April 18, 2024 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, he came up out of the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta and into the bright lights of the stage worldwide. Here's the story of the “Chairman of the Board” himself, B.B. King…whose unique style of guitar playing and voice changed the music industry forever. Here to tell the story is Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Daniel de Visé…author of the first in-depth biography of B.B. in almost 30 years: King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people up next, the story of a man who came
up out of the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta
and into the bright lights of the stage worldwide. We're
of course telling the story of the Chairman of the
(00:30):
Board himself, BB King, whose unique style of guitar playing
and voice changed the music industry forever. Here to tell
the story is Daniel Davy Say, author of The King
of the Blues. Take it away, Daniel.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Let's start with the proposition that BB King is the
one superstar of the blues. There are arguably equally great
figures in the blues. Maybe Muddy Waters is one, Maybe
possibly Robert Johnson is one, although BB would disagree with that.
But he's certainly the one superstar of the blues. And
I say this because he toured like ninety countries and
(01:07):
you know, at all these Grammys and sold massive numbers
of records. He's much bigger than any other blues artist
ever was. That's the starting point. But I would argue
that why he matters is not just that, not just
the fact that he may have played more concerts, which
is posted twenty thousand than any other major musical artist ever.
I don't think anybody comes close. Even that isn't why
(01:28):
he matters. Why he matters, I would argue, is that
he developed a signature guitar sound that was transformative for
him and.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
For the guitar and for its place in popular music.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
He redefined the guitar, and that sound the guitar as
a voice, passed from bb King to Buddy Guy, to
Eric Clapton, to Jimmy Hendrix to absolutely everyone. But he's
also bigger than the blues, and people need to remember
that about him. Riley King was born in nineteen twenty
(02:04):
five to a sharecropper family in the Delta, Mississippi Delta,
in a little cabin on land that was owned by
a white land owner, and they worked the land. And
the sharecropper system was a really horrible economic enterprise. I mean,
looking at it now, it sounds just a couple baby
steps away from slavery. But the white owner typically would
(02:27):
sort of lease the land to the sharecroppers. The sharecroppers
would raise their crops, sell the crops, and then the
black sharecroppers would in theory, would get some proceeds from
the sale of those crops, but after deducting all sorts
of expenses, and a lot of times, I dare say
most of the time the sharecropper would end the year
in debt. So it was a sort of brutal sort
(02:49):
of cycle of perpetual debt. His mother was I believe,
a teenager when he was born. He only knew her
up until age seven eight nine. I think he was
nine when she died. She probably had diabetes and probably
succumbed to it. It's all a little unclear because you know,
(03:10):
there weren't hard records kept of.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
A lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
But BB King's mother is sort of this almost ethereal
character in his memoir. She's portrayed by him as a sweet, loving, angelic,
beautiful creature.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
So yeah, it.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Was inconceivably wrenching for him to lose his mother, a
terrible loss, and I would argue that through his life
from that point there were two things really motivating mister King.
One was to kind of rebuild the family that he
lost with the death of his mother.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
He had a big sort of.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Hole at the center of his soul. I think that
when mister King entered adulthood, he felt like he was
sort of alone in the world, and I think that's
why he was not just willing, but really wide open
to embracing paternity claims from children. I don't know whose children,
but I would argue probably not his children. He went
to a fertility doctor and he had a test and
(04:06):
found out that he could not father children. The children
who say they are his children are his adoptive children.
And he loved them all and claimed them all as
his own. But I don't think they were his biological children.
I think that he loved having this big family.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
And you know too.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
The other impulse was to sort of impress his father,
because his father was this tireless workaholic who famously said,
it's a rhetorical question, how can a man work too much?
There's no such thing, mister King, I would argue, Phoebe
King spent his whole adult life trying to prove to
his father that he could be as hard working as
(04:43):
Albert King. His father was a fairly prosperous tractor driver.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
The tractor driver was a.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Really really elevated position in the sort of system of sharecropping.
Drivers were few, They operated very expensive machinery. If I
told you how much he earned, it wouldn't sound very impressive,
because this is the nineteen thirty five dollars. But Albert
King Beebe's father earned enough from tractor driving that he
supported a wife and her extended family. I think six
(05:18):
or seven people were living under Albert King's roof. So
Albert King was kind of an alpha male among sort
of black agrarian workers of that era, and so Riley
King as a child would have worked the farm I
think he has today at a term like canned to
cant And I'm not saying that the right accident, but basically,
(05:38):
from the moment the sun popped up over the horizon,
you'd go to work, and then you'd work until you
couldn't see anything anymore, right, And he would sleep in
rickety cabins with no you know, water electricity. It was
absolutely pitch dark all night. In fact, so much so
that in later life mister King was kind of terrified
(06:00):
of the dark. He always had to have a light
on somewhere near him as he slept because it was
so probably frightening being in utter darkness.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
And so.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I dare say that by the time BB King sort
of is entering adulthood and he's in Indianola and he's
working picking cotton. He probably would have aspired to become
a well, he said, so he aspired to become a
tractor driver himself, because he knew that job sat at
the top of the heap. The only person BB King
knew who earned more than a tractor driver was a
(06:31):
guy named Booker Baggett, who was the foreman under the
white landowner on the farm.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Where bb lived and worked. If this makes sense, the
foreman was sort of.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
The you know, the top employee, overseeing all of the
tractor drivers and farmers, and typically that was a job
given to a white person. But this particular landowner was
relatively progressive in his thinking, and so he gave the
job to a black man. And this caused when Booker,
the black foreman, would go into town in Ginola, the
(07:04):
white storekeepers often didn't want to talk to him or
deal with him, but they couldn't believe that a black
man was the foreman. Booker would have to go get
the actual landowner and send him in and say, yes,
this man is my foreman.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
That would have been the absolute.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Apex of BB King's aspirations. When he was an eighteen
year old, twenty year old young man.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
When we come back, more of the story of the
Chairman of the Board, BB King. Here on our American Story.
Liehbib here the host of our American Stories. Every day
on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this
great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
(07:42):
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
Alamerican Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot
com and give. And we returned to our American Stories
(08:12):
and our story on Bluesman BB King. Telling the story
is author Daniel davy Say, author of the fantastic book
King of the Blues, available at Amazon or all the
usual suspects. When we last left off, Daniel was telling
us about BB King's childhood. You heard about his father's
work ethic, but his mother well her death. Her early
(08:34):
death had a profound effect on BB King. Let's pick
up where we last left off with Daniel davy Say.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Schooling and Bbking got schooling schooling happened only once all
the farming was done for the seasonal cycle, so it
wasn't probably a full year of schooling. It probably wasn't
from September first until May thirtieth, but he got schooling.
I think Luther Henson was his only teacher. Luther Henson
(09:09):
was an incredibly important role model for young Riley King
BB King. Luther Henson operated essentially a one room schoolhouse
in Kilmichael, Mississippi, with black children of all different ages.
Taught all of the students. I believe his father had
been a slave and had been freed, and Luther Henson
taught his black students out of black newspapers, African American
(09:33):
newspapers from different parts of the country. He would find
those papers and show the students heroes, you know, important
African American people who the black students were not going
to read about, most likely in the white newspapers. The
white newspapers mostly covered Black America when Black Americans were
accused of crimes, and so Luther Henson taught the students,
(09:54):
including BB King, you need to get an education. This
is something the white people will never take away from you.
