B.B. King, 89, blues monarch for a generation
B.B. King, 89, the Mississippi-born son of sharecroppers who earned the title "King of the Blues" over a seven-decade career in which he established himself as the most influential electric guitar player in history, died late Thursday at his home in Las Vegas.
B.B. King, 89, the Mississippi-born son of sharecroppers who earned the title "King of the Blues" over a seven-decade career in which he established himself as the most influential electric guitar player in history, died late Thursday at his home in Las Vegas.
His attorney, Brent Bryson, told The Associated Press that King died peacefully in his sleep at 9:40 p.m. (12:40 a.m. Friday, Philadelphia time). He said funeral arrangements were underway.
The singer was born Riley B. King. His initials-only stage name was a shortened form of "Beale Street Blues Boy," the moniker he used in Memphis as a DJ in the late 1940s. He maintained a 200-plus-performance-a-year itinerary for more than a half-century, pleasing intergenerational audiences with trademark laments such as "The Thrill Is Gone" and "Sweet Little Angel."
Diagnosed in 1980 with type 2 diabetes - a disease for which he would become a public spokesman - Mr. King played his final show Oct. 3, 2014, in Chicago, where he was taken from the stage to be treated for dehydration and exhaustion. He was hospitalized again in April, and after suffering a suspected heart attack the last week of that month, was placed in hospice care in his Las Vegas home.
On news of his death, praise for the blues titan poured in from all quarters of the music world and beyond. In a video posted on his Facebook page, Eric Clapton said, "He was a beacon for all of us who love this kind of music" and recommended people go out and find King's watershed album Live at the Regal. Fellow blues man Buddy Guy said on Instagram: "He could play so smooth, he didn't have to put on a show. The way BB did it is the way we all do it now."
And President Barack Obama issued this statement: "The blues has lost its king, and America has lost a legend. … No one worked harder than B.B. No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues."
Allen James, longtime Philly-area blues guitarist, now with the Deb Callahan band, said, "B.B. King to me is one of those guitarists that you know from the first couple of notes. That's hard to say these days. . . . 'The Thrill Is Gone' is a blues standard. Plus, as a player myself, his vibrato just kills me every time I hear him play - and every guitar player should own a copy of Live at the Regal."
Fellow guitarist Gary Lee Bass said Mr. King "was one of the first guys I listened to ... and one of the first shows I saw ... at the Fillmore East, no less. Those short, well-phrased solos were some of the first that early bands I was in tried to cop."
Princeton-area guitarist Mark Hill called Mr. King "one of my all-time favorite guitarists. I happened to see him in concert six times in 1971 or 1972. ... He played the same exact show, telling the same exact stories and jokes, and played the same exact songs in the same exact order, but with incredible feeling. He and the band were like a machine. He was one of the greats of the old Delta blues players."
Jamie Mahon of St. James and the Apostles, a Philadelphia-based band, said, "Where to begin? I could talk tirelessly about his left-hand vibrato technique or his love of Frank Sinatra, but B.B. King to me has always been about the space between the notes, and keeping the singing and the soloing separate. That's the essence of the whole less-is-more aesthetic that I've been copying as long as I've been playing guitar. B.B. is king amongst all the Kings who shared that surname and will be dearly missed."
Born on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Miss. in 1925, Mr. King was a last living link to the first wave of blues pioneers, and a stylistic innovator who understood and harnessed the emotional potential of his amplified instruments, which he dubbed "Lucille" (usually a black semihollow-body Gibson ES-355) and referred to as "my baby."
At a King show in Twist, Ark., in the 1950s, a fight among two patrons over a woman named Lucille led to the club's catching fire. Mr. King risked his life to save his cherished Gibson, whose subsequent incarnations would forever be called Lucille.
Mr. King, who was also was a subtle and soulful vocalist, never learned to sing and play guitar at the same time. Instead, he mastered the art of carrying on a conversation between his instrument and his own voice. "When I sing, I play in my mind," he once said. "The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille."
After his parents split up, he grew up with his maternal grandmother in Kilmichael, Miss. There Mr. King learned to love early bluesmen like Blind Lemon Jefferson, and fashioned his own homemade instrument from a broomstick and cotton baling wire. He credited the Texas blues man T-Bone Walker with sending him on his way. He was "the first electric guitar player I heard on record. He made me know I just had to go out and get an electric guitar."
