“God made the Blues right after he made women.”
- B.B. King
Today was the birthday of B.B. King (1925). B.B. was the happy Johnny Appleseed of blues music. He spent much of his career playing his palatable brand of blues to mainstream audiences around the world. It was hard not to like B.B. and his good and pleasant nature.
Born Riley B. King, he grew up around Itta Bena, Kilmichael and Indianola, Mississippi. I've been to those places. Let's call them humble. His parents were sharecroppers on a cotton plantation. He was drawn to the guitar by the preacher in the church he attended as a youth and he was able to acquire his own cheap guitar at a young age. His mother and grandmother's deaths left him on his own when he was ten and he began playing on street corners for dimes. All the while he longed to visit Memphis, the home of his cousin and well-known blues player, Bukka White.
He hitchhiked there in the mid 1940s and before long he made appearances on WDIA radio in West Memphis, Arkansas. He began to build an audience that lead to getting his own show called The Sepia Club on the station. It was there as a disc jockey that he was given the name “Beale Street Blues Boy,” later shortened to "Blues Boy" and finally just B.B..
He got a recording contract with RPM Records and through the 1950s and 60s, he recorded and toured relentlessly with his band. Initially, his audiences were primarily black only. Mainstream notoriety didn't come until the mid-1960s when young, white rock and roll musicians started to cite him as an influence. After that his career took off and he became in many ways a household name. He was a guest on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show 16 times and he made a slew of other TV appearances over the years. In his career he played to audiences in 90 countries. Among his many honors and accolades were inductions into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984 and The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.
I saw him play twice. The first time on a hot August night in Memphis on the Mississippi bluff, and the second time at his club on Beale Street. They were very different environments and settings, but in both cases, he brought it.
Most everyone, I think, knows the story of how he came to call his guitar Lucille. It's fun to tell, so here goes anyway:
In 1949, B.B. was playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas. A fight started between two men over a woman named Lucille and a fire broke out as a result. B.B. ran outside to safety, but realized he'd left his cheap wooden guitar behind and he dashed back in the burning building to save it. From that point on he named his guitars Lucille as a reminder not to fight over a woman or run into burning buildings. There you go.
Also on this day in 1977, English glam-rock pioneer, Marc Bolan, was killed as a passenger in a one car accident in London. He was 29. Bolan was the founder and leader of the band T. Rex which during the early to mid-70s achieved superstar status in the music world. In the UK from 1970-1973, their level of popularity was comparable to the Beatles. They had a run of eleven top ten singles, four of which reached number one. Bolan's influence can be traced to elements of glam, punk, new wave and alternative rock. He was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2020 as a member of T. Rex.
The clip of B.B. King below I've played before, but I never get tired of it. It's from the U2 documentary, Rattle and Hum (1988). Also, a little T. Rex too.