He taught them that not every white person is racist,
that there are obviously many, many horrible white people who
are going to try to kill you, or at least
greatly greatly Hamperer attempts to be free and prosperous, but
(10:15):
that you have hope because there are good people out there,
white and black. And certainly BB King absorbed the lesson
because he became BB King became a very very up, faint,
endlessly patient man. I mean, he endured innumerable innumerable slights
and acts of racism large and small over the course
(10:36):
of his career and had an amazingly tolerant and forgiving
and patient.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Approach to it all.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I mean, working on the Chitlin circuit was itself kind
of one massive slight. I The Chitland circuit was part
of a segregated, walled off music industry where white and
black artists and fans basically worshiped in different.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Churches, so to speak.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So all of the places where BB King was allowed
to perform in the nineteen fifties and into the nineteen
sixties were segregated black venues, and they were our wonderful places,
and he had amazing loyal, knowledgeable fans. But the industry
itself sort of blocked him from doing anything else outside.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Of that system, that circuit.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
This is why you know, Ray, Charles, Fats Domino, other
artists went into mainstream so called record labels and broke
out of the Chitlin circuit and scored hits, massive hits
on the pop charts to break out of the segregated industry.
As far as just sort of day to day racial antipathy,
it was constant.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Many were the times when mister King and his all
black band would arrive at a hotel with Sid Seidenberg,
his white manager, and the hotelier would ask mister Seidenberg
to come in the front door, and the black musicians
would be around the side or to the back, and
Sid would say, hell, no, I'm not doing that. If
they're going around the back, I'm going around the back.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
BB King had.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
A bus that he called Big Red that traveled up
and down the Chitland circuit, and when they would stop
for gas, there was a perpetual battle, at least in
the South, to get service and to get food. Typically,
his roadie would have to go and sort of negotiate
and saying, well, I'll buy one hundred gallons of gas
from you, but you've got to sell us some food
(12:28):
because otherwise they would not. So if the band wanted
to eat, they had to sort of parlay. It's like
I will fill my tank and give you our money,
but you've got to be willing to serve us, and
then they would wind up having to eat and often
sleep in the buses. Anyone who's at all familiar with
Jim Crow America knows that black artists mostly stayed and
segregated hotels. So when BB King went to Houston, he
(12:51):
would stay at the segregated black hotel in Houston. Now
that the upshot was, he'd often be staying in the
same hotel with you know, Charlie Parker, which was kind
of cool and he got to meet the greatest musical
artists of the prior generation, but it was still segregation.
Success as many parents. There are at least three separate
(13:15):
accounts of Riley King getting his first guitar. The earliest
is that Booker White, who was a cousin I think
a first cousin of BB King's grandmother.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I'm probably saying that wrong, but was a relation of
BB King.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Booker White shows up as a successful slide guitarist shows
up to Riley King's house where he lives with his mother,
and this is around nineteen thirty in Burclare, Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
You can find it, you can go there. It's like
three or four little dwellings on a railroad track. I've
been there.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Booker brings his guitar and according to whose account you believe,
maybe just shows it to Riley, says, here's my guitar, son,
you know, check it out.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Or maybe he actually gives it to him.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
It's ambiguous. The people who interviewed book are white, you know,
got this story out of him, but it was a
little bit unclear whether he just lent him the guitar
or actually gave him a guitar. In any event, a
few years later, Riley King is in Kilmichael, just out
of the hill country in Mississippi, with his extended family
and an uncle kind of a little bit of a
(14:20):
mean uncle, and supposedly this uncle gave Riley a guitar.
It was not too uncommon for black men and women
in Mississippi in the nineteen thirties to have a harmonica,
maybe a guitar. Much wealthier families like the family of
Ike Turner, had pianos, but less well off families often
(14:43):
had guitars, so it's certainly plausible that this uncle gave
BB King Riley King a guitar, maybe around age seven
age eight. BB King himself said that his first guitar
was something that he bought with his own money, and
he he bought it with wages he'd earned as a
sharecropper from a white young man, and I think it
(15:06):
was fifteen dollars. That story sounds the most credible to
me because BB King himself told it. It's possible that
he had possessed a guitar in earlier life, but I
don't know what use a six or seven year old boy.
I mean, even with BB King's incredible gifts, I don't
know that he would have made much use of a
guitar at age five or six or seven. But by
the time he's twelve and thirteen, he clearly made use
(15:28):
of that guitar. BB King had a circle of churches
that he went to.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
With his kin around Kilmichael.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
One of these churches was overseen by all accounts, a
fiery preacher by the name of Archie Fair, and Archie
Fair becomes another really important role model for young Riley King.
Archie Fair is a guitar slinging preacher. He preaches and
he sings, and he plays guitar. And I don't think
that Kilmichael was wired for electricity, so he might have
(15:57):
had a battery powered amplifier. I'm not really sure how
that would have had happened. But somehow or other, Archie
Fair entertained his flock with a guitar. And Riley King
was absolutely and utterly smitten by Archie Fair, fell in
love with everything about his preacher performance, and decided then
and there he wanted to become a guitar playing preacher himself.
(16:19):
So Riley King, when he first gets into music, he
gets into sacred music, he joins, he forms, I would
say he probably started it. He forms a sort of
couple of gospel combos and goes around and plays with
them at churches, and he even gets onto the radio.
I think in Greenwood it was either Greenwood or Greenville.
I always get those two cities confused. But one of
(16:41):
those two cities had a radio station, w GRM or
something like that. And Riley King and his gospel combo
go on the air a number of times singing multi
Park gospel.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Harmonies, and that was a thing. And even in the.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Nineteen thirties, despite the SEGRE on the radio, black gospel
combos were allowed permitted to play on white radio stations
like the LEGRM. So that might have been his fate.
It might have been that BB King would have gone
on to national fame with the.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Famous Saint John's Gospel Singers. I think that was the
name of the outfit.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
The other guys in the combo, though, didn't really have
the same ambitions and they didn't want to leave in Janola,
so that kind of dried up.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And you're listening to author Daniel Davisa tell the story
of BB King, the King of the Blues and the
Chairman of the Board. And BB King, as you heard,
endured many racial slights. We heard the same story about
Duke Ellington that Terry Tchek told when we come back
more of the remarkable life story of Riley King aka
(17:50):
BB King here on our American story and we returned
to our American stories and our story on bluesman BB King.
(18:14):
Telling the story is Daniel davy Say, author of the
fantastic book King of the Blues Again. It's available on
Amazon and all the usual suspects. When we last left off,
BB King had formed a gospel group after being inspired
by a guitar slinging preacher in Kill Michael, Mississippi. But
unfortunately for BB King, or perhaps fortunately for blues fans,
(18:38):
that didn't pan out. Let's get back to the story
here again, is Daniel.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
So I take you back to Indianola.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Really, strapping cotton pickers in Indianola could earn, you know,
real money, and mister King was capable of earning pretty
good pay picking cotton. And then once he got to
be attracted or just like his father, he earned even
better pay. But then here's what happened. Riley King went
out and busked on the street corners in the Angenola.
If you go to in Genola, you can find the
(19:10):
street corner where he busked. There's a you know, like
a plaque there. And he would first play gospel songs
and people would, you know, sort of pat him on
the shoulder for doing that. But then he he finally
started playing blues songs, and he learned that the blues
songs could be monetized. People started throwing actual money into
his guitar case or that, and he got so good
(19:31):
at the busking that he was earning better money, frankly,
than he was earning from tractor driving. So this was
a simple mercenary proposition. I mean, that's why he went
into music, and that's also why he left gospel, because
gospel music didn't pay and blues music did. So he
decides to go alone to Memphis. What triggers his departure
(19:55):
is that he's out driving his tractor and he's probably tired.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
It's been a long day.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
He's steering the tractor back into the sort of shed
and I guess it kind of bucks because he hadn't
put it out of gear or in gear, or he
hadn't secured it the way he was supposed to secure it,
and so it lurches and the manifold or something breaks
off of it. I picture this has been kind of
like an exhaust, and that's like a five hundred dollars repair,
and apparently he panicked.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
You know, I'm getting out of here.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
But I have to say, for the sake of his currency,
that he returned and he paid that bill in full.