Unlike Mississippi forebears such as Charley Patton and Robert Johnson, he did not play in the bottleneck slide style on which the Delta blues was built. Trying to learn from bluesman Bukka White, a relative he stayed with when he first left behind a job as a tractor driver and moved upriver to Memphis in 1946, he found he could not imitate White's technique with a slide. Instead, "I devised my own technique for producing the tremolo," which he called "the butterfly," he told the London newspaper the Observer in 2012. "I swivel my wrist from my elbow, back and forth, and this stretches the string, raising and lowering the pitch of the note rhythmically. With my other fingers stretched out, my whole hand makes a fluttering gesture, a bit like a butterfly flapping its wings."
Bending strings on Lucille to make it cry and moan, he made his instrument a most effective vehicle for turning the troubles he'd seen and felt into a profoundly emotional American art form that could be experienced by anyone within earshot of himself and Lucille. Smartly turned out in a suit and tie, and taking in the influence of jazz players like Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt, he took the blues uptown without losing its down-home impact.
Mr. King got his first big break in 1948 performing on Sonny Boy Williams' radio show in West Memphis, Ark., and the next year recorded his first single, "Miss Martha King." But the next year, he signed with record executives the Bihari brothers, and scored his first hit, "Three O'Clock Blues," in 1951. A steady stream of hits on the R&B charts followed, like "You Upset Me Baby" and "Everyday I Have The Blues," throughout the 1950s, and he toured steadily.
Like fellow African American musicians of the era, he suffered the indignities of touring on "the Chitlin Circuit," a label he disliked, in the pre-Civil Rights South. "I've put up with more humiliation than I care to remember," he recalled in his 1994 memoir, Blues All Around Me, written with David Ritz. "Touring a segregated America - forever being stopped and harassed by white cops hurt you most, because you don't realize the damage. You hold it in. You feel empty, like someone reached in and pulled out your guts. You feel hurt and dirty, less than a person."
As the blues revival brought the music to a new generation in the 1960s, Mr. King's influence became apparent on guitarists on both sides of the Atlantic, including Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton (with whom he would finally get around to recording an album, Riding With the King, in 2000), and Jimi Hendrix. Mr. King's playing was always impeccable, his soloing never excessive, his full and rounded sound never as raw as that of Delta-raised players such as Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. But he was a hero, almost without exception, to the blues and rock guitar heroes to come, from the late Stevie Ray Vaughan to younger axmen like John Mayer.
Mr. King broke though to white audiences with his 1964 album Live at the Regal, played high-profile gigs at the Montreux Jazz and Newport Folk Festivals and at the Fillmore in San Francisco, and toured arenas with the Rolling Stones in 1969. That same year, his album Completely Well included his signature song of sorrow, "The Thrill Is Gone," his biggest hit, which went to No. 15 on the pop charts.
Hits were sparse after that, but Mr. King continued to record prolifically in subsequent decades. He frequently worked with contemporary Bobby "Blue" Bland, and in 1974 did sessions with producers Kenny Gamble and Leon Huff for the album Friends that produced the instrumental "Philadelphia." Working the road relentlessly, always with a sizable band dressed, like their leader, in dinner jackets and bow ties, he collected honors along the way.
In 1980, he was inducted into the first class of the Blues Hall of Fame. In 1987, he went into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in its second year. And he became the rare elder statesman to get airtime on MTV in 1989, when his collaboration with U2, "When Love Comes to Town," was a hit from the Irish band's album Rattle & Hum.
In Memphis, Los Angeles, and New York, the guitarist opened branches of B.B. King's Blues Club in the 1990s. But rather than hunker down in his own venues, Mr. King continued to perform more than 100 shows a year, usually remaining seated at center stage throughout performances.
Mr. King, who received the Kennedy Center honors in 1995, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, was married and divorced twice, to Martha Lee from 1946 to 1952, and Carol Hall from 1958 to 1966. Neither marriage produced offspring, but he fathered 15 children (some of them adopted) with 15 different mothers, and had more than 40 grandchildren.
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