibrato and short, stinging guitar runs while singing almost exclusively about romance. Unlike the musicians who influenced him, Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, for example, or his contemporaries Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker and Howlin Wolf whose music bore geographic identities, King's music was not tethered to the style heard at the Mississippi plantation he was born on or the Beale Street sound in Memphis where he first established his career.
He took rural 12-bar blues and welded it to big city, horn driven ensembles populated with musicians who understood swing and jazz, but played music that worked a groove and allowed King's honey-sweet vocals and passionate guitar licks to stand out. His solos often started with a four- or five-note statement before sliding into a soothing, jazzy phrase; it's the combination of tension and release that King learned from gospel singers and the jazz saxophonists Lester Young and Johnny Hodges.
"The first rock 'n' roll I ever knew about was Fats Domino and Little Richard because they were playing blues but differently," King said in the liner notes to MCA's 1992 box set King of the Blues. "And I started to do what I do now -- incorporating. You can't just stay in the same groove all the time. ... I tried to edge a little closer to Fats and all of them, but not to go completely."
The universal appeal of King's guitar sound, admired by the likes of Stevie Ray Vaughan, Michael Bloomfield and Eric Clapton, and his welcoming performance style opened doors for him globally as he was one of the most consistent touring acts of the last 50 years. For more than half a century King averaged 275 shows per year; in 1956 alone, he played 342 one-nighters.
"I found that each time I went to a place I would get more fans," King says in the book The B.B. King Treasures. "I started to get letters, and in that area people would buy records. People thought I was making a lot of money because I was traveling a lot. That was the only way I could survive."
King had a 40-year stretch on the Billboard 200 with 33 titles charting. His 2000 album with Eric Clapton, Riding With the King, hit No. 3, King’s chart peak. On his own, King hit the top 40 twice: 1970’s Indianola Mississippi Seeds, which followed the album that included “The Thrill is Gone,” Completely Well, hit No. 26, and Live In Cook County Jail reached No. 25 a year later. B.B. King is tied with Joe Bonamassa for most albums on the Blues Albums chart -- 25 titles since the chart started in 1995.
Live in Cook County Jailwas the biggest of 25 albums that landed on the Top R&B Albums chart, hitting No. 1 for three weeks during its 31-week run on the chart. Nine of King’s albums hit No. 1 on the Blues Albums chart, the last being Live at the Royal Albert Hall 2011 in 2012.
King landed 35 songs on the Hot 100 between 1957 when “Be Careful With a Fool” peaked at No. 95 and “When Love Comes to Town,” a duet with U2, reached No. 68. King’s chart peak was “The Thrill is Gone,” his 1969 single that hit No. 15. King only had two other top 40 hits.
King won 15 Grammy Awards, received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1987 and was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
Nearly as famous as the man was the man’s guitar.
In the winter of 1949, while King was performing in a club in Twist, Ark., a pail filled with kerosene, lighted to keep the place warm, was knocked over during a brawl between two men over a woman, and the place went up in flames.
“When I got on the outside, I realized then that I had left my guitar [a Gibson L-30 with a DeArmond pickup] on the inside. So I went back for it,” he told Jazzweekly.com. “The building was wooden and burning rapidly. It started to collapse around me, and I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar.
B.B. King Cancels Shows After Falling Ill in Chicago
“So the next morning, we found out that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady that worked in the little dance hall. We learned that her name was Lucille. So I named the guitar Lucille to remind me to never do a thing like that again.” (King partnered with Gibson in 1982 to create a guitar the B.B. King Lucille.)
Born Riley King on Sept. 16, 1925, in the Mississippi Delta near Itta Bena, he was raised on a cotton farm by his maternal grandmother, Elnora. His mother died he was 9, his grandmother when he was 14. He picked cotton on a plantation in Indianola, Miss., and his first recording, made in 1940, was the “Sharecropper Record” in 1940.
King learned the guitar by studying Jefferson, Walker, Lonnie Johnson and his cousin, Booker “Bukka” White, who taught him the finer points of guitar.
“I guess the earliest sound of blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be pickin’ cotton or choppin’ or something,’ ” King recalled in a 1988 interview with Living Blues. “When I play and sing now, I can hear those same sounds that I used to hear then.”
He believed gospel singing was a path to success and in 1943 joined the Famous St. John Gospel Singers, which was featured on WGRM, a gospel radio station. He sang in church on Sundays, then changed hats in the evenings to play for tips on the street corners of Indianola.
That same year he joined the Army, but his stay lasted less than three months. He spent his service days driving a tractor on a Delta plantation and his weekends at Indianola music spots soaking up the likes of Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Robert Nighthawk. At that time, he decided he would attempt to play blues rather than gospel.
After the war, King moved in with Bukka White in Memphis and caught his first break in 1948 performing on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio program on KWEM in West Memphis, Tenn. It led to engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill and later a 10-minute spot on black-staffed and managed Memphis radio station WDIA. He was billed as Riley King, the Blues Boy from Beale Street, later shortened to the Blues Boy and then just B.B.
King’s first record deal was with the small Nashville label Bullet Records, his first single being “Miss Martha King,” written for his first wife. That led to a deal in 1949 with the Bihari Brothers, whose labels included RPM, Modern and Kent, and quickly found success. His first hit, “3 O’Clock Blues,”was recorded at the Memphis YMCA in 1951 with Ike Turner on piano.
It spent 17 weeks on the Top R&B Singles chart, five of them at No. 1, leading to King signing with Universal Attractions and getting booked nationally at theaters that catered to African-American audiences, among them: New York’s Apollo Theatre and Washington, D.C.’s Howard Theater.
Like many blues artists of the period, King did not receive his fair share of profits as writing credits on some of his songs listed him alongside Joe Josea, Jules Taub and Sam Ling.
“Some of the songs I wrote, they added a name when I copyrighted it," King told Blues Access magazine. "There was no such thing as Ling or Josea. No such thing. That way, the company could claim half of your song.”
In the early 1960s, King signed with ABC-Paramount, then home to Ray Charles, and his records took on a more sophisticated tone mostly due to him working with arrangers for the first time. His 1965 concert album Live at the Regal, recorded in Chicago, became a hallmark concert LP.
In February 1967, King was booked on a bill at the Fillmore Auditorium in san Francisco with Moby Grape and the Steve Miller Band, a booking King thought was a mistake after he arrived, having never played to an all-white audience. Miller and promoter Bill Graham were big fans who wanted him on the bill.
"We were all just thrilled to the core," Miller said in B.B. King Treasures. "It was a very emotional night. He had tears in his eyes because the audience, as soon as B.B. came out on stage, just stood up and gave him a standing ovation."
King recalled it as the night he was viewed as a musician instead of as a blues singer. It also led to King meeting and performing with the white blues-rock musicians, among them Bloomfield, Al Kooper and the Blues Project and Clapton, who told journalists the highlight of his first visit to the U.S. was meeting King.
Sid Seidenberg, King's accountant who became his manger in 1967, took control of the guitarist's career to get King ahead of the IRS, to which he owed $1 million. Seidenberg cut King's band in half to five pieces, got him signed with the Associated Booking Corp. and got him booked into rock ballrooms and opening for the Rolling Stones, which led to appearances on The Tonight Show and The Ed Sullivan Show.
In 1969, he scored his first hit single.
"I had been carrying 'The Thrill is Gone' around for seven or eight years," King said in the liner notes of King of the Blues. "Had tried it many times, but it would never come out like I wanted it.
