He has picked cotton, run tractors, chauffeured limousines, sung for pennies on street corners and played nearly every dive from Mississippi to Chicago.
But today, at 65 and with a gleaming new Grammy in hand, he remains the unchallenged King of the Blues.
Other blues legends may be more exalted in years, such as Chicago`s octogenarian singer-pianist Sunnyland Slim, or more celebrated by the rock culture, such as blues-inspired guitarist Eric Clapton. Yet no one in the world symbolizes the spirit of the blues, with its feverish vocals and scorching guitar licks, like B.B. King.
For King, more than anyone else, made the blues a language spoken around the world.
”The blues is something that we own, a creation that we started-I`m talking about America here,” says King, still proselytizing on behalf of the music he knows and loves best.
”And the big record conglomerates finally are starting to push the blues. They`re finally starting to show the world-which has embraced the blues anyway-that we appreciate what we have started.
”People didn`t pay much attention to the blues before,” adds King, who plays the Ravinia Festival on Wednesday, ”but they`re paying attention today.”
They probably wouldn`t be if not for King, who has been wooing audiences for half a century, whether working the streets of his native Mississippi, the booze halls and prisons of Cook County or the far-flung theaters of Moscow and Hong Kong.
Without King`s searing vocals and stage charisma, it`s unlikely that such esoteric blues recordings as ”The Complete Robert Johnson” (Columbia) or such blues-tinged pop as Bonnie Raitt`s ”Nick of Time” (Capitol) would have become international hits.
”When I started out, I thought the blues as we knew it was dying,” says King, referring to an art form that took root in the Deep South at the start of the century (or earlier, depending on how you define the term ”blues”)
and blossomed in Chicago.
”Kids would come backstage after my shows and say, `Man, would you give me an autograph please for my Mom?` But they didn`t want one for themselves.” Today that has changed, to say the least, with King`s name on a marquee virtually guaranteeing a sellout.
Not even King, however, would have thought it possible when he was growing up poor. With his parents divorced when he was 4, his mother dead by the time he was 9, Riley B. King seemed destined for obscurity.
”I never expected to be a blues musician or any kind of musician,” King often has said, and it`s easy to understand why, considering that he was breaking his back on a Mississippi farm from sun-up, beginning as an 8-year-old. On a good day, he could pick 500 pounds of cotton, earning 35 cents for every 100 pounds.
While toiling in the fields, however, he was thinking, breathing music.
”I really grew up kind of in church,” says King. ”My mother was quite religious, and she would take me all the time, so I was hearing gospel music all the time.
”But whenever I would get a chance to leave home and go to my aunt`s, I would listen to her records. She had people like Blind Lemon (Jefferson), Lonnie Johnson, Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton.
”I don`t know how to say what it was about that music that hit me, but it just had something that was sort of like fulfilling to me. It was soothing. ”I`ve heard the words that music soothes the savage beast, so it seems to me that the (blues) soothed whatever was inside of me.”
Surely the imploring sound of early blues had something to do with it, for King`s models sang of the harsh, racist world to which he was born. But the blues originators had at least two things that King did not: a guitar and the ability to play it.
So King scrimped together $8 to buy an instrument.
Unfortunately, ”I had the guitar, but I didn`t know what to do with it,” recalls King. ”So I ordered a book from Sears Roebuck to learn to read and pick properly. The funny thing, though, was that all the music printed in the books was country.
”So to learn, you had to sing”-and here King breaks into a lusty singing voice-” Oh my darling, oh my darling, oh my darling Clementine.` ”
Still, music was King`s future.
”I always thought that learning to play the guitar would give me a chance to stop picking cotton and those kinds of things,” he says. ”But, to be honest, I never felt that I would be a blues singer. I thought I would be popular, but as a gospel singer.
”I was singing in a group, and I thought we would have been a thing like the Soul Stirrers or the Golden Gate Quartet (two legendary gospel ensembles). ”But the group didn`t want to leave Indianola, Miss., and go for something bigger, like Memphis, so I had to do it.”
But there was another reason King took the blues route.
”After I had a short stay in the Army, I would sit on the street corners in Mississippi, and people would usually come by and request tunes.
”And most times, when they would request a gospel tune, they would give me a nice compliment and say, `Son, if you keep it up, you`re going to be great one day,` but they never did tip.
”And the people that would ask me to play blues, usually they would give me a tip,” remembers King with a chuckle. ”And that was my motivation to sing the blues.”
So at 22, King packed up his few possessions and hitched to Memphis, then a thriving blues center, where he wangled himself a job as a radio deejay. Before long, his 10-minute show became a 2 1/2-hour spot featuring ”The Beale Street Blues Boy,” with ”Blues Boy” eventually shortened to ”B.B.”
Suddenly, King was hearing the big-city sounds that never had reached him in Mississippi. The sweetly seductive electric guitar of jazz innovator Charlie Christian, the larger than life vocals of Jimmy Rushing-an avalanche of new music shocked, then redefined King.
”That was the turning point,” says King of his deejay days. ”That`s when I first became popular, and that`s when I heard music that I never would have had a chance to hear.
”Man, I was like Adam in the Garden of Eden.”
By the late `40s, King`s music-which had been first shaped by the rural, gospel-shout tradition-was becoming citified. Like Christian (and blues pioneer T-Bone Walker), King turned to electric guitar. The slides, glissandos, bent notes and wails that he draws from his guitar to this day, and the jazz-inspired vocals that make his music swing and sometimes bop, originate from his days as a deejay.
And it was these big-city influences that made King`s blues meaningful to the mass audience that he would eventually reach. No longer a small-town Southern blues singer, he was on his way to being a mass-appeal entertainer and, ultimately, a kind of blues savior.
Not that the roughly two decades between his first blues hit, ”Three O`Clock Blues” (1951), and his first crossover success, ”The Thrill is Gone” (1969), were easy.
”I was working hard, touring every day, going places and sometimes not getting paid,” says King.
”But just having a job (in music), having places to go, was a lot better than when I had to get up those mornings to get the tractor out, get the mule and get the cotton sack.
”So however hard some people might say that touring was for them, it was still a bed of roses for me.”
Yet one critical question remains: Why was King-even with his incendiary, electric blues guitar-able to reach a wide audience that no blues player had before?
”I think it was partly because a lot of the rock `n` roll superstars mentioned my name from time to time, and that made people listen to me,” he says.
”I read once where somebody asked John Lennon what he would like to do, and he said: `Play guitar like B.B. King.` When you have people that strong and that talented as he was mentioning my name, that opened doors.
”But also it was because I was jazz influenced, and country music influenced, and gospel music influenced, although I still had to hold on to some what I had (of raw, Mississippi blues).”
So King is riding high these days, and as he prepares to return to Chicago-which he says ”has done more for blues music than any other city”-he still clings to his dear, fretted friend, Lucille.
”We first met in a place called Twist, Ark.,” says King.
”I used to play there every Friday and Saturday night, and it used to get quite cold in Twist, so they would take something that looked like a big garbage pail, set it in the middle of the floor, half fill it with kerosene, and they would light that fuel for heat.
”People generally would dance around it, but one night two guys started fighting, and one knocked the other one over on that container, and when they did, it spilled on the floor.
”And when it spilled it looked like a river of fire, so everybody started running for the front door, including B.B. King.
”But when I got outside I realized that I had left my guitar inside. I went back for it, and when I did, the building, which was wooden, was burning and started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar.
”The next morning we found that these two guys were fighting about a lady that worked in the little club, and I learned her name was Lucille.
”I never did meet her, but I named my guitar Lucille to remind me never to do a thing like that again.”