He probably spent two full years at probably twenty bucks
a month or something repaying that debt to his landowner,
but he hitchhikes to Memphis and this is around nineteen
forty six and finds his cousin, Booker White, and takes
(20:47):
up residence with him in his apartment and basically sort
of mentors under him and goes to house parties and
watches Booker White entertain audiences on the slide guitar and
sort of starts to earn more and more of a
repertoire of what was then kind of popular blues and
rhythm and blues songs. But he realizes that he's not
(21:07):
good enough to make it really in Memphis, so he
tweets back to Ingenola, and he returns to Memphis two
years later as a more practiced, more polished blues guitarist
and very quickly in a matter of days, talks his
way into his own radio show. It's a startup station
called WDA and it's historically the very first station with
(21:32):
all black talent. It's owned and run by white people,
but they decide to have all black performers. The first
rainy day that Riley King walks into the offices of WDIA,
he walks in as Riley King, and he walks out
as bb King and let me explain that he sat
down with the station manager, and the station manager you know,
(21:52):
kind of said okay, well we'll put you on the air,
and no good. Here you sang the song and it
sounded pretty, sang Louis Jordan's saying, sounds great.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
We'll put you on you know.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Next two, Dad or whatever, and we need to give
you a catchy name, so let's call you BB. This
white station manager came up with the BB initials and
it was just, you know, catchy, something like the Colonel
would have done for Elvis, and it was not shortened
from blues boy or from anything else.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
That's a myth.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
He took to the radio at the beginning as BB
King as a first a performer who would come on
for maybe fifteen minutes and then he'd advertise whatever gig
he was playing that night in West Memphis. And then
he gets an actual disc jockey job on WDA. So
from that point on he is DJing, he's spinning songs,
(22:39):
acquiring a massive knowledge of rhythm and blues, and he
records his very first sides in the summer of nineteen
forty nine for a Bullet Records out of Nashville, and
nobody listening to this has probably ever heard them. They're
not very good, frankly, because BB King at the beginning
didn't really keep time because he was a solo artist.
So he put him with a band and he didn't
(23:00):
know when the measure ended. But over the sort of
summer into the winter nineteen forty nine into nineteen fifty,
BB King put in you know, the thousand hours of practice.
He sounds really damn good. And what's more, over that
winter he had developed his own signature sound, which he
(23:22):
called the Butterfly. The best way I can think of
to explain it is Nigel Tufnel, you know from spinal Tap,
that kind of dude, you know, don't touch it, you know,
don't even look at it, you know, spinal tap. Anyway,
BB King developed this signature sound, and I would argue
that he was the first prominent guitarist to really make
(23:44):
a solo guitar sound like a human voice. This is
his signal accomplishment. This is this is the most important
thing probably in all of what Bbking did in all
of his career, all of his forebears, the earlier Belannie
Johnson's The Charlie Christians, that even the table and Walker.
They used some vibrato, but they really employed the solo
guitar more like a horn. It didn't really sound like
(24:06):
a voice. So he's this wonderful guitar player with this unique,
amazing breakthrough guitar sound. So by nineteen fifty he's leading
a terrific band. And BB King's first really good band
has a two guitar attack, which is a would have
been a rarity in rhythm and blues of that era
or in any of popular music. The guitar, and this
(24:28):
is what you have to wrap your brain around. The
guitar was a back bench instrument in popular music of
the nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties. There weren't
band leaders who played guitar. Most bands that were on
the rhythm and blues charts were led by singers who
might also play piano or might also play a horn,
(24:49):
not the guitar.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
There were no certainly guitar heroes in a sense.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
BB King belatedly became one of the first, if not
the first. So for BB King to have a band
that had a front line of two guitars was kind
of an amazing thing, and he hired an extremely versatile
second guitarist Robert Lockwood, Robert Junior Lockwood. The junior is
because he was supposedly like, you know, like a junior
(25:16):
Robert Johnson. And Robert Lockwood is this just incredible guitarist
who becomes basically the rhythm guitarist whose rhythm work allows
BB King to solo. So Bb King in this band
with two guitars is liberated, liberated to do only solo
work on the guitar, not really to play rhythm, and
so thus he becomes this kind of front and center.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Lead guitar guy. And there were very few such characters
anywhere in popular music. I would argue.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
In nineteen fifty that's a huge breakthrough. And he starts
making a name for himself. He starts charting. He charts
his first number one hit with three o'clock Blues, and
that put him into play as a Chitlin circuit performer.
So then he's he is then empowered to go up
and down the Chitland circuit all through the nineteen fifties.
(26:03):
And here's something that'll surprise you.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Very few of the people who would.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Have gone to see BB King on the Chitlin circuit
in the nineteen fifties thought of him as any kind
of great shakes as a guitarist.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
BB King in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
As a black star superstar, was regarded first and foremost
as a singer. He was considered to be sort of
the preeminent kind of pure blues singer.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
His guitar playing was an afterthought.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
It was barely mentioned in any of the articles about
him and the ads he'd be holding the guitar, but
nobody really cared about it. It's very hard to reconstruct
this now because we're thinking of him as a guitar hero.
But that wasn't how he was regarded by his black
fans in the nineteen fifties into the sixties. In fact,
if you listen closely to BB King live at the Regal,
(26:52):
even if you listen closely to the BB King at
Cook County Jail, which is from I think nineteen seventy,
how has bb introduced the world's greatest blues singer.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
There's no mention made of his guitar.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
When we come back more of the story of BB King,
the Chairman of the Board, the King of the Blues,
More about his unique contributions to music and to the
rich American artistic tapestry. Here on our American stories, and
(27:37):
we return to our American stories and the final portion
of our story on bluesman BB King. Telling this story
is Arthur Daniel Dave Say, author of the fantastic book
King of the Blues. Let's return to the story. Here
again is Daniel.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
So it is into the nineteen sixties. B. B. King
is at that point a journeyman blues artist. He's done
great stuff, He's sold a ton of records, he's made
a lot of money, chewed through dozens and dozens of musicians,
chewed through. He was a benevolent band leader where they
came and they went. It was a very punishing life.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
And here's what happens.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
There's two huge distinctions between musicians in America and musicians
in Britain. Right about nineteen sixty four sixty five, in America,
we were in the midst of this kind of folk revival,
you know, which gave us Dylan and Joan Baez, and
there was armies of white folk guitar guys, and all
(28:40):
those people would eventually go and see a hard day's night,
and they all kind of en mass bought electric guitars
and learned how to play like the Beatles, and you
know the rest of that story. In Britain, going into
the nineteen sixties, different things were happening. They'd come out
of a sort of a rag timey sort of jazz
(29:01):
trad jazz movement. There'd been this skifful thing, which is
sort of like jug band music, and all of the
great guitar heroes from Britain had all been in skiffle bands,
which is kind of funny. And then they progressed into
a blues revival and America was not having a blues revival,
but Britain was. And so by the early sixties you
have a bunch of guitarists and drummers and singers who
(29:23):
are pretty damn good who are playing in blues ensembles.
And all these records were coming in. I picture them
arriving in places like Liverpool, you know, being shipped in
and his records end up in England. Some of his
singles crossed over, and I think it was a single
called rock Me Baby around nineteen sixty four that sold pretty.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Well in England.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Now, white listeners in England were not nearly so blinded
by race as were white listeners in the States. And
so while most white people by nineteen sixty four sixty
had not heard and did not hear live at the Regal,
a whole bunch of white guitarists and singers in Britain,
including Mick Jagger and you know, Eric Clapton, heard Rock
(30:11):
Me Baby, and they said, well, this guy's amazing. Clapton
was a great musicologist. And when Clapton figured out that
BB King had originated the guitar sound that was Clapton's sound,
he never looked back. He became a sort of besotted
BB King fan for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
So B. B.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
King spawned a whole army of white British guitar guys
who then came over in the British invasion and sort
of taught us all a lesson about black blues music.
