BB King - # 105

BB King, the King of Blues, dies at 89

He was number 105 on the list.

BB King, who has died aged 89, was the most eminent and influential blues musician of his generation.

King was above all a showman, and his willingness in later life to temper his music to suit the tastes of a white audience attracted criticism from blues’ purists; but such carping overlooked the fact that King was also the articulate guardian of much of the blues’ heritage, and that he had raised the form almost single-handedly from its backwater status into the musical mainstream.

His own playing, a majestic fusion of blues and jazz styles that brought him the nickname “King of the Blues”, also had a profound effect on the development of modern rock music.

The son of a sharecropper, he was born Riley King on a plantation near Indianola, Mississippi, on September 16 1925. His parents separated when he was four, and his mother married twice more before dying when Riley was nine, leaving him to be brought up by his grandmother.

As a boy he worked as a cotton picker. “Cotton surrounded my life and invaded my dreams,” he recalled. “I saw it, felt it, dealt with it every day in a thousand ways.” In the six months between harvesting and planting he would walk five miles and back each day to sit with the 86 other pupils who shared a single teacher at Elkhorn School.

In time he was promoted from ploughman to tractor driver on the plantation: “I loved it. The mule crapped, but the tractor hummed; the mule ploughed one row at a time, the tractor four at once.”

As a child, King concentrated on gospel singing. His first contact with its profane half-brother, the blues, was on his great-aunt’s wind-up phonograph, and this early experience was reinforced during his military service in an all-black US Army company. Then, aged 20, he hitchhiked to Memphis, Tennessee, to live with his mother’s cousin, the famed bluesman Bukka White, who advised him: “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 found work at a company making fuel tanks, and moonlighted playing the bars and clubs: “I’d take my guitar and play on the streets. A gospel song would get me a pat on the head. But a blues would get me a dime. So you see why I stuck with the blues.” He was soon earning more in a single day’s busking than he had in a week as a farm labourer, modelling his playing on that of T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.

“When I heard T-Bone, I flat out lost my mind,” said King of Walker, who had updated the back-country blues for the faster tastes of the new plantations of Chicago. “Thought Jesus Himself had returned to earth playing electric guitar. T-Bone’s blues filled my insides with joy and good feeling. I became his disciple.”

The harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson invited King to perform on his radio programme, King Biscuit Time, and this led to work in Memphis’s Beale Street clubs and a slot promoting a pick-me-up tonic on WDIA, America’s first all-black radio station. King soon had his own show, shortening his billing as “The Beale Street Blues Boy” to “BB”.

Listening to the records he was asked to play on WDIA had broadened King’s musical education, and at the instigation of Ike Turner — then a talent scout — King was signed to Modern Records.

At Memphis’s Sun Studios, soon to beget Elvis Presley, King then began a prolific recording career that saw him cut more than 200 discs in the 1950s alone. Three O’Clock Blues launched him to blues stardom in 1951, topping the Rhythm and Blues charts for 17 weeks.

King, essentially a gifted interpreter of the songs of others, followed this hit with standards he quickly made his own, including Sweet Little Angel and Every Day I Have The Blues. Yet he saw little money from his records, which sold cheaply and profited only the label: “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.”

A performer of considerable stamina, King paid his dues touring the “Chitlin’ Circuit”, the South’s gruelling network of small clubs and theatres. Unconventionally, he was backed by a 13-piece band, which travelled in a converted Greyhound bus known as Big Red, while King rode separately in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac. In 1956 they played 342 one-night stands at separate venues, and two years later Big Red was written off in a head-on collision with an oil tanker. King’s band emerged unscathed, but the truck driver and a passenger were killed. 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 pay it off.

At one performance, in Twist, Arkansas, two men began fighting, knocking over a kerosene heater. As the hall went up in flames, King ran to safety, only to rush back inside to retrieve his precious Gibson guitar, narrowly escaping with his life. The fight concerned a girl called Lucille, and King christened the guitar — and all its successors — Lucille “to remind me not to do such a silly thing again”.