"We were in the studio from about 10 o'clock to 3 in the morning and had done 'The Thrill' and a couple others. Funny thing was, [producer] Bill Szymczyk didn't like it at first. About five in the morning he calls me .... he says 'I've got this idea to put strings on "Thrill" ' and I said 'fine.' About two weeks later he got Bert de Coteaux to put strong son it and it really did enhance it."
B.B. King Nominated For Songwriters Hall Of Fame
With the addition of a hit record, Seidenberg was able to craft a unique path for King: Book him in white college concert markets and Las Vegas hotels and get his music in commercials for brands such as AT&T, Northwest Airlines and Wendy's.
His highest-charting studio album, 1970’s Indianola Mississippi Seeds, was produced in a way to add to King's growing crossover appeal. White rock musicians, among them Leon Russell and Carole King, backed him; the rawer edges of his sound were toned down in the mix; and his lyrics leaned toward melancholy rather than the rage he sometimes expressed in cases of broken relationships.
On the heels of his commercial crossover success, King reverted to some of the rootsiest work of his life in 1971. He recorded Live In Cook County Jail -- he co-founded the Foundation for the Advancement of Inmate Rehabilitation and Recreation -- and followed the leads of Waters, Wolf and Chuck Berry by heading to London in 1971 to record with the new generation of British blues-rockers. From that point forward, Seidenberg focused on having King regularly head out on worldwide tours and a diverse range of recording projects that would include a live album with Bobby Bland, a slick Philly soul album and a collaboration with the Crusaders.
King told Billboard in 1974 that his "crusade" was to get greater recognition for older blues artist such as Buddy Guy, Lightnin Hopkins and Sleepy John Estes. He was host of a blues edition of The Midnight Special and said he had spoken with syndicators about creating as show that would include performance and talk segments with blues artists.
"There was a time when I was ashamed to be a blues singer, but today I'm exceptionally proud that I'm doing my part to preserve this art form," he said. The TV show never came to fruition.
King's recording career slowed down in the 1980s even as he was adding new countries on tour routes. U2 wrote “When Loves Comes to Town” for King, which they released in 1988 and featured in the film Rattle and Hum. King had met Bono around the time The Joshua Tree was released and asked the U2 singer to write a song for him. Years later they were in Fort Worth, Texas, at the same time and King visited the band to listen to the song they would eventually record in Los Angeles It would go on to win a MTV Video Music Award.
The 1990s saw the creation of B.B. King’s Blues Clubs starting in Memphis in 1991 and then Los Angeles in 1994. A third club opened in New York City in June 2000. King's autobiography, Blues All Around Me, written with David Ritz, was published in 1996.
At that time he had a resurgence as a recording artist, putting out 10 albums of new recordings between 1995 and 2008. During that time he won eight of his Grammy Awards, five of them in the best traditional blues album category.
King was married twice, from 1942 to '52 to Martha Lee Denton and then from 1958-66 to Sue Hall. He fathered 15 children with multiple women and had more than 50 grandkids. “About 15 times, a lady has said, ‘It's either me or Lucille.’ That’s why I’ve had 15 children by 15 women.”
In 1995, King received Kennedy Center Honors from President Bill Clinton. “Anytime the most powerful man in the world takes 10 to 15 minutes to sit and talk with me, an old guy from Indianola, Miss., that’s a memory imprinted in my head that forever will be there,” he said.
Additional reporting by Jennifer Frederick and Mike Barnes of the Hollywood Reporter
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandpopfeatures/5343853/BB-King-last-of-the-great-bluesmen.html
BB King: last of the great bluesmen
BB King, who died last night, gave this interview during his 2009 farewell tour – telling Mick Brown how he sang his way out of Mississippi's cotton fields
'I always had to work harder than other people': BB King Photo: AFP/GETTY
by Mick Brown
15 May 2015
Telegraph
BB King sits back on the tan leather banquette, legs splayed, plump fingers resting on his knee, diamond rings sparkling under the light. 'There’s no hurry,’ he says.
King has spent a lifetime on the road. In the old days – 40 or 50 years ago – he would tour more than 300 days a year, grinding across the highways and two-lane blacktops of America, playing the black theatres and road-houses on what was known as the chitlin’ circuit; for the past 30 years the itinerary has included Europe, Australia, the Far East. Now that King is 83, the schedule is necessarily more relaxed. But the bus is where he feels most comfortable – the closest thing, perhaps, to home, and the bus is where BB King chooses to hold court.
• The 25 best BB King songs
We have been talking for more than an hour in the car-park of the Canyon Club in the Los Angeles suburb of Agoura Hills, where King is playing tonight, when there is a knock at the door. 'Who is it?’ he says. The door opens to reveal a tall, slim black man smartly dressed in a suit and snap-brim hat. 'Number one,’ the man says, pulling the door closed behind him.
King nods. 'That means the band’s on stage, doing their first number.’ Your band? I ask. 'Uh-huh.’ I reach forward to turn off the tape-recorder. 'There’s no hurry,’ King says. 'We got plenty of time yet.’
• BB King: You can tell it's him from one note
King is a very big man – somewhere north of 20st. Sixty-some years ago, when he was a young greenhorn, up from the plantation, his second cousin, the bluesman Bukka White, gave him some sound advice: 'If you want to be a good blues singer, people are going to be down on you, so dress like you’re going to the bank to borrow money.’ King has always taken the words to heart, but now he dresses like he owns the bank: an immaculate tuxedo, bow tie fastened tightly at his neck, black patent shoes, those diamond rings.
The bus is one of those luxury items, with custom-built everything; it’s the back that is King’s home – a cocoon of buttery leather, deep-pile carpet, high-tech equipment. He punches a button and the window slides open behind him. 'Let’s have a little air.’
BB King is the last of the great bluesmen – the sole survivor of a tradition that goes back to the Mississippi Delta and the early 1920s. Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Howlin’ Wolf – the men who were his contemporaries, and his rivals, have all passed on. But King continues to record and tour. He last performed in Britain three years ago, billed as his 'farewell tour’. In a few weeks’ time, he will be back performing again. You never seem to stop, I say, and he laughs. 'If I stop I don’t get paid.’
To his left is a huge plasma TV screen; to his right, a home theatre console, stored with hundreds of DVDs. More are scattered on the banquettes. Hollywood films, anthologies and documentaries of the blues and jazz guitarists that he has been listening to all his life, and whom he considers his heroes. 'I think of guitar players in terms of doctors: you have the doctor for your heart, the cardiologist, then one that works on your feet, your leg. But I believe George Benson is the one that plays all over. To me, he would be the MD of them all. But I like all of them, even back to the godfather of the guitar, Andrés Segovia.’
King, who was working on a plantation at the age of seven, and gave up on schooling at 15, does nothing to hide the fact that his lack of formal education left him feeling disadvantaged in life; that it left, too, a legacy of avid self-improvement. 'This is my school right here.’ He gestures to a laptop on the table beside him. 'I buy software for stuff that I want to learn.’
What kind of things do you want to learn?
'What don’t I want to learn? I have how-to books, history, nature. Ain’t nobody here saying, “You’d better learn this.” But I still think I’ve got a head on my shoulders, and it pleases me.’
Even with the guitar?
'Especially with the guitar!’ He laughs. 'It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.’
You honestly don’t believe you are?