And I mentioned there were two distinctions. That's the one
is that there was a blues revival happening in Britain,
so there was a hunger for black blues music, which
(30:49):
they revered, I mean, and we did not, you know,
in America, we didn't even know about it. The second
distinction is there was way less. There wasn't none, but
there was way less institutionalized sort of racism in the
music business in Britain. In Britain, it was not remotely
unheard of to have a great treasured black artist perform
(31:10):
in a quote unquote white club.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
That was fine in anyway. It was not fine in
the United States.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
So there wasn't this sort of these racial blinders.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
And so it is that in the second half.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Of the nineteen sixties, bit by bit, measure by measure,
white guitarists, fans, bands, singers, performers start learning and embracing
the music of BB King, the Black Blues Star. So
once you get into these kind of pop bands in
America in the second half of the sixties, like the
(31:42):
Jefferson Airplane, the Birds, the Grateful Dead, all of those artists,
not every last one, but for the most part, they
were recovering folkies who had gone to the theater and
seen a hard day's night and decided to form rock
and roll bands. And then only later, under the influence
of Apton beck Page, only later did they even get
(32:03):
into sort of the blues sounds. And by about nineteen
sixty seven he's finally allowed to perform for these huge
white audiences who knew his music by then, because you know,
Keith Richards had played it before them. I'm not aware
of a single white guitarist in America who knew anything
about what he was doing. I'm sure there must have
been some, but the first that I hear with my
(32:25):
own ears somebody playing like BB King who was white
in America, it's got to be Bloomfield in the Butterfield
blues pan. That's not until about nineteen sixty five sixty six.
He did this all kind of in a vacuum for
the better part of.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
A decade and a half. So he was, I think
very much ready.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
I mean he was, goodness, he was how old was
he in nineteen sixty seven three?
Speaker 3 (32:47):
But he was entering his forties. He was ready. He
was ready to break through the circuit.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
He did not want to settle for being in the
chillin circuit. You know, Bhebe was probably still felt like
he was and hand him out. So he absolutely wanted
to become a star for all of America, not just
for Black America. He wanted to do what Ray Charles
had done. He wanted to break through. There's a sort
of sequence of events that puts BB King over the top.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Toward the end of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
The very first shot fired off was this coming out
gig get the Filmore in February sixty seven, which is
this legendary performance where white America sort of discovers him.
Now he's known as a guitarist. They know he's a
great singer, but the guitar work suddenly is front and center.
So Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop from the Butterfield Band,
(33:43):
they went to Graham, the guy who ran the Film War,
and said, Bill Graham, you've got to hire this guy.
You've got to have You've got to have bb king Man,
And so Bill Graham hires him to perform in February
nineteen sixty seven. Now Babe shows up at the Film
War and he knows it as a Chipland circuit palace.
It had been a Chitlin circuit venue. He had played
(34:03):
there for black audiences. But I don't know if his manager,
whoever his manager was, maybe hadn't told him, by the way,
the whole audience is going to be white. So he
goes up the stairs and there's all these hippies and
all this aromatic smoke in the air, and he's like
I'm not sure I'm in the right place here, and
he finds Bill Graham says, no, no.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Bb, this is it. You know you're at the right place.
So Bill Graham introduces him.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
You know, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the chairman
of the board, mister B. B. King, And they just
clap and clap and clap, and BB has tears streaming
down his face because he suddenly realizes, Holy, I've got
an audience, you know, a white audience. All of a sudden,
young Americans of every stripe know who I am. And
(34:49):
that's why it's such a momentous occasion, this kind of
breakthrough gig. And it's as silly as that that he
literally showed up thinking that he was playing it the
Chitlin Circuit Palace. So after that thing got moved very quickly.
I'm not sure if I remember how BB King wound
up on the Stones tour in nineteen sixty nine, but
(35:09):
my sense of it is that the Stones wanted to
have the best black artists as their opening act, because
you know, the Stones were a discerning gang.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
They thought they were the best rock and roll band.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
And you know, you can imagine how Keith and Mick
would have thought about this, Well, we want let's see
who's the best blues guy, BB King. You know who's
the best R and B soul band. Oh, that'd be
Icon Tina. So they hired Ikon Tina and BB King
to open for them in their sixty nine tour. And
that's an enormous, enormous event for BB King because it
exposes him to you know, probably a million or two
(35:42):
million fans, lots of write ups in all the best
music publications all over the country, and then by the
turn of the nineteen seventies, he's got a much much
higher profile than he had gosh, three years earlier, when
he was barely known to white America. All the way
up to his death, BB King loved nothing more, I
(36:06):
would say then, to return to Club Ebony and in Genola,
which was the old.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Roadhouse in the black neighborhood. I've been there.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
It's a lovely place, and it made him so happy
to perform for black people again. This is part of
the deeper part of his character that doesn't come out
so much in the many interviews he did because he
sort of hit a lot of this. But I think
he was heartbroken to not play for black people more
often than he did, and he loved nothing more than
(36:35):
to return to Ingenola for these homecoming events and play
for lower income audiences who loved him for free or
for very little money, you know, at places like Club Ebony.
There's an anecdote in my book where Tony Coleman, who
was this very funny drummer who played with mister King,
was cracking up the band talking about okay, this place
(36:56):
with grass growing through the floor and Club Ebony, give
me a break.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
He's kind of making them all laugh talking about how
this hazy joint they're going to play at, and mister
King turns to him and says something like, mister Coleman,
you know, I don't want you to forget that. You
know every time I come here, you know that these
are my people, and this is why we're doing this,
and nothing's more important than coming back and you know,
seeing my roots. And Tony felt terrible after this because
(37:22):
he'd been making jokes about playing at this juke joint
in Ginola, but for mister King, it meant everything.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing, and production
by our own Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to
author Daniel Davies say his book King of the Blues.
It's available on Amazon dot com and all the usual suspects.
Pick it up, you won't put it down. And what
a story Daniel told, particularly about how the blues revival
in Great Britain necessitated blues music in America. It took
(37:54):
young guitar players like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and
Keith Richards and Jeff Beck to come and introduce white
audiences to this traditional folk black music, which of course
was and is the blues and absolutely an American story.
BB King's story here on our American Stories
This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories,
the show where America is the star and the American
people up next, the story of a man who came
up out of the cotton fields of the Mississippi Delta
and into the bright lights of the stage worldwide. We're
of course telling the story of the Chairman of the
(00:30):
Board himself, BB King, whose unique style of guitar playing
and voice changed the music industry forever. Here to tell
the story is Daniel Davy Say, author of The King
of the Blues. Take it away, Daniel.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Let's start with the proposition that BB King is the
one superstar of the blues. There are arguably equally great
figures in the blues. Maybe Muddy Waters is one, Maybe
possibly Robert Johnson is one, although BB would disagree with that.
But he's certainly the one superstar of the blues. And
I say this because he toured like ninety countries and
(01:07):
you know, at all these Grammys and sold massive numbers
of records. He's much bigger than any other blues artist
ever was. That's the starting point. But I would argue
that why he matters is not just that, not just
the fact that he may have played more concerts, which
is posted twenty thousand than any other major musical artist ever.
I don't think anybody comes close. Even that isn't why
(01:28):
he matters. Why he matters, I would argue, is that
he developed a signature guitar sound that was transformative for
him and.
