B. B. King

B.B. King: The Man Who Never Fought Over Lucille Again

A brawl over a woman named Lucille once set a Twist, Arkansas, dance hall on fire. B.B. King had already run outside to safety when he turned around and ran back into the burning building to save his guitar. He named it Lucille that night, he said, as a permanent reminder never to fight over a woman or run into a burning building again — and for the next six decades, every guitar he played, a long line of Gibsons ending in a signature model bearing her name, was Lucille too.

From Cotton Fields to Gospel Choir

Riley B. King was born September 16, 1925, on a cotton plantation called Bear Creek near Itta Bena, Mississippi, to sharecroppers Albert and Nora Ella King. His parents separated when he was four, and he was raised largely by his maternal grandmother in Kilmichael and then Lexington, Mississippi, before settling as a teenager in Indianola, the town he always considered home. He sang in the gospel choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church, where a local Pentecostal minister taught him his first three guitar chords, and his employer, a plantation manager named Flake Cartledge, advanced him fifteen dollars for his first real guitar, which King repaid out of his wages over two months. Drafted-adjacent work saved him from combat: during World War II he was classified as essential to the wartime agricultural economy because of his skill driving a tractor, and he was discharged from Army service on that basis.

Radio, Memphis, and the Birth of "B.B."

King followed his cousin, blues musician Bukka White, to Memphis in 1946, then moved to West Memphis, Arkansas, where a spot on blues harmonica player Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program led to steady club work and eventually his own ten-minute segment on Memphis station WDIA. The station gave him the nickname "Beale Street Blues Boy," which shortened first to "Blues Boy" and then simply to "B.B.," the name that stuck for the rest of his life. He worked simultaneously as a singer and disc jockey, giving him an insider's ear for what audiences actually wanted to hear.

Building a Sound That Changed the Guitar

King debuted on record in 1949, and after unremarkable early releases, his 1952 single "3 O'Clock Blues," recorded for RPM Records, became his first number-one hit on the Billboard Rhythm and Blues chart, launching a decade of hits including "Every Day I Have the Blues" and "Please Love Me." His touring schedule was punishing even by the standards of the era — 342 concerts in 1956 alone — and by then he had assembled a full band with horn players and a formally trained arranger, giving his live sound a polish uncommon among blues acts of the period. His guitar style, built on fluid string bending, a distinctive vibrato produced with his left hand, and sparse, vocal-like phrasing rather than dense runs of notes, became so influential that AllMusic later called him "the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the 20th century." King himself described the intimate relationship between his voice and his instrument: "When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille."

Crossing Over

King's 1970 recording of "The Thrill Is Gone," which added strings to his blues arrangement and became a hit on both pop and R&B charts, marked his definitive crossover into the mainstream and earned him a Grammy Award. He credited the wave of young white blues-rock musicians who idolized him — Eric Clapton chief among them — with expanding his audience further; opening for the Rolling Stones on their 1969 American tour introduced him to listeners who had never before heard him. "My audience had started mixing before that," King later reflected, "but that really pushed it over the top." His 1964 live album "Live at the Regal," recorded in Chicago, is widely regarded as a definitive document of his stage performance, and he later said simply, "that particular day in Chicago everything came together."

A Six-Decade Career

King toured relentlessly for the rest of his life, often exceeding 275 shows a year well into his seventies and eighties, and became one of the first American musicians to perform in the Soviet Union. He recorded "Live in Cook County Jail" in 1970 amid national debate over prison conditions and co-founded an organization supporting incarcerated people's rehabilitation. He collaborated widely and late in life, recording "Riding with the King" with Eric Clapton in 2000, joining U2 on "When Love Comes to Town," and even presenting Lucille to Pope John Paul II at a 1997 Vatican Christmas concert. Diagnosed with diabetes in 1990, he became a public advocate for the disease, and he opened a chain of B.B. King's Blues Clubs beginning in Memphis in 1991.

Recognition

King's honors span nearly every category American culture offers an artist: induction into the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award the same year, the National Medal of Arts in 1990, an NEA National Heritage Fellowship in 1991, Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, the Polar Music Prize in 2004 for his "significant contributions to the blues," and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, awarded by President George W. Bush in 2006. He held honorary doctorates from Yale, Brown, Berklee, and Tougaloo College. Rolling Stone ranked him among its greatest guitarists of all time; he was known, alongside the unrelated Albert King and Freddie King, as one of the "Three Kings of the Blues Guitar," and simply as "The King of the Blues."

Why B.B. Is Called a Genius

King's own explanation of his gift points away from technical virtuosity toward interpretation: he treated the guitar as an extension of his singing voice, favoring a handful of perfectly bent, sustained notes over speed or density, an economy of expression that professional guitarists across genres have spent decades studying and imitating. That is a genius of taste and emotional precision rather than raw technical complexity, and it is the specific quality AllMusic and generations of guitarists have credited as his most influential contribution. The honest counter-case is that King, unlike some blues contemporaries, was never primarily an innovator of new musical forms — his crossover success depended partly on commercial choices, like the orchestral strings on "The Thrill Is Gone," and partly on the blues-rock revival that white musicians like Clapton drove into the mainstream. His genius, by the clearest evidence, was in refining an expressive vocabulary to its most economical and communicative form, then performing it with a work ethic — decades of nightly touring — that had little to do with innate gift and everything to do with sustained discipline.

Legacy

King died May 14, 2015, at age eighty-nine, from complications of vascular dementia linked to his diabetes, and was buried at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola after a funeral procession down Beale Street. He believed the blues "belonged everywhere beautiful music belonged," and spent a sixty-year career proving it, carrying the music from what he called "dirt floor, smoke in the air" juke joints into concert halls, the Vatican, and the White House.