B.B. King

Delta to Beale Street

Riley B. King was born on 16 September 1925 on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and later called Indianola his hometown. His grandmother raised him. He sang in a church gospel choir, a local minister taught him his first three chords, and his employer bought him his first guitar for 15 dollars. In November 1941 the radio show King Biscuit Time began broadcasting from Helena, Arkansas. King listened on his breaks and decided he wanted to be a radio musician.

In 1946 he followed his cousin Bukka White to Memphis. Two years later he was back in West Memphis, playing on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program, and that led to a ten-minute spot on WDIA in Memphis that grew into the Sepia Swing Club. On air he was the Beale Street Blues Boy, which shrank to Blues Boy and finally to B. B. At WDIA he met T-Bone Walker, and after hearing him King knew he had to own an electric guitar.

The RPM years

King made his first record for Bullet in 1949, then signed with RPM Records of Los Angeles, where Sam Phillips produced many of the early sides. He named his guitar Lucille after a fire in an Arkansas dance hall that same year. Three O'Clock Blues, cut around September 1951 in a room at the Memphis YMCA, spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1952. His weekly earnings rose from about 85 dollars to 2,500, and he began playing theaters such as the Howard in Washington and the Apollo in New York.

Hits followed, among them Every Day I Have the Blues and Sweet Little Angel. In 1956 he played 342 shows, held three recording sessions and started his own label, Blues Boys Kingdom. The Bihari brothers gathered his singles on his first LP, Singin' the Blues, in 1957.

Live at the Regal

King signed to ABC-Paramount in 1962. On 21 November 1964 he recorded Live at the Regal in Chicago, a room he said he had played hundreds of times. Johnny Pate produced, and the album came out in 1965. King later said everything came together on that day. It was added to the National Recording Registry in 2005, and Rolling Stone placed it at number 299 in its 2020 list of the greatest albums. How Blue Can You Get, issued as an ABC-Paramount single that year, became a regular in his shows.

Crossing over

From the late 1960s his manager Sid Seidenberg steered him toward the rock audience, and in 1969 he opened for the Rolling Stones on their American tour. Completely Well, produced by Bill Szymczyk, held The Thrill Is Gone, which went to number 15 on the Hot 100 and won a Grammy in 1970. Szymczyk also produced Indianola Mississippi Seeds, with Carole King, Leon Russell and Joe Walsh among the guests.

On 10 September 1970 King played for 2,117 prisoners at Cook County Jail in Chicago. Live in Cook County Jail reached number one on the R&B chart, the only album of his to do so. He kept playing prisons, over fifty of them by 1998, and co-founded a foundation for inmate rehabilitation.

The long road

He joined the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, appeared with U2 on Rattle and Hum in 1988, and made Riding With the King with Eric Clapton in 2000, which won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album. He received the Polar Music Prize in 2004 and went on a farewell tour in 2006, though he kept playing. The B.B. King Museum opened in Indianola on 13 September 2008. His last show was at the House of Blues in Chicago on 3 October 2014.

King died on 14 May 2015, aged 89,. Joe Bonamassa wrote that a single note was enough to tell it was King. In 2019 an 80th-birthday Gibson Lucille prototype from his estate sold at auction for 280,000 dollars.