Speaker 3 (01:38):
For the guitar and for its place in popular music.
Speaker 2 (01:41):
He redefined the guitar, and that sound the guitar as
a voice, passed from bb King to Buddy Guy, to
Eric Clapton, to Jimmy Hendrix to absolutely everyone. But he's
also bigger than the blues, and people need to remember
that about him. Riley King was born in nineteen twenty
(02:04):
five to a sharecropper family in the Delta, Mississippi Delta,
in a little cabin on land that was owned by
a white land owner, and they worked the land. And
the sharecropper system was a really horrible economic enterprise. I mean,
looking at it now, it sounds just a couple baby
steps away from slavery. But the white owner typically would
(02:27):
sort of lease the land to the sharecroppers. The sharecroppers
would raise their crops, sell the crops, and then the
black sharecroppers would in theory, would get some proceeds from
the sale of those crops, but after deducting all sorts
of expenses, and a lot of times, I dare say
most of the time the sharecropper would end the year
in debt. So it was a sort of brutal sort
(02:49):
of cycle of perpetual debt. His mother was I believe,
a teenager when he was born. He only knew her
up until age seven eight nine. I think he was
nine when she died. She probably had diabetes and probably
succumbed to it. It's all a little unclear because you know,
(03:10):
there weren't hard records kept of.
Speaker 3 (03:12):
A lot of this stuff.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
But BB King's mother is sort of this almost ethereal
character in his memoir. She's portrayed by him as a sweet, loving, angelic,
beautiful creature.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
So yeah, it.
Speaker 2 (03:27):
Was inconceivably wrenching for him to lose his mother, a
terrible loss, and I would argue that through his life
from that point there were two things really motivating mister King.
One was to kind of rebuild the family that he
lost with the death of his mother.
Speaker 3 (03:42):
He had a big sort of.
Speaker 2 (03:45):
Hole at the center of his soul. I think that
when mister King entered adulthood, he felt like he was
sort of alone in the world, and I think that's
why he was not just willing, but really wide open
to embracing paternity claims from children. I don't know whose children,
but I would argue probably not his children. He went
to a fertility doctor and he had a test and
(04:06):
found out that he could not father children. The children
who say they are his children are his adoptive children.
And he loved them all and claimed them all as
his own. But I don't think they were his biological children.
I think that he loved having this big family.
Speaker 3 (04:21):
And you know too.
Speaker 2 (04:23):
The other impulse was to sort of impress his father,
because his father was this tireless workaholic who famously said,
it's a rhetorical question, how can a man work too much?
There's no such thing, mister King, I would argue, Phoebe
King spent his whole adult life trying to prove to
his father that he could be as hard working as
(04:43):
Albert King. His father was a fairly prosperous tractor driver.
Speaker 3 (04:53):
The tractor driver was a.
Speaker 2 (04:54):
Really really elevated position in the sort of system of sharecropping.
Drivers were few, They operated very expensive machinery. If I
told you how much he earned, it wouldn't sound very impressive,
because this is the nineteen thirty five dollars. But Albert
King Beebe's father earned enough from tractor driving that he
supported a wife and her extended family. I think six
(05:18):
or seven people were living under Albert King's roof. So
Albert King was kind of an alpha male among sort
of black agrarian workers of that era, and so Riley
King as a child would have worked the farm I
think he has today at a term like canned to
cant And I'm not saying that the right accident, but basically,
(05:38):
from the moment the sun popped up over the horizon,
you'd go to work, and then you'd work until you
couldn't see anything anymore, right, And he would sleep in
rickety cabins with no you know, water electricity. It was
absolutely pitch dark all night. In fact, so much so
that in later life mister King was kind of terrified
(06:00):
of the dark. He always had to have a light
on somewhere near him as he slept because it was
so probably frightening being in utter darkness.
Speaker 3 (06:08):
And so.
Speaker 2 (06:11):
I dare say that by the time BB King sort
of is entering adulthood and he's in Indianola and he's
working picking cotton. He probably would have aspired to become
a well, he said, so he aspired to become a
tractor driver himself, because he knew that job sat at
the top of the heap. The only person BB King
knew who earned more than a tractor driver was a
(06:31):
guy named Booker Baggett, who was the foreman under the
white landowner on the farm.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
Where bb lived and worked. If this makes sense, the
foreman was sort of.
Speaker 2 (06:42):
The you know, the top employee, overseeing all of the
tractor drivers and farmers, and typically that was a job
given to a white person. But this particular landowner was
relatively progressive in his thinking, and so he gave the
job to a black man. And this caused when Booker,
the black foreman, would go into town in Ginola, the
(07:04):
white storekeepers often didn't want to talk to him or
deal with him, but they couldn't believe that a black
man was the foreman. Booker would have to go get
the actual landowner and send him in and say, yes,
this man is my foreman.
Speaker 3 (07:15):
That would have been the absolute.
Speaker 2 (07:17):
Apex of BB King's aspirations. When he was an eighteen
year old, twenty year old young man.
Speaker 1 (07:22):
When we come back, more of the story of the
Chairman of the Board, BB King. Here on our American Story.
Liehbib here the host of our American Stories. Every day
on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this
great country, stories from our big cities and small towns.
(07:42):
But we truly can't do the show without you. Our
stories are free to listen to, but they're not free
to make. If you love what you hear, go to
Alamerican Stories dot com and click the donate button. Give
a little, give a lot. Go to Alamerican Stories dot
com and give. And we returned to our American Stories
(08:12):
and our story on Bluesman BB King. Telling the story
is author Daniel davy Say, author of the fantastic book
King of the Blues, available at Amazon or all the
usual suspects. When we last left off, Daniel was telling
us about BB King's childhood. You heard about his father's
work ethic, but his mother well her death. Her early
(08:34):
death had a profound effect on BB King. Let's pick
up where we last left off with Daniel davy Say.
Speaker 2 (08:48):
Schooling and Bbking got schooling schooling happened only once all
the farming was done for the seasonal cycle, so it
wasn't probably a full year of schooling. It probably wasn't
from September first until May thirtieth, but he got schooling.
I think Luther Henson was his only teacher. Luther Henson
(09:09):
was an incredibly important role model for young Riley King
BB King. Luther Henson operated essentially a one room schoolhouse
in Kilmichael, Mississippi, with black children of all different ages.
Taught all of the students. I believe his father had
been a slave and had been freed, and Luther Henson
taught his black students out of black newspapers, African American
(09:33):
newspapers from different parts of the country. He would find
those papers and show the students heroes, you know, important
African American people who the black students were not going
to read about, most likely in the white newspapers. The
white newspapers mostly covered Black America when Black Americans were
accused of crimes, and so Luther Henson taught the students,
(09:54):
including BB King, you need to get an education. This
is something the white people will never take away from you.
He taught them that not every white person is racist,
that there are obviously many, many horrible white people who
are going to try to kill you, or at least
greatly greatly Hamperer attempts to be free and prosperous, but
(10:15):
that you have hope because there are good people out there,
white and black. And certainly BB King absorbed the lesson
because he became BB King became a very very up, faint,
endlessly patient man. I mean, he endured innumerable innumerable slights
and acts of racism large and small over the course
(10:36):
of his career and had an amazingly tolerant and forgiving
and patient.
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Approach to it all.
Speaker 2 (10:45):
I mean, working on the Chitlin circuit was itself kind
of one massive slight. I The Chitland circuit was part
of a segregated, walled off music industry where white and
black artists and fans basically worshiped in different.
Speaker 3 (11:01):
Churches, so to speak.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
So all of the places where BB King was allowed
to perform in the nineteen fifties and into the nineteen
sixties were segregated black venues, and they were our wonderful places,
and he had amazing loyal, knowledgeable fans. But the industry
itself sort of blocked him from doing anything else outside.
