The King Is Gone But He’s Not Forgotten: The Music & Legacy of B.B. King
Since the beginning of recorded music, there have been many legendary artists that can count themselves as musical royalty. But there was only ever one B.B. King.
Trying to place the great man, the King of the Blues, into some kind of musical lineage is futile because he transcended it all. That soulful voice, his charismatic nature as an entertainer, and, of course, that particular, immaculate, gorgeous, uplifting magic that he held in his fingers. The world lost an irreplaceable talent last month.
Born in rural Mississippi in 1925, B.B. King was around early enough to grow up around the first wave of popular blues recording artists. The down-home authentic acoustic players that invented an image so clearly defined and so often imitated. The old man in the straw hat playing sombre tunes on his front porch. But B.B. made it big playing electric. He merged the country blues feeling with big city band music. He was the Frank Sinatra of the blues, an ambassador and a leader.
And when he played guitar it was like the angels were crying.
His tone got more polished as he grew older, but the feeling was there from the start. “I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” he wrote in his autobiography. That he most certainly achieved. No other guitarist, not those he followed nor those that tried to emulate him, has ever seemed so keenly intuned into something so primal and touching. B.B. drew on and bent those strings like he was caressing a lover. ‘Lucille’ he named his signature guitar, a fittingly intimate detail.
He knew the value of scarcity, never overplaying and always keeping his solos to a tasteful length. This was a man for whom every single note was a symphony. Not a single one was ever misplaced.
It’s a shame that so many obituaries felt like they needed to qualify their praise with the tributes of other, younger (/lesser) musicians. It’s something he faced all his career. Though immensely successful in his own right, he influenced so many people that it was like he was constantly being offered a helping hand by those desperate to pay their respects. By the back end of his career, he was making duet albums (as so many original masters tend to – see Ray Charles). Some songs would be good, some great, many forgettable. He made a full-length duet album with Eric Clapton which spurned a couple cool moments amidst the over-production and unnecessary layers of guitars (Let Lucille speak!). Even his final album, 2008’s ‘One Small Favor’, is covered in the fingerprints of producer T-Bone Burnett. Although having said that, it’s still a stunning record. A hauntingly beautiful collection of old blues standards that makes a fitting and poignant final statement from a true icon of American music.
‘One Small Favor’ will stand as one of B.B.’s very best albums, but it’s probably not a great place to start, what with the maudlin feel of the record. The King at his best was pure joy, he took the universal pains of the everyday person and inverted them into something jubilant. The best that was ever captured was on a pair of live albums, both of which count among the very best live albums ever released. 1965’s ‘Live At The Regal’ was a turning point in his career. Before then he was playing mostly in black joints, after it he could sell out a crowd in any white neighbourhood in America. It’s got great versions of a bunch of B.B. classics, such as Sweet Little Angel, Everyday I Have The Blues and How Blue Can You Get, and is loaded with killer audience banter and an absolutely gorgeous guitar tone from the old girl Lucille. This was probably the man at his peak as a performer, so full of energy and love, his voice was never better. They even locked up a copy for preservation at the Library of Congress it’s that good.
B.B. King made many live albums throughout his career after the success of this ‘Live At The Regal’, though only one could ever be said to match it. ‘Live In Country Cook Jail’ is a masterpiece of performing. Released in 1971, it follows on with the Johnny Cash tradition of playing gigs in prisons for prisoners that was going on around then. There are a few crossover songs between this and ‘Regal’, but they’re looser this time around. The crowd is rapturously eating out of his hands, the spoken interlude in Worry, Worry was never more profound and hilarious. The big punchline in How Blue Can You Get? the same. There’s more room for jamming and B.B. gets a couple of wonderful solos in while the rest of the band all have their moments too. Plus it’s after the release of his most recognised single, The Thrill Is Gone, and that one gets possibly its finest live recorded rendition here.