He considers this for a moment. 'I don’t know how to explain this to you, but I’ll try. A lot of people believe what other people say. But I know my limitations. I’ll give you a for-instance. In 2008 Rolling Stone magazine put out an article on the 100 best guitarists. Now I forget, but it seems to me like they put me in the top five [in fact, King was ranked number three]. I don’t agree with that. You mention Barney Kessel, George Benson, some of them older guys – man, I couldn’t hold a candle to them. That’s why I say I’m still learning. At my age,
I have a motto – I guess that’s a good word – if I don’t learn something new every day, it’s a day lost.’ He smiles and slowly shakes his head. 'I think that way now because there are fewer days.’
In the first half of the 20th century, the dark alluvial soil of the Mississippi Delta produced three things: cotton, grinding poverty for those that picked it, and the blues – as consolation, entertainment and an escape route to a better life. BB’s parents, Albert and Nora Ella King, were sharecroppers, and Riley, as he was christened, was their first son, born in 1925 in their wooden cabin on a plantation, near the small Delta town of Ita Bena. A neighbour set off on foot – there was no other form of transportation – to summon a midwife, but she arrived too late for the birth. A second child would die in infancy.
When Riley was four, his parents separated. His father moved away – Riley would not see him for another 10 years. His mother married twice more before dying when Riley was nine, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother. His boyhood years were spent helping her work her 'share’, picking and chopping cotton. In the five or six months between harvesting and planting he would walk five miles and back each day to sit with the 50 or 60 other children of all ages in the single room of Elkhorn School.
His first exposure to the blues was on his great-aunt’s wind-up phonograph. 'My mother knew my aunt liked me and she’d take me to see her. I’d be glad to see her, but my aunt did snuff and she’d always kiss me, and I hated that. But then my mother would remind me, you like to play her phonograph. So I’d say, all right. That’s how I heard Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson, Barbecue Bob, Mississippi John Hurt – many of these people were around then. And my favourites wound up being Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon, and they still are – they’re on my MP3 over there now.’ King laughs. 'And I still can’t play like them.’
By the age of 16 he was working as a tractor driver on the plantation. 'When I was picking cotton they paid 35 cents a hundred, and I learnt to be pretty good – I could pick over 400 in a day. Then I learnt to drive tractors and I was very good at it; and driving a tractor on a plantation you’re kind of a star, because you’re doing something that not everyone can do. And top wages then was $22 and a half a week, which was more than anybody else made.’
BB King playing recently in Biloxi, Mississippi (Photo: Rex Features)
He sang in church, and dreamt of singing and playing guitar like his pastor, the Rev Archie Fair. On Saturdays he would walk into town with his guitar over his shoulder and stand on street corners singing spirituals. 'I would sit on the corners, and people would walk up to me and ask me to play a gospel song, and they’d pat me on the head and say, that’s nice, son – but they didn’t tip at all. But people who ask me to play the blues would always tip me. I’d make $40-50. Even as off in the head as I am, I could see it made better sense to be a blues singer.’
In 1948, after a spell in the army, King left the plantation and moved to Memphis. He had married at 17, but his wife stayed behind. He found work at a company making fuel tanks. 'By being black I couldn’t join the union, so the only thing I could do was to hold this metal while the welders would weld it. Which I enjoyed very much.’
Memphis was the gateway to the North, and Beale Street, the 'southern Broadway’, was thronged with musicians jostling for attention – and a break. King played the bars and clubs, eventually landing a regular spot on a black-managed radio station, WDIA, after composing a jingle for the show’s sponsor, Pepticon health tonic. He adopted the nickname the Beale Street Blues Boy, which was soon abbreviated to Blues Boy and, finally, to BB.
King has always been a modest man – his progress could be seen as a triumph of talent over self-doubt. A story he tells of an early encounter with the blues singer Howlin’ Wolf illustrates this. Born Chester Burnett, Wolf was a powerfully built man with a domineering personality and a voice that could frighten the devil. In later years his most outré trick was to shake a Coke bottle and slip it inside his trousers as he was walking to the microphone, then unbutton his fly, pop the top and spray the audience.
'See, this is way back. I had heard of Wolf but I didn’t know him. There was a guy called Willie Ford; he had a little nightclub, about 40 miles west of Memphis. Now Wolf had been working for Willie Ford, but Wolf was away visiting his family, so Willie Ford contacted me at the radio station, and he hired me to sit in while Wolf was gone. And I had a good time. I was young – in my twenties – loved the girls. My job was – they had gambling in the back, and my job was to keep the people happy that didn’t gamble, keep ’em dancing. I wasn’t that good, but one thing I had going for me was the beat of my foot – I kept good time. And if you’re keeping good time, people can dance, that do dance.
• The greatest guitarists of all time, in pictures
I’ve never danced in my life. So my job was to play about 30 to 40 minutes, then stop and give the jukebox a chance. And I liked that, because a lot of girls would dance and I’d get a chance to sit and look at them.’ King laughs at the memory. 'I was trying to get with every girl I could, because all of them were pretty to me.
'I must have stayed there about two weeks, and then Wolf came back. And Willie Ford told us he couldn’t keep both of us. So he had us both play, and at the end of the tune the people could vote. And then he said, “OK, it seems like the people have chosen you, B, so Wolf, I’m going to let you go tonight, but I’m going to let you play another set.” Man, listening to Wolf sing, I cried myself. And at the end of it I told him, “I don’t want the job, you keep it.” That’s how good he was. But he wouldn’t take it. We was like rookies then, both of us trying to make it. And the next time I saw him, I had a hit record, and so did he. We didn’t talk about that night, but I sure thought about it, and
I still say there was nobody that sounded like Wolf, or played like him.’
King made his first recordings for a small local record company named Bullet in 1949, which in turn led to a contract with a bigger LA-based label, Modern, and in 1952 he had his first number one hit in the R&B charts with Three O’Clock Blues.
King endlessly plyed back and forth across the country, beefing up his sound from 'a guitar and a man’ to a small combo, to a 13-piece band – the band riding in a converted Greyhound bus known as Big Red, King travelling separately in his chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In 1956 he played 342 one-night stands. In 1958 Big Red was written off in a head-on collision with an oil tanker. King’s band emerged miraculously unscathed; the truck driver and a passenger died. The insurance on the bus had lapsed only a few days earlier. King’s liability was settled at $100,000, and it would take him years to work off the debt. Over the years, King would be involved in some 15 car accidents.
While his records were consistent sellers in the R&B charts, King never saw much return. 'I used to hear, what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. But it does hurt you.’ He gives a rueful smile. 'Ignorance is bliss? That’s bull, far as I’m concerned. Because I was making a half a cent a side – one penny for a record. It’s like building buses, for example. If you built this bus for me and I didn’t know anything about it, you could charge me whatever I’d pay for it. Now, which one of us is crazy? Me. And that’s the way they did me on the records. But I don’t fault them for it, because if you don’t know, you don’t know. It took me to learn.’
Such exploitation is a familiar theme in the history of pop music, particularly black music. Yet King seems to be a man totally without bitterness. He is fond of recounting the last words that his mother said to him on her deathbed, that if you’re always kind to others, they will be kind to you.
'Actually, I don’t know anybody I don’t like,’ he says at one point. 'There have been times when I’ve been around people I wouldn’t care to be around, and if I could get away I would. We have a word in Mississippi – we just don’t seem to set horses. In other words, this person is always saying something that gets your goat, y’understand? But when people treat you mean, you dislike them for that, but not because of their person, who they are. I was born and raised in a segregated society, but when I left there I had nobody I disliked other than the people that’d mistreated me, and that only lasted for as long as they were mistreating me.’