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Of that system, that circuit.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
This is why you know, Ray, Charles, Fats Domino, other
artists went into mainstream so called record labels and broke
out of the Chitlin circuit and scored hits, massive hits
on the pop charts to break out of the segregated industry.
As far as just sort of day to day racial antipathy,
it was constant.
Speaker 1 (11:44):
You know.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Many were the times when mister King and his all
black band would arrive at a hotel with Sid Seidenberg,
his white manager, and the hotelier would ask mister Seidenberg
to come in the front door, and the black musicians
would be around the side or to the back, and
Sid would say, hell, no, I'm not doing that. If
they're going around the back, I'm going around the back.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
BB King had.
Speaker 2 (12:08):
A bus that he called Big Red that traveled up
and down the Chitland circuit, and when they would stop
for gas, there was a perpetual battle, at least in
the South, to get service and to get food. Typically,
his roadie would have to go and sort of negotiate
and saying, well, I'll buy one hundred gallons of gas
from you, but you've got to sell us some food
(12:28):
because otherwise they would not. So if the band wanted
to eat, they had to sort of parlay. It's like
I will fill my tank and give you our money,
but you've got to be willing to serve us, and
then they would wind up having to eat and often
sleep in the buses. Anyone who's at all familiar with
Jim Crow America knows that black artists mostly stayed and
segregated hotels. So when BB King went to Houston, he
(12:51):
would stay at the segregated black hotel in Houston. Now
that the upshot was, he'd often be staying in the
same hotel with you know, Charlie Parker, which was kind
of cool and he got to meet the greatest musical
artists of the prior generation, but it was still segregation.
Success as many parents. There are at least three separate
(13:15):
accounts of Riley King getting his first guitar. The earliest
is that Booker White, who was a cousin I think
a first cousin of BB King's grandmother.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
I'm probably saying that wrong, but was a relation of
BB King.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
Booker White shows up as a successful slide guitarist shows
up to Riley King's house where he lives with his mother,
and this is around nineteen thirty in Burclare, Mississippi.
Speaker 3 (13:41):
You can find it, you can go there. It's like
three or four little dwellings on a railroad track. I've
been there.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
Booker brings his guitar and according to whose account you believe,
maybe just shows it to Riley, says, here's my guitar, son,
you know, check it out.
Speaker 3 (13:56):
Or maybe he actually gives it to him.
Speaker 2 (13:58):
It's ambiguous. The people who interviewed book are white, you know,
got this story out of him, but it was a
little bit unclear whether he just lent him the guitar
or actually gave him a guitar. In any event, a
few years later, Riley King is in Kilmichael, just out
of the hill country in Mississippi, with his extended family
and an uncle kind of a little bit of a
(14:20):
mean uncle, and supposedly this uncle gave Riley a guitar.
It was not too uncommon for black men and women
in Mississippi in the nineteen thirties to have a harmonica,
maybe a guitar. Much wealthier families like the family of
Ike Turner, had pianos, but less well off families often
(14:43):
had guitars, so it's certainly plausible that this uncle gave
BB King Riley King a guitar, maybe around age seven
age eight. BB King himself said that his first guitar
was something that he bought with his own money, and
he he bought it with wages he'd earned as a
sharecropper from a white young man, and I think it
(15:06):
was fifteen dollars. That story sounds the most credible to
me because BB King himself told it. It's possible that
he had possessed a guitar in earlier life, but I
don't know what use a six or seven year old boy.
I mean, even with BB King's incredible gifts, I don't
know that he would have made much use of a
guitar at age five or six or seven. But by
the time he's twelve and thirteen, he clearly made use
(15:28):
of that guitar. BB King had a circle of churches
that he went to.
Speaker 3 (15:34):
With his kin around Kilmichael.
Speaker 2 (15:36):
One of these churches was overseen by all accounts, a
fiery preacher by the name of Archie Fair, and Archie
Fair becomes another really important role model for young Riley King.
Archie Fair is a guitar slinging preacher. He preaches and
he sings, and he plays guitar. And I don't think
that Kilmichael was wired for electricity, so he might have
(15:57):
had a battery powered amplifier. I'm not really sure how
that would have had happened. But somehow or other, Archie
Fair entertained his flock with a guitar. And Riley King
was absolutely and utterly smitten by Archie Fair, fell in
love with everything about his preacher performance, and decided then
and there he wanted to become a guitar playing preacher himself.
(16:19):
So Riley King, when he first gets into music, he
gets into sacred music, he joins, he forms, I would
say he probably started it. He forms a sort of
couple of gospel combos and goes around and plays with
them at churches, and he even gets onto the radio.
I think in Greenwood it was either Greenwood or Greenville.
I always get those two cities confused. But one of
(16:41):
those two cities had a radio station, w GRM or
something like that. And Riley King and his gospel combo
go on the air a number of times singing multi
Park gospel.
Speaker 3 (16:56):
Harmonies, and that was a thing. And even in the.
Speaker 2 (16:58):
Nineteen thirties, despite the SEGRE on the radio, black gospel
combos were allowed permitted to play on white radio stations
like the LEGRM. So that might have been his fate.
It might have been that BB King would have gone
on to national fame with the.
Speaker 3 (17:15):
Famous Saint John's Gospel Singers. I think that was the
name of the outfit.
Speaker 2 (17:18):
The other guys in the combo, though, didn't really have
the same ambitions and they didn't want to leave in Janola,
so that kind of dried up.
Speaker 1 (17:27):
And you're listening to author Daniel Davisa tell the story
of BB King, the King of the Blues and the
Chairman of the Board. And BB King, as you heard,
endured many racial slights. We heard the same story about
Duke Ellington that Terry Tchek told when we come back
more of the remarkable life story of Riley King aka
(17:50):
BB King here on our American story and we returned
to our American stories and our story on bluesman BB King.
(18:14):
Telling the story is Daniel davy Say, author of the
fantastic book King of the Blues Again. It's available on
Amazon and all the usual suspects. When we last left off,
BB King had formed a gospel group after being inspired
by a guitar slinging preacher in Kill Michael, Mississippi. But
unfortunately for BB King, or perhaps fortunately for blues fans,
(18:38):
that didn't pan out. Let's get back to the story
here again, is Daniel.
Speaker 3 (18:46):
So I take you back to Indianola.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
Really, strapping cotton pickers in Indianola could earn, you know,
real money, and mister King was capable of earning pretty
good pay picking cotton. And then once he got to
be attracted or just like his father, he earned even
better pay. But then here's what happened. Riley King went
out and busked on the street corners in the Angenola.
If you go to in Genola, you can find the
(19:10):
street corner where he busked. There's a you know, like
a plaque there. And he would first play gospel songs
and people would, you know, sort of pat him on
the shoulder for doing that. But then he he finally
started playing blues songs, and he learned that the blues
songs could be monetized. People started throwing actual money into
his guitar case or that, and he got so good
(19:31):
at the busking that he was earning better money, frankly,
than he was earning from tractor driving. So this was
a simple mercenary proposition. I mean, that's why he went
into music, and that's also why he left gospel, because
gospel music didn't pay and blues music did. So he
decides to go alone to Memphis. What triggers his departure
(19:55):
is that he's out driving his tractor and he's probably tired.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
It's been a long day.
Speaker 2 (20:01):
He's steering the tractor back into the sort of shed
and I guess it kind of bucks because he hadn't
put it out of gear or in gear, or he
hadn't secured it the way he was supposed to secure it,
and so it lurches and the manifold or something breaks
off of it. I picture this has been kind of
like an exhaust, and that's like a five hundred dollars repair,
and apparently he panicked.
