It may have been a farewell or a passing of the torch for B.B. King when he played Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Guitar Festival at a sold-out Toyota Park in Brideview, Ill., in 2007.
“May I live forever, but may you live forever and a day,” King said, while raising a cup to the fans. “And when they lay me off to rest … may the last voices I hear be yours.”
King, 89, died Thursday night in Las Vegas. He had been admitted twice in recent weeks to a hospital for treatment of symptoms linked to diabetes. It was the only way to slow him down. Only months before his death, King was still serving as the ultimate blues ambassador with a touring schedule that had surpassed 15,000 shows around the world. He helped turn the blues into an international language that crossed lines of race, geography and genre.
A commanding presence on stage with his robust frame and stentorian radio-DJ voice, King sold millions of records worldwide, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and won 15 Grammy Awards.
The guitarist brought a jazz musician’s sensibility to his playing and a gospel roar to his singing. His constant companion through it all was Lucille, his Gibson hollow-body guitar, which functioned as a second voice on his songs – falling silent when King sang, and answering him in clusters of single-string notes when he paused. For King, every note was precious. Even on his extended solos, he never overplayed, a master of concision and precision.
“Sometimes when I’m blue it seems like Lucille/Tryin’ to help me callin’ my name,” King once sang. He expanded the stripped-down settings of most blues songs to include string and horn orchestrations, and covered music written by everyone from Duke Ellington to U2. He bridged the chitlin-circuit juke joints and the supper clubs, and played arenas and prisons. One of his most famous recordings, “Live in Cook County Jail,” was recorded at the infamous South Side institution and topped the R&B chart in 1970.
He was a frequent performer in Chicago, headlining everything from the Chicago Blues Fest to clubs such as House of Blues in recent years. He fell ill after a performance at House of Blues last year, and canceled a series of concert dates because of dehydration and exhaustion.
At the Crossroads Festival in 2007, he performed a leering “Rock Me Baby” and a trembling “The Thrill is Gone,” his voice still roaring even though he was in his 80s. Robert Cray and Jimmie Vaughan flanked him with guitars, and Clapton applauded from the wings. King was a mentor to countless musicians, including Clapton, who recorded an album with his idol in 2000, “Riding with the King.” He was looked upon as a kindly godfather figure by many Chicago blues guitarists, including the late Hubert Sumlin, who accompanied King on stage at the Crossroads festival, and Buddy Guy, who once described King as the “last blues legend standing.”
The future blues icon was born Riley B. King on Sept. 16, 1925, in Itta Bena, Miss., and grew up in several nearby towns, most prominently Indianola, reared primarily by his grandmother after his father left home and his mother died. While picking cotton on a sharecropping farm, he sang gospel in a church choir and developed an affinity for blues guitar, eventually studying with bluesman Bukka White, with whom he lived for nearly a year.
He moved to Memphis in 1946, where he became known as the “Beale Street Blues Boy.” The newly christened B.B. King made his mark as a DJ at WDIA, playing blues records and developing a jive-talking patter that would serve him well as a concert showman. He cut his first single in 1949, and scored a major hit in 1951 with his version of Lowell Fulson’s “Three O’Clock Blues.” He continued to DJ and record for a few years, but finally put together a touring band in 1955 and began a lifelong commitment to the road, where his ebullient personality flourished.
On one of his many tours, a fight over a woman named Lucille resulted in a fire in the building where King was performing. The building was evacuated, but King then rushed back inside to rescue his guitar, which he later christened in honor of Lucille to remind him of his reckless act.
With his string-bending solos on Lucille, King remained forever indebted to Mississippi Delta blues. But that didn’t stop him from exploring a more cosmopolitan vocabulary, as he experimented with big-band arrangements, R&B female choruses and Latin percussion. In contrast to some of his more polished studio music, King’s live recordings struck the loudest chord. His first landmark was another Chicago-born album, “Live at the Regal,” recorded at the South Side theater in November, 1964.
” ‘Live at the Regal’ is considered by some the best recording I’ve ever had,” King told interviewers Colin Escott and Andy McKaie in 1992. “At the Regal, and in Chicago, they still think well of and respect me and the dignity of the blues, thanks to Muddy Waters and the rest. … That particular day in Chicago everything came together and the audience was right in sync.”
It was during this era that a generation of white rock ‘n’ rollers on both sides of the Atlantic began immersing themselves in blues, and King became a hero of sorts to Clapton, Mike Bloomfield, the Rolling Stones and countless others. Amid this rising appreciation for “authentic” Mississippi sounds by a generation that had never set foot on a plantation, King continued to work both sides of the commercial fence: his raw, raucous concert performances and his sophisticated, pop-sounding studio recordings, epitomized by “The Thrill is Gone.” The latter was his biggest hit in the late ’60s, its wrenching vocal underscored by melancholy keys and sighing strings. The song introduced him to a new audience far beyond the blues faithful, and brought him to “The Tonight Show” and “The Ed Sullivan Show,” a prime-time coup for a blues singer.
Though King announced a “farewell” tour in 2006, he continued to play, backing off only slightly from his typical pace of 200 shows a year. He also accumulated more than 40 studio recordings in a variety of settings. Though no longer breaking ground artistically in recent decades, he remained a vital performer who spread the language of the blues to places it had never gone before, or would never have been welcomed in previous generations.
He recalled how a writer once criticized him for abandoning his roots: “B.B. – symphony hall, no dirt on the floor, no smoke in the air, and that’s the blues?”
“But my answer is, why not?” King said. “Isn’t a symphony hall built for beautiful music? And the blues is a beautiful music – it’s everybody’s music.”
greg@gregkot.com