So you believe that people are fundamentally good? King looks at me. 'Not just fundamentally,
I believe all people are good. Some just do bad things. I had a teacher – God bless him, he died a few years ago – Luther H Henson. I was a student of his at the time I lost my mother. He was my one person that seemed like anything I wanted to know, I could ask him and he’d give me an answer that was right. He told me, there’ll come a time when people won’t judge you by your colour; they’ll judge you by your deeds; how you act and how you treat people. Hearing Professor Henson say that made me think, and I guess sort of toe the line a little bit more. And later on I heard Dr King say, “I have a dream, where you’ll be judged not by the colour of the skin…” Of course, I’d been a man for years when Dr King came along, but it hit me hard because it strengthened for me what Prof Henson had already said when I was a boy.’
By the early 1960s, with the rising tide of the Civil Rights movement, the young black audience that had once been BB King’s constituency had begun to turn their backs on the blues, with all its associations with hard times and oppression. At the same time, rough-and-tumble urban bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were finding a new audience of young whites in coffee houses and folk festivals, lionised for their Rousseau-like authenticity. King, in his words, 'fell between the cracks’.
While his spare, precise, single-note guitar playing – like a fretboard being caressed with a velvet-covered ice-pick – was to prove enormously influential on a generation of young rock guitarists, not least Eric Clapton, King had never played for a white audience until 1967, when he was booked to appear at the Fillmore West in San Francisco, a dance hall in the black section of town that had been taken over by the impresario Bill Graham and become the focal point of the burgeoning hippie scene.
'I’d played the Fillmore when it was a black theatre, but this time when we pulled up I saw all these long-haired kids outside. I thought, my agent’s made a mistake. See, once in a while I’d meet a white person who might say, “Boy, you sure is good,” but I wasn’t aware that a lot of these kids had been listening to me.
• 30 key blues musicians in pictures
'So I sent my road-manager in to get the promoter. And sure enough, Bill Graham came out and he said, “No, B, this is the right place.” I was like a cat with seven dogs around him! And when we get inside – no tables. Just kids sitting on the floor! Took me up to the dressing-room, same old dressing-room we used to go; the same old sofa, with slashes in, like somebody had cut it with a knife. Now I was nervous because I’d never played to people like this before. So I told Bill, I’ve got to have a drink. He sent out and got me the smallest half pint of liquor I’ve ever seen. I’ve taken a sip of it or so and try to get my mind off what I’m doing. Then finally we get on stage, and Bill said, “Ladies and gentlemen” – and it got so quiet you could hear a pin fall on the floor – “I bring you the chairman of the board, BB King.” That’s the shortest intro, and the best one, I ever had in my life. They all stood up and they yelled. I guess I had a 45-minute set, and they must have stood up three or four times. That’s the night I saw the difference.’
King lays much of the credit for his success with Sid Seidenberg, an accountant who took over as his manager a year after the Fillmore appearance, and – with the exception of a brief period in the 1970s – guided King’s career until his death in 2006. From the days of vaudeville and cylinder recordings, the relationship between black artistry and Jewish entrepreneurialism has been one of the constants of American entertainment. (Louis Armstrong was fond of recounting the advice once given to him by 'old Slippers’, the bouncer at a New Orleans honky-tonk where Armstrong played as a young man: 'Always keep a white man behind you that’ll put his hand on you and say, “That’s my nigger."’)
'Sid made things happen I never dreamt could happen for me,’ King says. Under Seidenberg’s management, King began playing festivals, Las Vegas showrooms and concert halls. He had his first, and only, million-seller in 1970 with The Thrill Is Gone – his signature tune. Since then, he has worked with jazz musicians and symphony orchestras, performed in 90 countries around the world, played half a dozen times at the White House, and at a private audience in the Vatican with Pope John Paul II. (Told that the Pontiff played the guitar, King presented him with one of his own. One may question the claim made by members of King’s band that His Holiness could be heard playing The Thrill Is Gone as they were leaving the room.) King holds six honorary doctorates from American universities and has a museum dedicated to his life story – the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Centre – in Indianola, Mississippi. He has also lent his name to sell everything from airlines to salad dressing. Just as Louis Armstrong faced accusations of 'selling out’ to white audiences, so King too has been disdained by 'purists’ – usually white – who continue to nurture an idea of the blues as the music of poverty and romantic squalor.
He tells the story of once playing at a symphony hall in Idaho and a critic writing 'BB – symphony hall, no dirt on the floor, no smoke in the air, and that’s the blues?’
'But my answer is, why not? Isn’t a symphony hall built for beautiful music? And the blues is a beautiful music – and it’s everybody’s music.’
King has always had a reputation as a kind man in an unkind business, a fair employer, whom musicians like to work for, and a man of extravagant generosity to family and friends. Even when he drank himself he would stick firmly to what he calls 'the old code’ – no drinking or smoking on the bandstand, and no drugs of any kind, anywhere. His two weaknesses have been romance and gambling. His maxim has always been that 'all women are angels’ and you sense that he has worked assiduously to enter the gates of heaven at any and every possibility. He was married twice, many years ago, but has 15 children by as many women. It is a source of some embarrassment. 'I think that’s the only thing that society will frown on me that I know about,’ he says. (King has taken care of all his children, and put many of his grand- and great-grandchildren through college.)
King was always an inveterate gambler – travelling on the road, band-members would bet on raindrops running down a window – and his decision to move to Las Vegas some 30 years ago may not have seemed altogether prudent. But curiously, he says, it actually helped him to break the habit. 'It was sort of like a man getting married – you don’t have to go out looking for girls, you’ve got your girl with you. I could go to casinos any time I had money and wanted to, so I actually went less.’
He will retire one day, of course – 'we all do some time’ – but shows no inclination to do so for as long as his health holds up. For one thing, he says, it is important for the blues to be kept alive as a musical form; and for another, the bookings keep coming in – and 'it’s against my nature to turn down money.’ You sense an unspoken rankling that his record sales have never matched his reputation. The recordings that have sold best have been his collaborations with others – his 1989 venture with U2 on the single When Love Comes To Town; his album with Eric Clapton, Riding with the King (2000). 'Apart from that, you don’t hear my records much on the radio.’ He is too diplomatic to say as much himself, but the inference is clear: the blues is still regarded as a second-class music.
BB King aged 23, advertising his show on Memphis radio station, WDIA, in 1948
He has performed at the Grammys 'once or twice – but I haven’t seen any other blues singers on there.’ Last year his album One Kind Favor won a Grammy for best traditional blues album. This year, he says, he was called at short notice to perform a tribute to the late Bo Diddley, along with Buddy Guy, John Mayer and Keith Urban. King cancelled a show in Florida to fly to LA. 'They put us on, and they didn’t even mention our names.’ The mood of bonhomie that has sustained him throughout our conversation suddenly vanishes. 'We have been treated sort of like I was during segregation in Mississippi. I was sad and hurt.’
King makes to rise from his seat. His band has been on stage for 15 minutes now, and it is time for him to go. But he doesn’t want to end the conversation like this. 'There’s one more thing I want to tell you: we used to be called rhythm and blues singers; but after rock’n’roll I guess we lost our rhythm, because now it’s just called blues.’ He laughs – it’s a well-practised line. 'But I don’t try to just be a blues singer – I try to be an entertainer. That has kept me going.’