Speaker 3 (20:23):
You know, I'm getting out of here.
Speaker 2 (20:25):
But I have to say, for the sake of his currency,
that he returned and he paid that bill in full.
He probably spent two full years at probably twenty bucks
a month or something repaying that debt to his landowner,
but he hitchhikes to Memphis and this is around nineteen
forty six and finds his cousin, Booker White, and takes
(20:47):
up residence with him in his apartment and basically sort
of mentors under him and goes to house parties and
watches Booker White entertain audiences on the slide guitar and
sort of starts to earn more and more of a
repertoire of what was then kind of popular blues and
rhythm and blues songs. But he realizes that he's not
(21:07):
good enough to make it really in Memphis, so he
tweets back to Ingenola, and he returns to Memphis two
years later as a more practiced, more polished blues guitarist
and very quickly in a matter of days, talks his
way into his own radio show. It's a startup station
called WDA and it's historically the very first station with
(21:32):
all black talent. It's owned and run by white people,
but they decide to have all black performers. The first
rainy day that Riley King walks into the offices of WDIA,
he walks in as Riley King, and he walks out
as bb King and let me explain that he sat
down with the station manager, and the station manager you know,
(21:52):
kind of said okay, well we'll put you on the air,
and no good. Here you sang the song and it
sounded pretty, sang Louis Jordan's saying, sounds great.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
We'll put you on you know.
Speaker 2 (21:59):
Next two, Dad or whatever, and we need to give
you a catchy name, so let's call you BB. This
white station manager came up with the BB initials and
it was just, you know, catchy, something like the Colonel
would have done for Elvis, and it was not shortened
from blues boy or from anything else.
Speaker 3 (22:17):
That's a myth.
Speaker 2 (22:19):
He took to the radio at the beginning as BB
King as a first a performer who would come on
for maybe fifteen minutes and then he'd advertise whatever gig
he was playing that night in West Memphis. And then
he gets an actual disc jockey job on WDA. So
from that point on he is DJing, he's spinning songs,
(22:39):
acquiring a massive knowledge of rhythm and blues, and he
records his very first sides in the summer of nineteen
forty nine for a Bullet Records out of Nashville, and
nobody listening to this has probably ever heard them. They're
not very good, frankly, because BB King at the beginning
didn't really keep time because he was a solo artist.
So he put him with a band and he didn't
(23:00):
know when the measure ended. But over the sort of
summer into the winter nineteen forty nine into nineteen fifty,
BB King put in you know, the thousand hours of practice.
He sounds really damn good. And what's more, over that
winter he had developed his own signature sound, which he
(23:22):
called the Butterfly. The best way I can think of
to explain it is Nigel Tufnel, you know from spinal Tap,
that kind of dude, you know, don't touch it, you know,
don't even look at it, you know, spinal tap. Anyway,
BB King developed this signature sound, and I would argue
that he was the first prominent guitarist to really make
(23:44):
a solo guitar sound like a human voice. This is
his signal accomplishment. This is this is the most important
thing probably in all of what Bbking did in all
of his career, all of his forebears, the earlier Belannie
Johnson's The Charlie Christians, that even the table and Walker.
They used some vibrato, but they really employed the solo
guitar more like a horn. It didn't really sound like
(24:06):
a voice. So he's this wonderful guitar player with this unique,
amazing breakthrough guitar sound. So by nineteen fifty he's leading
a terrific band. And BB King's first really good band
has a two guitar attack, which is a would have
been a rarity in rhythm and blues of that era
or in any of popular music. The guitar, and this
(24:28):
is what you have to wrap your brain around. The
guitar was a back bench instrument in popular music of
the nineteen forties and into the nineteen fifties. There weren't
band leaders who played guitar. Most bands that were on
the rhythm and blues charts were led by singers who
might also play piano or might also play a horn,
(24:49):
not the guitar.
Speaker 3 (24:50):
There were no certainly guitar heroes in a sense.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
BB King belatedly became one of the first, if not
the first. So for BB King to have a band
that had a front line of two guitars was kind
of an amazing thing, and he hired an extremely versatile
second guitarist Robert Lockwood, Robert Junior Lockwood. The junior is
because he was supposedly like, you know, like a junior
(25:16):
Robert Johnson. And Robert Lockwood is this just incredible guitarist
who becomes basically the rhythm guitarist whose rhythm work allows
BB King to solo. So Bb King in this band
with two guitars is liberated, liberated to do only solo
work on the guitar, not really to play rhythm, and
so thus he becomes this kind of front and center.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
Lead guitar guy. And there were very few such characters
anywhere in popular music. I would argue.
Speaker 2 (25:41):
In nineteen fifty that's a huge breakthrough. And he starts
making a name for himself. He starts charting. He charts
his first number one hit with three o'clock Blues, and
that put him into play as a Chitlin circuit performer.
So then he's he is then empowered to go up
and down the Chitland circuit all through the nineteen fifties.
(26:03):
And here's something that'll surprise you.
Speaker 3 (26:07):
Very few of the people who would.
Speaker 2 (26:08):
Have gone to see BB King on the Chitlin circuit
in the nineteen fifties thought of him as any kind
of great shakes as a guitarist.
Speaker 3 (26:17):
BB King in the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 2 (26:18):
As a black star superstar, was regarded first and foremost
as a singer. He was considered to be sort of
the preeminent kind of pure blues singer.
Speaker 3 (26:28):
His guitar playing was an afterthought.
Speaker 2 (26:30):
It was barely mentioned in any of the articles about
him and the ads he'd be holding the guitar, but
nobody really cared about it. It's very hard to reconstruct
this now because we're thinking of him as a guitar hero.
But that wasn't how he was regarded by his black
fans in the nineteen fifties into the sixties. In fact,
if you listen closely to BB King live at the Regal,
(26:52):
even if you listen closely to the BB King at
Cook County Jail, which is from I think nineteen seventy,
how has bb introduced the world's greatest blues singer.
Speaker 3 (27:03):
There's no mention made of his guitar.
Speaker 1 (27:11):
When we come back more of the story of BB King,
the Chairman of the Board, the King of the Blues,
More about his unique contributions to music and to the
rich American artistic tapestry. Here on our American stories, and
(27:37):
we return to our American stories and the final portion
of our story on bluesman BB King. Telling this story
is Arthur Daniel Dave Say, author of the fantastic book
King of the Blues. Let's return to the story. Here
again is Daniel.
Speaker 2 (27:57):
So it is into the nineteen sixties. B. B. King
is at that point a journeyman blues artist. He's done
great stuff, He's sold a ton of records, he's made
a lot of money, chewed through dozens and dozens of musicians,
chewed through. He was a benevolent band leader where they
came and they went. It was a very punishing life.
Speaker 3 (28:15):
And here's what happens.
Speaker 2 (28:19):
There's two huge distinctions between musicians in America and musicians
in Britain. Right about nineteen sixty four sixty five, in America,
we were in the midst of this kind of folk revival,
you know, which gave us Dylan and Joan Baez, and
there was armies of white folk guitar guys, and all
(28:40):
those people would eventually go and see a hard day's night,
and they all kind of en mass bought electric guitars
and learned how to play like the Beatles, and you
know the rest of that story. In Britain, going into
the nineteen sixties, different things were happening. They'd come out
of a sort of a rag timey sort of jazz
(29:01):
trad jazz movement. There'd been this skifful thing, which is
sort of like jug band music, and all of the
great guitar heroes from Britain had all been in skiffle bands,
which is kind of funny. And then they progressed into
a blues revival and America was not having a blues revival,
but Britain was. And so by the early sixties you
have a bunch of guitarists and drummers and singers who
(29:23):
are pretty damn good who are playing in blues ensembles.
