With the exception of Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, few blues artists of the 20th century were more influential and enduring than guitarist, singer and songwriter B.B. King. In a span of nearly seventy years, he cemented a reputation as the primary ambassador of the blues by making the music accessible to mainstream audiences around the world who would otherwise have little or no connection to it.
King is a 1980 inductee into the Blues Hall of Fame, and a 1987 inductee into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In his lifetime, he was the recipient of a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award (1987), the National Medal of Arts (1990), the Kennedy Center Honors (1995), the Living Legend Medal from the Library of Congress (2000), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2006). He holds honorary doctorates from Tougaloo College (1973), Yale University (1977), Berklee College of Music (1985), and Brown University (2007).
He won fifteen Grammy Awards between 1970 and 2009. AllMusic, the online music database, calls him “the single most important guitarist of the last half of the 20th century,” and Rolling Stone named him the eighth greatest guitarist of all time.”
There’s much more to this list of awards and accolades, but you get the idea.
He was born Riley B. King 100 years ago (September 16, 1925) to sharecropper parents on a cotton plantation in rural Mississippi. He sang in his Baptist church’s gospel choir as a young boy and later taught himself how to play the guitar. He launched his career while he was still in his teens, playing in churches, juke joints and radio stations in the deep south. After playing steady gigs in Memphis and working as a disc jockey at Memphis radio station WDIA, he picked up the nickname of “Beale Street Blues Boy,” which was later abbreviated to “Blues Boy” and ultimately “B.B.”
Over the next several decades, he recorded more than forty albums and maintained a worldwide tour schedule that included up to 300 gigs a year. One of his most high-profile appearances was on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, in 2012, by invitation from President Barack Obama. The event was called “In Performance at the White House: Red, White and Blues.”
I interviewed King thirty years ago, in April of 1995, when I was a freelance writer for The Scene, a weekly music and entertainment newspaper in Cleveland. At the time, I had been writing for the paper for about four years, and I had made the blues my beat by covering the steady stream of local and national artists playing in venues all over northeast Ohio. The genre’s resurgence in popularity at the time, spurred by the untimely death of Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1990, kept me busy for several years.
I had already covered scores of touring artists by 1995, but an interview with B.B. King – who was scheduled to play at the prestigious State Theater downtown – was next-level stuff.
I connected with King’s road manager and we set up the interview in time for me to write a profile in advance of his performance on April 16. I was told I would have fifteen minutes with him on the phone. I usually preferred something closer to thirty, but it was B.B. King and I wasn’t about to argue.
The typical procedure was for the writer to initiate the call, but King’s manager said he would call me at the appointed day and time. It seems like a minor technicality – and in hindsight, it was – but sitting at your desk in your apartment and watching the clock and waiting for a phone call from one of the most influential figures in American popular music over the last half century can be unnerving.
The call came through on schedule, and when I picked it up, a voice on the other end said, “Hold for Mr. King, please.”
The next voice I heard belonged to B.B. King. Don’t ask me what got said after that. I recall him being reserved but gracious, but otherwise I don’t remember a damn word. I recorded the conversation, but the cassette tape (remember those?) hasn’t survived the decades – and even if it had, I no longer own a machine that could play it. I’m just glad I have copies of the 1,500-word profile I wrote after the fact, or there would be no record whatsoever that the conversation ever took place at all.
I went with “The Thrill Never Leaves” as the title of the profile. It was a nod to “The Thrill Is Gone,” the now-famous track that King recorded in June of 1969 and released at the end of that year. Melancholy and evocative, it climbed to number fifteen on the Billboard Hot 100 chart within a few months and won the first in that previously mentioned string of Grammy Awards in 1970 for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance. It eventually became his signature song.
Among the more interesting takeaways from the interview was King’s colorblind sense of the music. He spoke of one of his earliest influences, Jimmie Rodgers, the white blues singer from Mississippi who worked as a railroad brakeman before launching his music career in the late 1920s.
“He sang the blues and played country songs as well,” said King. “He was very popular, not only among whites but among the blacks also.” He later added: “We don’t spend too much time thinking about this guy being a white player and that guy being a black player. We just think of each other as blues players.”
When I asked him what the audience could expect from his two upcoming shows at the State Theater, his answer was simple: “The best I got.”
And he delivered, then and always. The show at the State was one of three or four times I saw him perform throughout the ‘90s, and he never disappointed. For as much as he was celebrated (and still is) as a world-class guitar player, he also brought a powerful voice to every performance, careening from a soft and soulful place to a barely controlled roar – and then back again – with no effort at all. He was a classy, old-school showman who performed in a tuxedo and connected with his audiences via a combination of sincerity, humility, good humor and badass guitar chops.
King died in 2015, just a couple years after the White House gig. When he passed, I thought about that fifteen-minute phone call and the opportunity to tell a little piece of his enormous story. Thirty years later, after hundreds of other newspaper and magazine articles, a couple journalism awards for feature writing, three novels, and about a dozen published short stories, I still consider it a career highlight.
And I’m still grateful to B.B. for giving the world the best he had.