We shake hands. I step off the bus and walk around to the front entrance of the club. As I walk in, King is coming on to the stage, as if he has moved from his parting thought to his opening song without a moment’s pause.
Nowadays, he performs sitting down, pulling the microphone closer to him on its stand, his guitar, 'Lucille’, nestling in his lap like a baby. There is a musician’s term, 'travelling’ – it’s what happens when the band ticks over quietly in the background while the singer talks to the audience, spinning yarns. King does a lot of travelling now, but when he bursts into full-throated song or caresses Lucille, the effect is as electrifying as ever. He performs for almost two hours. At the end he thanks the audience profusely and says he hopes he hasn’t bored them – as if he could. His band quits the stage, but King remains seated, patiently signing the scraps of paper and photographs being passed up to him. The house lights go up, and the line gets longer, and still he keeps signing.
There’s no hurry.
• On May 14 2015, BB King died peacefully in his sleep at his home in Las Vegas
http://www.npr.org/2015/05/15/406988156/b-b-king-on-life-plantation-living-and-his-droopy-drawers-sound
Music Interviews
B.B. King On Life, Plantation Living And His 'Droopy-Drawers' Sound
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B.B King in 1996.
David Redfern/Redferns
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B.B. King, the legendary blues musician, died Thursday after spending much of the month in hospice care. He was 89.
Born
Riley B. King in Indianola, Miss., in 1925, King began his life on a
plantation, where he was born the son of a sharecropper. Speaking to Fresh Air's
Terry Gross in 1996, King remembered an early life without telephones,
electricity or any outside opportunities. "A lot of the people,
including myself in the early years, just thought this was it, you raise
your families and you get old, you die, your families take over, kids,
what have you," King said.
But the world would soon open to the
musician. In 1947, he moved to Memphis and began busking on streets
with his guitar. Two years later, King made his first recording, and
he's been playing the blues, touring and recording ever since.
No
matter how many times he performed, King admitted to feeling a rush of
nerves whenever he stepped on stage. "I developed in my head that I'm
never any better than my last concert or the last time I played, so it's
like an audition each time," he said. "You get nervous just before
going onstage. I still have that, but I think it's more like concern.
You're concerned about the people — like meeting your in-laws for the
first time."
This interview originally aired on Oct. 22, 1996.
Interview Highlights
On growing up on a plantation in Mississippi
Believe
it or not, the people [who] lived on the plantation felt like that this
was really home, most of them, and we were being taken care [of]
because the boss of the plantation usually was like your lawyer, your
judge, your father, your mom. He was your — practically everything.
People lived on plantations felt, believe it or not, secure to be there.
If they needed a few bucks, usually they could get this from the boss
man, and it's taken out at the end of the year...
I somehow
later started to feel that there was more for me and a few others. I
think the same way with young people today; they feel that they're not
really happy with the status quo.
On moving to Memphis
It
was like, let's say you leave Cairo, Ill., and you moved to Chicago.
Wow! That's what Memphis was like: Wow, great big city. I had never been
in a city that large before. ... I felt that it was a place of
learning, because I was lucky my cousin Bukka White lived there and I
had a chance to meet a lot of people when I came to Memphis. And I would
go down on Beale Street and hear all these fine musicians playing,
especially on the weekends. Memphis was sort of like Chicago or any of
the major metropolitan areas. People was coming through going east or
west; in other words, it was sort of like a meeting place, if you will —
a port for people traveling from different places. So I had a chance to
meet a lot of great giants in the business, jazz and otherwise.
On how his 1952 hit "3 O'Clock Blues" changed his life
Well,
it changed my life in many ways. One thing, financially, because I had
been making about $60 a week at this radio station, and I would go out
and pick cotton. I would drive trucks and tractors; I did everything to
try to make ends meet, if you will, because my music wasn't taking care
of me. When I made "3 O'Clock Blues," I started then to get guarantees,
maybe like [$400] or $500 a day when I played out, and that made a big
difference ... financially speaking, because then I could hire more
people to work with me. Made life easier. I could get a driver to keep
from having to drive to all the different places by myself, and my wife
and I was able to live better, able to pay the band better. I was able
to do many things that I hadn't been able to do prior to that. And, of
course, [I] was much more popular, if you will. I just started to feel
then that I was a real entertainer.
On not crossing over in the same way Ray Charles and Chuck Berry did
In
the beginning, I was really confused about the way the politics ran in
music. I always thought if you made a good record, it was a good record.
... Not black, not white, not red or yellow — but people would like it.
Some people would like it. But I learned quickly after I got into the
music business that there are so many categories and you can get lost.
You're like a little fish in a big pond, and more so if you're a blues
singer, a blues musician. So I was not really wanting to be a crossover
[artist], actually. But I wanted all people to hear it and like it; I
was hoping, rather, that they would like it. People like Ray Charles,
people like Chuck Berry, all these guys to me were very talented ... all
of them were very energetic when it comes to playing music. They didn't
play the slow, droopy-drawers music like I did, so I found that maybe
that was my reason: that they had things that I didn't have.
I
was never envious of them, because me, I'm the country boy that left the
country but they never got the country out of me, so I didn't have that
stage presence that they have. So I was never envious of them being
able to get over [to younger audiences], but I would hope that people
sometime would pay more attention to what I was doing.
On the best advice his manager gave him
There
used to be a saying that if a black performer — it was four theaters
you had to play and be accepted before you would be accepted as a true
entertainer. One of those theaters was the Howard Theatre in Washington,
the Royal Theater in Baltimore and the master itself was the Apollo
Theater in New York, in Harlem. ... The fourth theater was the Regal
Theater in Chicago. My manager said, "Do not go to New York trying to be
Nat Cole or anybody else that's trying to be slick, because there are
people that are sweeping the floors that are much better than you'll
ever be. So the best thing for you to do is go there and be B.B. King.
Sing '3 O'Clock Blues'; sing the songs that you sing the way you sing
them. All these other people can do all of those other things, but they
can't be you as you can be you." That I've tried to keep from then until
now.
THE MUSIC OF B.B. KING: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH MR. KING:
BB King Calls This One Of His Best Performances:
B.B. King - "Sweet Little Angel" (Live):
B B King Greatest Hits | B B King Best Songs || B B King Collection:
BB King-'Live At The Regal'-- complete cd/lp:
Recorded Nov.21st,1964 in
Chicago
Tracks 01. Every Day I Have The Blues 02. Sweet Little Angel 03. It's My Own Fault 04. How Blue Can You Get? 05. Please Love Me 06. You Upset Me Baby 07. Worry,Worry 08. Woke Up This This Mornin' 09. You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now 10. Help The Poor
B.B. King - "Stormy Monday" (Live):
B.B. King - "The Thrill Is Gone"-- Live From Crossroads Festival 2010:
BB King - "You're gonna miss me":
B.B. King - "Why I Sing the Blues":
B.B. King - "Nobody Loves Me But My Mother":
Live @ Cowtown Ballroom in Kansas City, MO. August 1972
B.B. King Thrill Is Gone November 25 1971:
B.B. King performs "Thrill Is Gone" intro by Kenny Rogers on November 25, 1971
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B.B._King
B.B. King
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| B.B. King | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
King at the 2009 North Sea Jazz Festival.
|
|||||
| Background information | |||||
| Birth name | Riley B. King | ||||
| Born | September 16, 1925 Berclair, Mississippi, United States | ||||
| Origin | Memphis, Tennessee, United States | ||||
| Died | May 14, 2015 (aged 89) Las Vegas, Nevada, United States | ||||
| Genres | |||||
| Occupation(s) |
|
||||
| Instruments |
|
||||
| Years active | 1948–2015 | ||||
| Labels | |||||
| Associated acts | |||||
| Website | bbking |
||||
| Notable instruments | |||||
| Gibson ES-355 ("Lucille") | |||||
Riley B. "B.B." King (September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015) was an American blues singer, songwriter, musician, record producer, and actor.