And all these records were coming in. I picture them
arriving in places like Liverpool, you know, being shipped in
and his records end up in England. Some of his
singles crossed over, and I think it was a single
called rock Me Baby around nineteen sixty four that sold pretty.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Well in England.
Speaker 2 (29:48):
Now, white listeners in England were not nearly so blinded
by race as were white listeners in the States. And
so while most white people by nineteen sixty four sixty
had not heard and did not hear live at the Regal,
a whole bunch of white guitarists and singers in Britain,
including Mick Jagger and you know, Eric Clapton, heard Rock
(30:11):
Me Baby, and they said, well, this guy's amazing. Clapton
was a great musicologist. And when Clapton figured out that
BB King had originated the guitar sound that was Clapton's sound,
he never looked back. He became a sort of besotted
BB King fan for the rest of his life.
Speaker 3 (30:27):
So B. B.
Speaker 2 (30:27):
King spawned a whole army of white British guitar guys
who then came over in the British invasion and sort
of taught us all a lesson about black blues music.
And I mentioned there were two distinctions. That's the one
is that there was a blues revival happening in Britain,
so there was a hunger for black blues music, which
(30:49):
they revered, I mean, and we did not, you know,
in America, we didn't even know about it. The second
distinction is there was way less. There wasn't none, but
there was way less institutionalized sort of racism in the
music business in Britain. In Britain, it was not remotely
unheard of to have a great treasured black artist perform
(31:10):
in a quote unquote white club.
Speaker 3 (31:12):
That was fine in anyway. It was not fine in
the United States.
Speaker 2 (31:16):
So there wasn't this sort of these racial blinders.
Speaker 3 (31:20):
And so it is that in the second half.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Of the nineteen sixties, bit by bit, measure by measure,
white guitarists, fans, bands, singers, performers start learning and embracing
the music of BB King, the Black Blues Star. So
once you get into these kind of pop bands in
America in the second half of the sixties, like the
(31:42):
Jefferson Airplane, the Birds, the Grateful Dead, all of those artists,
not every last one, but for the most part, they
were recovering folkies who had gone to the theater and
seen a hard day's night and decided to form rock
and roll bands. And then only later, under the influence
of Apton beck Page, only later did they even get
(32:03):
into sort of the blues sounds. And by about nineteen
sixty seven he's finally allowed to perform for these huge
white audiences who knew his music by then, because you know,
Keith Richards had played it before them. I'm not aware
of a single white guitarist in America who knew anything
about what he was doing. I'm sure there must have
been some, but the first that I hear with my
(32:25):
own ears somebody playing like BB King who was white
in America, it's got to be Bloomfield in the Butterfield
blues pan. That's not until about nineteen sixty five sixty six.
He did this all kind of in a vacuum for
the better part of.
Speaker 3 (32:38):
A decade and a half. So he was, I think
very much ready.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
I mean he was, goodness, he was how old was
he in nineteen sixty seven three?
Speaker 3 (32:47):
But he was entering his forties. He was ready. He
was ready to break through the circuit.
Speaker 2 (32:54):
He did not want to settle for being in the
chillin circuit. You know, Bhebe was probably still felt like
he was and hand him out. So he absolutely wanted
to become a star for all of America, not just
for Black America. He wanted to do what Ray Charles
had done. He wanted to break through. There's a sort
of sequence of events that puts BB King over the top.
Speaker 3 (33:16):
Toward the end of the nineteen sixties.
Speaker 2 (33:18):
The very first shot fired off was this coming out
gig get the Filmore in February sixty seven, which is
this legendary performance where white America sort of discovers him.
Now he's known as a guitarist. They know he's a
great singer, but the guitar work suddenly is front and center.
So Mike Bloomfield and Elvin Bishop from the Butterfield Band,
(33:43):
they went to Graham, the guy who ran the Film War,
and said, Bill Graham, you've got to hire this guy.
You've got to have You've got to have bb king Man,
And so Bill Graham hires him to perform in February
nineteen sixty seven. Now Babe shows up at the Film
War and he knows it as a Chipland circuit palace.
It had been a Chitlin circuit venue. He had played
(34:03):
there for black audiences. But I don't know if his manager,
whoever his manager was, maybe hadn't told him, by the way,
the whole audience is going to be white. So he
goes up the stairs and there's all these hippies and
all this aromatic smoke in the air, and he's like
I'm not sure I'm in the right place here, and
he finds Bill Graham says, no, no.
Speaker 3 (34:23):
Bb, this is it. You know you're at the right place.
So Bill Graham introduces him.
Speaker 2 (34:27):
You know, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the chairman
of the board, mister B. B. King, And they just
clap and clap and clap, and BB has tears streaming
down his face because he suddenly realizes, Holy, I've got
an audience, you know, a white audience. All of a sudden,
young Americans of every stripe know who I am. And
(34:49):
that's why it's such a momentous occasion, this kind of
breakthrough gig. And it's as silly as that that he
literally showed up thinking that he was playing it the
Chitlin Circuit Palace. So after that thing got moved very quickly.
I'm not sure if I remember how BB King wound
up on the Stones tour in nineteen sixty nine, but
(35:09):
my sense of it is that the Stones wanted to
have the best black artists as their opening act, because
you know, the Stones were a discerning gang.
Speaker 3 (35:18):
They thought they were the best rock and roll band.
Speaker 2 (35:20):
And you know, you can imagine how Keith and Mick
would have thought about this, Well, we want let's see
who's the best blues guy, BB King. You know who's
the best R and B soul band. Oh, that'd be
Icon Tina. So they hired Ikon Tina and BB King
to open for them in their sixty nine tour. And
that's an enormous, enormous event for BB King because it
exposes him to you know, probably a million or two
(35:42):
million fans, lots of write ups in all the best
music publications all over the country, and then by the
turn of the nineteen seventies, he's got a much much
higher profile than he had gosh, three years earlier, when
he was barely known to white America. All the way
up to his death, BB King loved nothing more, I
(36:06):
would say then, to return to Club Ebony and in Genola,
which was the old.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Roadhouse in the black neighborhood. I've been there.
Speaker 2 (36:15):
It's a lovely place, and it made him so happy
to perform for black people again. This is part of
the deeper part of his character that doesn't come out
so much in the many interviews he did because he
sort of hit a lot of this. But I think
he was heartbroken to not play for black people more
often than he did, and he loved nothing more than
(36:35):
to return to Ingenola for these homecoming events and play
for lower income audiences who loved him for free or
for very little money, you know, at places like Club Ebony.
There's an anecdote in my book where Tony Coleman, who
was this very funny drummer who played with mister King,
was cracking up the band talking about okay, this place
(36:56):
with grass growing through the floor and Club Ebony, give
me a break.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
You know.
Speaker 2 (37:00):
He's kind of making them all laugh talking about how
this hazy joint they're going to play at, and mister
King turns to him and says something like, mister Coleman,
you know, I don't want you to forget that. You
know every time I come here, you know that these
are my people, and this is why we're doing this,
and nothing's more important than coming back and you know,
seeing my roots. And Tony felt terrible after this because
(37:22):
he'd been making jokes about playing at this juke joint
in Ginola, but for mister King, it meant everything.
Speaker 1 (37:30):
And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing, and production
by our own Monty Montgomery and a special thanks to
author Daniel Davies say his book King of the Blues.
It's available on Amazon dot com and all the usual suspects.
Pick it up, you won't put it down. And what
a story Daniel told, particularly about how the blues revival
in Great Britain necessitated blues music in America. It took
(37:54):
young guitar players like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page and
Keith Richards and Jeff Beck to come and introduce white
audiences to this traditional folk black music, which of course
was and is the blues and absolutely an American story.
BB King's story here on our American Stories
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