B.B. King

Riley B. King was born on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and lost his mother to abandonment at four; his grandmother raised him afterward in Kilmichael, then Lexington. He sang in the choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church, and a local Pentecostal minister taught him his first three chords on a Sears Roebuck guitar. His employer, Flake Cartledge, fronted him fifteen dollars for his own guitar and deducted it from his wages over two months. In 1941 the King Biscuit Time radio program out of Helena, Arkansas, pulled him toward music as a way out; in 1946 he moved to Memphis and moved in with his cousin, the bluesman Bukka White.

King picked up his stage name, Beale Street Blues Boy, at Memphis radio station WDIA in 1949, the same year he cut his first single. Recording for RPM under producer Sam Phillips, he had his first number-one R&B hit, "3 O'Clock Blues," in February 1952, and by 1956 he was booking 342 concerts in a single year. Live at the Regal, recorded in 1964, became one of the defining live blues albums; "The Thrill Is Gone" won him a Grammy in 1970. He kept touring more than 200 nights a year into his seventies, carrying the blues out of Delta juke joints and into concert halls worldwide, and collected honors to match: the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, Kennedy Center Honors in 1995, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.

The guitar he played through all of it was named for a woman he never met. During a show in Twist, Arkansas, two men started a fight over someone named Lucille and knocked over a kerosene stove, setting the building on fire; King ran back inside to save his guitar and named it afterward as a reminder, he said, not to fight over women or run into burning buildings again. His own two marriages, to Martha Lee Denton and later Sue Carol Hall, both ended, and he blamed roughly 250 shows a year for it. Neither marriage produced children; he fathered fifteen with other women. Diagnosed with diabetes in 1990, he spent his last decades publicizing the disease that eventually caused the strokes that killed him.

King died in Indianola, Mississippi, in May 2015 at 89, of vascular dementia brought on by small strokes tied to his diabetes. A funeral procession moved down Beale Street in Memphis before his burial at the B.B. King Museum in Indianola. AllMusic called him the single most important electric guitarist of the second half of the 20th century, and few guitarists who came after him — in blues or rock — have argued the point. His bent-note, vocal-toned lead style is now so built into how the instrument is taught that it barely registers as an innovation anymore; it just reads as the grammar of the guitar.

B.B. King's life against the full span of the corpus.

• "3 O'Clock Blues" song
  His first number-one R&B hit 1952
• Singin' the Blues album
  His first studio album 1957
• Live at the Regal album
  Recorded in Chicago — a landmark live blues album 1964
• "The Thrill Is Gone" song
  Won King his first Grammy Award 1970
• Riding with the King album
  Collaboration with Eric Clapton 2000

• September 16, 1925 aged 0 Born near Itta Bena, Mississippi
• 1946 aged ~21 Moves to Memphis and stays with cousin Bukka White
• 1949 aged ~24 Gets the stage name B.B. at radio station WDIA
• February 1952 aged 26 "3 O'Clock Blues" hits number one on the R&B chart
• 1956 aged ~31 Books 342 concerts in a single year
• 1964 aged ~39 Records Live at the Regal
• 1970 aged ~45 Wins a Grammy for "The Thrill Is Gone"
• 1990 aged ~65 Diagnosed with diabetes
• May 14, 2015 aged 89 Dies in Las Vegas at 89

• Robert Johnson 1911–1938
  Delta blues guitarist whose small recorded output influenced generations of blues and rock players. influenced by
• Muddy Waters 1913–1983
  Chicago bluesman who electrified Delta blues and supplied a foundation for rock music. contemporary of
• Elvis Presley 1935–1977
  The King of Rock and Roll whose music and style revolutionized American popular culture. influenced
• Ray Charles 1930–2004
  Singer and pianist who fused gospel, blues, jazz, and country into a foundational sound of soul and modern American popular music. toured with