Rolling Stone ranked King No. 6 on its 2011 list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time.[2] King introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues guitarists.[3] King was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
in 1987 and is considered one of the most influential blues musicians
of all time, earning the nickname "The King of the Blues", and one of
the "Three Kings of the Blues Guitar" along with Albert and Freddie.[4][5][6]
King was known for performing tirelessly throughout his musical career,
appearing at more than 200 concerts per year on average into his 70s.[7] In 1956, he reportedly appeared at 342 shows.[8]
King died at the age of 89 in Las Vegas, Nevada on May 14, 2015 from complications of Alzheimer's disease along with congestive heart failure and diabetic complications.[9]
 Oral History, B.B. King reflects on his greatest musical influences. interview date August 3, 2005, NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) Oral History Library |
Contents
Early life
Riley B. King was born on September 16, 1925,[10] on a cotton plantation called Berclair, near the town of Itta Bena, Mississippi,[11][12] the son of sharecroppers Albert and Nora Ella King.[12] He considered the nearby city of Indianola, Mississippi to be his home.[13]
When Riley was 4 years old, his mother left his father for another man,
so the boy was raised by his maternal grandmother, Elnora Farr, in Kilmichael, Mississippi.[12]
While young, King sang in the gospel choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church in Kilmichael. King was attracted to the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ because of its music. The local minister led worship with a Sears Roebuck Silvertone guitar. The minister taught King his first three chords.[14] It seems that at the age of 12 he purchased his first guitar for $15.00,[12] although another source indicates he was given his first guitar by Bukka White, his mother's first cousin (King's grandmother and White's mother were sisters).[15]
In November 1941 "King Biscuit Time" first aired, broadcasting on KFFA in Helena, Arkansas.
It was a radio show featuring the Mississippi Delta blues. King
listened to it while on break at a plantation. A self-taught guitarist,
he then wanted to become a radio musician.[16]
In 1943, King left Kilmichael to work as a tractor driver and play guitar with the Famous St. John's Quartet of Inverness, Mississippi, performing at area churches and on WGRM in Greenwood, Mississippi.[17][18]
In 1946, King followed Bukka White to Memphis, Tennessee. White took him in for the next ten months.[12]
However, King returned to Mississippi shortly afterward, where he
decided to prepare himself better for the next visit, and returned to West Memphis, Arkansas, two years later in 1948. He performed on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program on KWEM
in West Memphis, where he began to develop an audience. King's
appearances led to steady engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill in
West Memphis and later to a ten-minute spot on the Memphis radio station
WDIA.[19] The radio spot became so popular that it was expanded and became the Sepia Swing Club.[20]
Initially he worked at WDIA as a singer and disc jockey, gaining the nickname "Beale Street Blues Boy", which was later shortened to "Blues Boy" and finally to B.B.[21][22][23][24] It was there that he first met T-Bone Walker.
King said, "Once I'd heard him for the first time, I knew I'd have to
have [an electric guitar] myself. 'Had' to have one, short of stealing!"[25]
Career
1949–2005
In 1949, King began recording songs under contract with Los Angeles-based RPM Records. Many of King's early recordings were produced by Sam Phillips, who later founded Sun Records. Before his RPM contract, King had debuted on Bullet Records
by issuing the single "Miss Martha King" (1949), which did not chart
well. "My very first recordings [in 1949] were for a company out of
Nashville called Bullet, the Bullet Record Transcription company," King
recalled. "I had horns that very first session. I had Phineas Newborn on piano; his father played drums, and his brother, Calvin, played guitar with me. I had Tuff Green on bass, Ben Branch
on tenor sax, his brother, Thomas Branch, on trumpet, and a lady
trombone player. The Newborn family were the house band at the famous
Plantation Inn in West Memphis."[26]
Performing with his famous guitar, Lucille
King assembled his own band; the B.B. King Review, under the
leadership of Millard Lee. The band initially consisted of Calvin Owens
and Kenneth Sands (trumpet), Lawrence Burdin (alto saxophone), George Coleman (tenor saxophone),[27] Floyd Newman (baritone saxophone), Millard Lee (piano), George Joyner
(bass) and Earl Forest and Ted Curry (drums). Onzie Horne was a trained
musician elicited as an arranger to assist King with his compositions.
By his own admission, King could not play chords well and always relied
on improvisation.[28]
King's recording contract was followed by tours across the United
States, with performances in major theaters in cities such as
Washington, D.C., Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, and St. Louis, as well
as numerous gigs in small clubs and juke joints of the southern United States. During one show in Twist, Arkansas,
a brawl broke out between two men and caused a fire. He evacuated along
with the rest of the crowd but went back to retrieve his guitar. He
said he later found out that the two men were fighting over a woman
named Lucille. He named the guitar Lucille, as a reminder not to fight over women or run into any more burning buildings.[29][30][31]
Following his first Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart number one, "3 O'Clock Blues" (February 1952),[32] B.B. King became one of the most important names in R&B music in the 1950s, amassing an impressive list of hits[24]
including "You Know I Love You", "Woke Up This Morning", "Please Love
Me", "When My Heart Beats like a Hammer", "Whole Lotta Love", "You Upset
Me Baby", "Every Day I Have the Blues", "Sneakin' Around", "Ten Long Years", "Bad Luck", "Sweet Little Angel",
"On My Word of Honor", and "Please Accept My Love". This led to a
significant increase in his weekly earnings, from about $85 to $2,500,[33] with appearances at major venues such as the Howard Theater in Washington and the Apollo in New York, as well as touring the entire "Chitlin' circuit". 1956 became a record-breaking year, with 342 concerts booked and three recording sessions.[34]
That same year he founded his own record label, Blues Boys Kingdom,
with headquarters at Beale Street in Memphis. There, among other
projects, he produced artists such as Millard Lee and Levi Seabury.[13] In 1962, King signed to ABC-Paramount Records, which was later absorbed into MCA Records, and which itself was later absorbed into Geffen Records. In November 1964, King recorded the Live at the Regal album at the Regal Theater.[32] King later said that Regal Live "is considered by some the best recording I've ever had . . . that particular day in Chicago everything came together . . ."[35]
B.B. King performs in Germany in 1971
From the late 1960s, new manager Sid Seidenberg pushed King into a
different type of venue as blues-rock performers like Clapton and Paul
Butterfield were popularizing an appreciation of blues music among white
audiences.[36]
King gained further visibility among rock audiences as an opening act on the Rolling Stones' 1969 American Tour.[37] He won a 1970 Grammy Award for the song "The Thrill Is Gone";[38] his version became a hit on both the pop and R&B charts. It also gained the number 183 spot in Rolling Stone magazine's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.[39]
