Profile/Copyright © 1975, 2006 by Jim O’Donnell
He sits on a stool on a stage. He seems as emotional as a banker, as immovable as Mount Rushmore, as dead-eyed as a prize-fighter in an alley fight. He's about to play some guitar and sing some blues.
His hair is processed straight, his suit and teeth are shiny. He smokes a Tiparillo. The frill is gone from the usual lead-guitarist getup of rock music.
He sees the lights go out. The Tiparillo goes out. He starts. He strokes his guitar with long and short pulls, and he screams out. The screams are as beautiful as they are emotional. Next thing, he's doing something called "Sweet Little Angel."
He wastes no moment. He does not dance. He does not know how to put an audience on. He does not want to. He has come to play guitar and sing some blues.
There is a label on the guitar case. It says: "My name is Lucille, I am a guitar. My boss is B.B. King."
Lucille is the man’s B.B. gun. He tries to create sounds with her, not hit notes. He couldn’t play the instrument very well with metal bars, rings, tubes, or bottlenecks, so he learned to use the fingers of his left hand.
He focused distortion, overtone, and feedback into a melodic, single-line strain of city blues. He introduced modern jazz harmonies and rhythms into the blues. He made the Delta blues guitar more than just an accompaniment.
He is as true blues as they come.
He has no home. Memphis is a base; there is a farm his father lives on. Home is usually a Holiday Inn, although he owns an apartment building in Memphis. He has never been a man of places, but a man of times—the present and the past.
He was born on a Delta plantation. It was a religious family, and his mother taught him young how to sing spirituals.
He chopped and picked cotton for 75 cents a day. His worldly possessions at age 12 were a mule and a plow and himself. He once reckoned he'd traveled about 60,000 miles in this life behind a mule.
There was no electricity when he went to bed as a boy, and to this day he does not trust darkness. He had no schooling past the ninth grade.
His first guitar cost $8 and it was red. He learned to play it from a minister uncle. He drove a tractor during the war, and weekends he used to sneak off the plantation, catch a train to the nearest small town, and sing on street corners for nickels and dimes.
He went to Memphis after the war, in 1948. It was the first time he'd ever been out of Mississippi. He became a disc jockey and a singer and got popular. He tasted all kinds of blues. He recorded in 1949, and by the mid-50s was fully established among bluesmen.
He left Memphis in the late 50s when Top-40 programming knocked out specialty shows like his.
Unlike many performers, he didn't go off the road, or into rock. He played any town that had a nightclub—and a bank. Sometimes he played in churches where he ate from the collected change of a passed hat.
He made no try at reaching the young white rock ‘n’ roll audience. Since they apparently weren't going to try to reach him, he worked the chitlin circuit of ghetto clubs and theaters for small change.
Which he could do because he liked the work, even when his albums started getting sold in drugstores at discount.
You see, he just wanted to play some guitar and sing some blues.
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He got the reputation of being a guy with eight miles of integrity. He'd rather go broke than sink his self-respect.
He is a sturdy man who can pocket an insult as easily as he pockets a pack of cigarettes. One thing he never pockets, though, is his dignity. His every act in life has said, "Take me for who I am, or go." He always thanks his band right after a show, for playing well.
He cut a record in 1955 called "Everyday I Have the Blues." He's always carryin' the blues, and he can get 'em out of you. He makes you feel those 3-o'clock-in-the-morning blue shadows, those broken chains of love that make you think you're not wanted anymore, and it's a mean world.
It seemed he'd never be for the masses. He was more classical than pop. Young white America finally got around to looking him up in the mid-60s.
His name kept surfacing every time any big English rocker was asked about his source material. They'd mention him, and defer to him.
He struck California gold at the 1967 Monterey Jazz Festival. Then in early 1968 he jammed in Greenwich Village's Cafe Au Go Go with Eric Clapton and Elvin Bishop, and he blew people's minds away.
By the end of that year, everybody was looking back at rock 'n' roll roots, and he was looking back—forever—on the chitlin circuit . . . and "B.B." meant Boss Blues.
He became the King Bee. The world wanted him to play guitar and sing some blues. So the world made his lifestyle Twentieth-Century regal—portable TV constantly plugged into the cigarette lighter of his green Cadillac Fleetwood Brougham.
The world suddenly realized who he was: probably the best true bluesman that ever lived. All in all, he has cut over fifty albums—not counting the compilations he appears on. The album that best captures the sweet sounds of his guitar, Lucille, is Live at the Regal.
He once needed forty stitches just below his right forearm and seven more over his right eye when his equipment truck overturned on its way from New Orleans to Dallas. He left the hospital the next day. He rented a truck, drove to Dallas, and did his five scheduled shows there.
He did 342 one-nighters that year. He knows that's the cost of being Boss.
He is, for those of you who haven't been paying attention in your rock history classes, Riley B. King, the Blues Boy from Beale Street.
Call him B.B.
He's half a century old, and he plays some guitar and sings some blues.
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CD: B.B. King, Live at the Regal. MCA, 1965.
Book: B.B. King, Blues All Around Me: The Autobiography of B.B. King. Harper, 1999.
Websites: http://www.bbking.com, http://www.worldblues.com
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