After those two it’s worth going back to his very first long-form recordings, 1956’s ‘Singin' the Blues’ and 1958’s ‘The Blues’. B.B. King was a pretty well formed artist by the time he found himself playing in the big city and recording albums, and he’d been cutting singles for nearly a decade before his first proper album. So there was no awkward first steps. This pair work well as companion pieces, though ‘Singin' the Blues’ has more hits. His guitar isn’t quite as pronounced but his voice is superb, a little higher than it would become, and given every opportunity to thrive. King has said that Frank Sinatra was his favourite singer of all, and you can tell that here. The blues side of things is strong, but he certainly favours a hybrid ballad. The brass is heavy and his blues are revolutionarily urban. It’s a style he’d slowly transition out of over the next decade for a more soul-infused sound, and a lovely one in its own right.
If you go by Charles Sawyer’s biography of B.B. King, then B.B.’s personal favourite of his albums was ‘My Kind of Blues’, released in 1960. It’s a rare album from this period that was more than a collection of singles. He ditches the brass band for a more rudimental bass, drum, and piano backing, and the result is the kind of album he was never quite able to reproduce through the rest of the 60s. Not stacked in singles, but it’s a glorious opportunity for his guitar to really soar – probably Lucille’s finest moment of her grittier toned days.
In 1968, B.B. released The Thrill Is Gone and it changed the game for the great man. He captured the slow burn blues of contemporaries like Otis Rush and Buddy Guy (the like that Jimi Hendrix loved so much) and combined it with his own unique brilliance and a little Ray Charles Soul to boot. It remains his most impactful single and an incredible, incendiary piece of aural transcendence. After that song came out (released in album form on 1969’s ‘Completely Well’, a record that goes well with the previous year’s ‘Lucille’ – both fine products with wonderful moments but not exactly devoid of filler), he found himself aligned with adoring white rock musicians, sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse. He toured with the Stones, he won a Grammy, and producers started lining up to work with him.
That led to B.B. working with all-star musicians, which took him slightly further away from his deep blues roots towards a vaguely pop-ier direction. In the 1970s he did a bunch of more accessible stuff that wasn’t always on par with his best stuff, but makes a nice stepping in point. They were big label efforts too so they aren’t too hard to find. Albums like ‘L.A. Midnight’, ‘Guess Who’ and ‘Midnight Believer’ all have their moments, as do ‘There Must Be a Better World Somewhere’ (1981) and ‘There is Always One More Time’ (1991). But the best thing he did in that stretch of his career (aside from his stellar live duets with Bobby Bland) was ‘Indianola Mississippi Seeds’ in 1970. It’s the finest he ever was in the pop element, still finding a way to cut straight to your soul even in a glossier setting. But ‘Seeds’ was far from clean-cut. He jams and he wails. He plays to his own tempo. His version of Leon Russell’s Hummingbird is gorgeous.
Of his latter duet stuff, you can guess which tracks will be quality and which will be phoned in. The Rolling Stones, Van Morrison and Willie Nelson know how to match it with the best. John Mayer is completely out of his class, while some more idiosyncratic types just don’t mesh all that well (Billy Gibbons, Tracy Chapman and Joe Cocker, for example). He also did a record called ‘Blues Summit’ in the 90s which was all duets with other blues-folk that has some good stuff hidden in there too. ‘Blues on the Bayou’, a 1998 solo venture, is a solid listen – laid-back and self-produced. His Louis Jordan tribute is a joyous change of pace.
To be honest, there are sleepers buried all across the man’s discography. No album is short of that one redeeming track, and that’s not even to mention the various singles, guest appearances, compilations and scattered live albums he left behind. Case and point: one called ‘Live In Japan’ from the early 70s, not released in America ‘til over 20 years later, it has a version of Hummingbird with a solo that lifts you all the way to paradise. Or his guest appearance on Big K.R.I.T.’s Praying Man from his 2012 modern hip-hop classic ‘Live From The Underground’.
Any album that bears the name ‘B.B. King’ is worth a listen, because any album that bear that name will also bear three other things: His voice, his guitar and his beautiful spirit. The world is worse for having lost him but immeasurably better for ever having had him.
Thank you for the music, B.B.
5 Essential B.B. King Albums
- Live At The Regal (1965)
- Live At County Cook Jail (1971)
- Singing The Blues (1956)
- My Kind Of Blues (1961)
- Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970)