King was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and the Official Rhythm & Blues Music Hall of Fame in 2014.[7][40] In 2004, he was awarded the international Polar Music Prize, given to artists "in recognition of exceptional achievements in the creation and advancement of music."[41]
King performing in New York in the late 1980s
From the 1980s to his death in 2015, he maintained a highly visible
and active career, appearing on numerous television shows and performing
300 nights a year. In 1988, King reached a new generation of fans with
the single "When Love Comes to Town", a collaborative effort between King and the Irish band U2 on their Rattle and Hum album.[32] In December 1997, he performed in the Vatican's fifth annual Christmas concert and presented his trademark guitar "Lucille" to Pope John Paul II.[42] In 1998, he appeared in The Blues Brothers 2000, playing the part of the lead singer of the Louisiana Gator Boys, along with Eric Clapton, Dr. John, Koko Taylor and Bo Diddley. In 2000, he and Clapton teamed up again to record Riding With the King, which won a Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album.[43]
Discussing where he took the Blues, from "dirt floor, smoke in the
air" joints to grand concert halls, King said the Blues belonged
everywhere beautiful music belonged. He successfully worked both sides
of the commercial divide, with sophisticated recordings and "raw,
raucous" live performance.[35]
2006–2015: farewell tour and later activities
In 2006, King went on a "farewell" world tour, although he remained active afterward during the last years of his life.[44] The tour was partly supported by Northern Irish guitarist Gary Moore, with whom King had previously toured and recorded, including the song "Since I Met You Baby". It started in the United Kingdom, and continued with performances in the Montreux Jazz Festival and in Zürich at the Blues at Sunset. During his show in Montreux at the Stravinski Hall he jammed with Joe Sample, Randy Crawford, David Sanborn, Gladys Knight, Leela James, Andre Beeka, Earl Thomas, Stanley Clarke, John McLaughlin, Barbara Hendricks and George Duke.[45]
B.B. King at Roy Thomson Hall, Toronto, Ontario, May 2007
In June 2006, King was present at a memorial of his first radio broadcast at the Three Deuces Building in Greenwood, Mississippi, where an official marker of the Mississippi Blues Trail was erected. The same month, a groundbreaking was held for a new museum, dedicated to King,[46] in Indianola, Mississippi.[47] The B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center opened on September 13, 2008.[48]
In late October 2006, King recorded a concert album and video entitled B.B. King: Live
at his B.B. King Blues Clubs in Nashville and Memphis. The four-night
production featured his regular B.B. King Blues Band and captured his
show as he performed it nightly around the world. Released in 2008, it
was his first live performance recording in over a decade.[49]
In 2007, King played at Eric Clapton's second Crossroads Guitar Festival[50] and contributed the songs "Goin' Home", to Goin' Home: A Tribute to Fats Domino (with Ivan Neville's DumpstaPhunk)[51] and "One Shoe Blues" to Sandra Boynton's children's album Blue Moo, accompanied by a pair of sock puppets in a music video for the song.[52]
European Tour 2009, Vienna, July 2009
In the summer of 2008, King played at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, Tennessee, where he was given a key to the city.[53] Also in 2008, he was inducted into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame.[54]
King performed at the Mawazine festival in Rabat, Morocco, on May 27, 2010.[55] In June 2010, King performed at the Crossroads Guitar Festival with Robert Cray, Jimmie Vaughan, and Eric Clapton.[56] He also contributed to Cyndi Lauper's album Memphis Blues, which was released on June 22, 2010.[57]
President Barack Obama and B.B. King singing "Sweet Home Chicago" on February 21, 2012
In 2011, King played at the Glastonbury Music Festival,[58] and in the Royal Albert Hall in London, where he recorded a concert video.[59]
On February 21, 2012, King was among the performers of "In Performance at the White House: Red, White and Blues", during which President Barack Obama sang part of "Sweet Home Chicago".[60] King recorded for the debut album of rapper and producer Big K.R.I.T., who also hails from Mississippi.[61] On July 5, 2012, King performed a concert at the Byblos International Festival in Lebanon.[62]
On May 26, 2013, King appeared at the New Orleans Jazz Festival.[63]
On October 3, 2014, not feeling well enough, King had to stop his
live performance at the House of Blues in Chicago, Illinois. A doctor
diagnosed King with dehydration and exhaustion, and the eight remaining
shows of his ongoing tour had to be cancelled. King didn't schedule any
additional shows for the remainder of the year.[64][65]
Equipment
For more information about King's guitar, see Lucille (guitar).
"When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille."[66]
B.B. King used simple equipment. He played guitars made by various manufacturers early in his career: he played a Fender Telecaster on most of his recordings with RPM Records (USA).[67] However, he was best known for playing variants of the Gibson ES-355. In 1980, Gibson Guitar Corporation
launched the B.B. King Lucille model. In 2005, Gibson made a special
run of 80 Gibson Lucilles, referred to as the "80th Birthday Lucille",
the first prototype of which was given as a birthday gift to King, and
which he used thereafter.[68]
King used a Lab Series L5 2×12" combo amplifier and had been using
this amplifier for a long time. It was made by Norlin Industries for
Gibson in the 1970s and 1980s. Other popular L5 users are Allan Holdsworth and Ty Tabor of King's X. The L5 has an onboard compressor, parametric equalization, and four inputs. King also used a Fender Twin Reverb.[69]
He used his signature model strings "Gibson SEG-BBS B.B. King
Signature Electric Guitar Strings" with gauges: 10–13–17p–32w–45w–54w
and D'Andrea 351 MD SHL CX (Medium 0.71mm, Tortoise Shell, Celluloid)
Picks.[69]
B.B. King's Blues Club
Sign outside B.B. King's Blues Club on Beale Street, Memphis
In 1991, Beale Street developer John Elkington recruited B.B. King to Memphis to open the original B.B. King's Blues Club, and in 1994, a second club was launched at Universal City Walk in Los Angeles. A third club in New York City's Times Square opened in June 2000. Two further clubs opened at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut in January 2002[70] and another in Nashville in 2003.[71] Another club opened in Orlando in 2007.[72] A club in West Palm Beach opened in the fall of 2009[73] and an additional one, based in the Mirage Hotel, Las Vegas, opened in the winter of 2009.[74] As of 2015, only the Memphis, Nashville, and Orlando locations remain open; however, two new locations are planned to open in New Orleans and in Montgomery, Alabama.[75]
Television and other appearances
King made guest appearances in numerous popular television shows, including The Cosby Show, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital,[76] The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sesame Street,[77] Married... with Children, Sanford and Son, and Touched by an Angel. He also had a cameo in the movies Spies Like Us,[78] Heart and Souls and Blues Brothers 2000. He voiced a character in the last episode of Cow and Chicken.[79]
In 2000, the children's show Between The Lions featured a singing character named "B.B. the King Of Beasts", modeled on the real King.[80]
A feature documentary about King narrated by Morgan Freeman and directed by Jon Brewer was released on October 15, 2012.[81]
King appeared twice on the PBS television series Austin City Limits, in 1983 and 1996.