An admirer of the sophistication that had gained Nat King Cole and Louis Jordan a white audience, King soon evolved his own highly polished style, fusing genres by drawing on his Delta blues influences as well as that of jazz guitarists like Django Reinhardt. The result was a rich but agile sound, with volleys of notes bent and sustained to heighten the emotional intensity of his guitar passages, at their best a fluid extension of King’s passionate, forthright vocals. His inability to play and sing at the same time led him to substitute lengthy guitar solos for vocal expression, a blueprint for later, flashier, rock guitarists.

In the early 1960s, however, King’s star dimmed as his black audience turned to the urban sounds of soul and R&B, while white purists shunned his sound as being too slick. Nevertheless, the 20-stone King remained a dynamic and charismatic live performer, and the power of his playing and rapport with a crowd was well caught on the album regarded as his masterpiece, Live at The Regal (1964). He also played regularly at prisons, notably Chicago’s Cook County Jail, and funded inmate rehabilitation groups.

 

By the mid-1960s urban bluesmen such as Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker were finding a new audience of young whites, and in 1967 King 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 had become the focal point of the hippie scene. “When we pulled up I saw all these long-haired kids outside,” King later recalled. “I thought, my agent’s made a mistake... I wasn’t aware that a lot of these kids had been listening to me.”

 

It was after this appearance at the Fillmore West that the accountant Sid Seidenberg took over as King’s manager. Seidenberg — one of a series of Jewish impresarios who managed black musicians in America — had looked after Louis Armstrong, and would guide King’s career (apart from a brief interlude in the 1970s) until his death in 2006. Under Seidenberg’s management, King began playing festivals, venues in Las Vegas and concert halls. He had his first, and only, million copy-seller in 1970 with The Thrill Is Gone – his signature tune. He went on to perform at the White House, at the Vatican (for Pope John Paul II) and in 90 countries around the world.

Guitarists such as Jimmy Page and Eric Clapton (with whom he made the album Riding with the King in 2000) acknowledged King’s influence. A collaboration in 1989 with U2, When Love Comes To Town, was among many acts of homage by white rock acts. He also collaborated successfully with the jazz-soul group The Crusaders, notably on Better Not Look Down.

 

King was always warmly received in Europe, and in 1979 became the first bluesman to play in the Soviet Union. Despite worsening diabetes, he maintained a punishing schedule of recording and touring into his seventies, playing some 250 concerts a year, into each of which he put his heart and soul; even in his eighties, he continued to tour, although at a more relaxed pace.

King made guest appearances in numerous popular television shows, including The Cosby Show, The Young and the Restless, General Hospital, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Sesame Street, Married... with Children, Sanford and Son, and Touched by an Angel. He also appeared in the movie Spies Like Us.

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.

B.B. King: The Life of Riley, a feature documentary about King narrated by Morgan Freeman and directed by Jon Brewer, was released on October 15, 2012.

 

King, who was diabetic, appeared in several television commercials for OneTouch Ultra, a blood glucose monitoring device, in the 2000s and early 2010s. He appeared in 1995 in a McDonald's commercial with Australian guitarist Nathan Cavaleri, and then in a commercial for the Toyota Camry with his guitar Lucille.

An avid gambler, he often found an excuse to play Las Vegas, but in person he was dignified, quiet and reflective. He refused to tolerate smoking or drinking (let alone drugs) among his musicians during a performance, but they admired him for his sense of fairness and gave him their affection and respect. He was known for his extravagant generosity to both family and friends.

In 2008 Rolling Stone magazine ranked King third in a list of the 100 best guitarists. “T-Bone deserves the recognition I’m now getting,” he said. “T-Bone and Lonnie and Blind Lemon. They were just born too early. I’m the lucky man.”

On stage he favoured dressing in a tuxedo, bow tie fastened tightly at his neck, and black patent leather shoes, his fingers adorned with diamond rings.

 

King held honorary doctorates from several American universities, and his life and career are remembered at the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Centre in Indianola, Mississippi.

Despite the hardship of his early years, BB King was a man without rancour: “Actually, I don’t know anybody I don’t like,” he told The Telegraph’s Mick Brown in 2009. “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.”

BB King, who liked to say that “all women are angels”, was twice married and divorced. He is reputed to have had 15 children by 15 different partners, and once mused: “I think that’s the only thing that society will frown on me that I know about.”