Commercials
King, who was diabetic, appeared in several television commercials for OneTouch Ultra in the 2000s and early 2010s.[82] He appeared in a 2014 commercial for the Toyota Camry with his guitar Lucille.[83]
Personal life
King was married twice, to Martha Lee Denton, 1946 to 1952, and to
Sue Carol Hall, 1958 to 1966. The failure of both marriages has been
attributed to the heavy demands made on the marriage by King's 250
performances a year.[12] It is reported that he fathered 15 children with several different women.[12]
He lived with diabetes for over 20 years and was a high-profile
spokesman in the fight against the disease, appearing in advertisements
for diabetes-management products along with American Idol season nine contestant Crystal Bowersox.[45][84]
King was an FAA certificated private pilot and learned to fly in 1963 at what was then Chicago Hammond Airport in Lansing, Illinois.[85][86]
He frequently flew to gigs but in 1995 his insurance company and
manager asked him to fly only with another certified pilot. As a result,
he stopped flying around the age of 70.[87]
King's favorite singer was Frank Sinatra.
In his autobiography he spoke about how he was a "Sinatra nut" and how
he went to bed every night listening to Sinatra's classic album In the Wee Small Hours.
During the 1960s Sinatra had arranged for King to play at the main
clubs in Las Vegas. He credited Sinatra for opening doors to black
entertainers who were not given the chance to play in "white-dominated"
venues.[89]
Philanthropy
In 2002, King signed on as an official supporter of Little Kids Rock,
a nonprofit organization that provides free musical instruments and
instruction to children in underprivileged public schools throughout the
United States. He sat on the organization's Honorary Board of
Directors.[90]
Illness and death
 |
Wikinews has related news: Blues musician B.B. King dies aged 89 |
After the cancellation of the remaining eight shows of his 2014 tour
because of health problems, King announced on October 8, 2014, he was
back at home to recuperate.[65]
On May 1, 2015, after two hospitalizations caused by complications from
high blood pressure and diabetes, King announced on his website that he
was in hospice care at his home in Las Vegas, Nevada.[91] He died in his sleep on May 14, 2015 at age 89.[16]
King's cause of death was determined to be multi-infarct dementia, brought on by a series of small strokes caused by atherosclerotic vascular disease as a consequence of type 2 diabetes.[92] However, two of his daughters alleged that King was deliberately poisoned by two associates trying to induce diabetic shock.[93] The Clark County coroner's office confirmed on May 25, 2015, that it was performing an autopsy on King's body and conducting a homicide investigation with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, although CNN reported that initial indications did not support the notion of foul play.[94] The autopsy revealed King's death was of complications of Alzheimer's disease and congestive heart failure, with no evidence of poisoning.[9][95]
Funeral and burial
On May 27, 2015, King's body was flown to Memphis. The funeral procession led down Beale Street, with a brass band marching in front of the hearse, playing "When the Saints Go Marching In", as mourners called out "BB". Rodd Bland, son of the late blues singer Bobby "Blue" Bland,
carried the latest iteration of King's famous guitar "Lucille."
Thousands lined the streets to pay their last respects. His body was
then driven down Route 61 to his hometown of Indianola, Mississippi.[96]
On May 29, 2015, King's body was laid out, in a purple satin shirt
and a floral tuxedo jacket, flanked by two black Gibson guitars, at the
B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, in Indianola. Fans lined
up to view his open casket.[97][98]
On May 30, 2015, King's funeral was held at the Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church in Indianola, Mississippi.[99][100][101] He was buried at the B.B. King Museum.[98]
Legacy
B.B. King has been called the “King of the Blues” and “Ambassador of
the Blues,” and indeed he’s reigned across the decades as the genre’s
most recognizable and influential artist. His half-century of success
owes much to his hard work as a touring musician who consistently logged
between 200 and 300 shows a year. Through it all he’s remained faithful
to the blues while keeping abreast of contemporary trends and deftly
incorporating other favored forms - jazz and pop, for instance - into
his musical overview. Much like such colleagues and contemporaries as
Buddy Guy and John Lee Hooker, B.B. King managed to change with the
changing times while adhering to his blues roots.
Discography
Main article: B.B. King discography
- Singin' the Blues (1956)[102]
- The Blues (1958)
- B.B. King Wails (1959)
- King of the Blues (1960)
- Sings Spirituals (1960)
- The Great B.B. King (1960)
- My Kind of Blues (1961)
- Blues For Me (1961)
- Blues in My Heart (1962)
- Easy Listening Blues (1962)
- B.B. King (1963)
- Mr. Blues (1963)
- Confessin' the Blues (1966)
- Blues on Top of Blues (1968)
- Lucille (1968)
- Live & Well (1969)
- Completely Well (1969)
- Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970)
- B.B. King in London (1971)
- L.A. Midnight (1972)
- Guess Who (1972)
- To Know You Is to Love You (1973)
- Friends (1974)
- King Size (1977)
- Midnight Believer (1978)
- Take It Home (1979)
- There Must Be a Better World Somewhere (1981)
- Love Me Tender (1982)
- Blues 'N' Jazz (1983)
- Six Silver Strings (1985)
- King of the Blues: 1989 (1988)
- There Is Always One More Time (1991)
- Blues Summit (1993)
- Lucille & Friends (1995)
- Deuces Wild (1997)
- Blues on the Bayou (1998)
- Let the Good Times Roll (1999)
- Makin' Love Is Good for You (2000)
- Riding with the King (2000, with Eric Clapton)
- A Christmas Celebration of Hope (2001)
- Reflections (2003)
- B.B. King & Friends: 80 (2005)
- One Kind Favor (2008)
Accolades
Awards and nominations
Years reflect the year in which the Grammy was awarded, for music released in the previous year.
B.B. King receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from George W. Bush, December 2006
Other honors
- 1977: Honorary Doctor of Music by Yale University[103]
- 1980: Inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame[104]
- 1987: Inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame[105]
- 1987: Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award[106]
- 1990: The National Medal of Arts[107]
- 1991: The National Heritage Fellowship from the NEA[108]
A commemorative guitar pick honoring "B.B. King Day" in Portland, Maine
- 1995: The Kennedy Center Honors; given to recognize "the lifelong accomplishments and extraordinary talents of our nation's most prestigious artists"[109]
- 1998: Grammy Hall of Fame Award for "The Thrill is Gone"; the award is given to recordings that are at least 25 years old and that have "qualitative or historical significance"[110]
- 2004: The Royal Swedish Academy of Music awarded him the Polar Music Prize for his "significant contributions to the blues"[41]
- 2006: The Presidential Medal of Freedom awarded by President George W. Bush on December 15[111]
- 2007: An honorary doctorate in music by Brown University (May 27)[112]
- 2008: The keys to the city of Portland, Maine (May 14)[113]
- 2009: Time named King No. 3 on its list of the 10 best electric guitarists[114]
- 2010: Sabrosa Park (in the small town of Sabrosa, north of Portugal) was renamed B.B. King Park in honor of King and the free concert he played before 20,000 people on May 29[citation needed]
- Each year during the first week in June, a King Homecoming Festival is held in Indianola, Mississippi[115]
- A Mississippi Blues Trail marker was added for King, commemorating his birthplace[116]
See also
- B.B. King's Bluesville
- Honorific nicknames in popular music
- List of nicknames of blues musicians
- African Americans in Mississippi
References
...was born on a cotton plantation, in Itta Bene [sic], Mississippi, just outside the delta town of Indianola.
1980: B.B. King is inducted into the first class of the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame.
- Mississippi Blues Commission. "B.B. King Birthplace". msbluestrail.org. Retrieved February 2, 2010.
External links
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Find more about
B.B. King
at Wikipedia's sister projects |
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Media from Commons |
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Data from Wikidata |
- Official website
- B.B. King at DMOZ
- B.B. King interview on Guitar.com
- B.B. King discography at Discogs
- B.B. King at the Internet Movie Database
