This story was originally published on Jan. 7, 1996. B.B. King passed away on May 14, 2015 at his home in Las Vegas. Read King's full obituary, see photos of his life through the years and see musicians' reactions to his death.
Tunica County, Miss. - When the King pulls those strings, the world swings. Right now, the King is bending strings in a hangar-sized concert hall in Tunica, bopping a thousand sweaty fans up and down like a collective yo-yo.
"Hey, everybody!" shouts the King, his polished black guitar riding up high on his formidable cummerbund.
"Yeah!" shouts the crowd.
"I mean everybody!" he shouts, cueing a quick punch from the horns.
"Yeah!"
"B.B. King's back in town!"
"YEAH!"
"So let the good times roll."
Riley B. King, 260 pounds and just shy of 6 feet tall, has another audience in his ham-sized hands. Those hands grab 250 audiences a year and shake them out of their seats with a show that is two parts Delta and three parts Las Vegas - gut-bucket funky and dinner-jacket slick.
While King shimmies and mugs and roars out the blues in a voice that could crack open the levees of Memphis 26 miles away and while the audience - lured away from the tables of Sam's Town Hotel and Gambling Hall to the concert hall in the rear - dances in the aisles, the furthest thing from anybody's mind is the fact that this performer has been eligible for Social Security since 1990.
No one supposes this is a septuagenarian hitting high notes on his guitar, Lucille, like a diamond blade cutting glass. Then, seven songs into the show, King's nephew, tenor saxophonist Walter King, brings out a chair. And B.B. King sits down.
"It's not that we're tired, " says King, wiping his sweaty brow with a towel and downing a pint of spring water. "It's just our way of reminiscing about 47 years on the road, trying to play the blues."
B.B. sits down? It really has been 47 years - and 74 albums, five Grammys, 62 countries (including pre-glasnost Russia), tea with the queen and three months of vacation, total.
But soon the show closer, "The Thrill Is Gone, " brings King and his audience back to their feet, and it's clear that time doesn't mean a thing to King's fans. "Oooh, yes, he looks good for his age, " says Deloris Brown, 35, of Tunica. "He just keeps getting better."
Kriste Cull, 40, drove down from Memphis to see the show, because "he's like Elvis now. He's 70 years old. It's time to go see him."
Says her husband, Tony Cull, "You look out here, you see 19-and 20- year-old guys. . . . "
"You also see 80-year-old women, " interrupts his wife. "I know, 'cause I ran into an 82-year-old woman here who's in my church group."
Tireless performer
If the King occasionally sits, he never rests. Just back in the States from a brief South American tour, he's putting on two shows this rainy night in Mississippi. Unfailingly polite, he'll sign autographs and greet friends, family, strangers and radio contest winners for hours afterward, before hustling back to his nominal home in Las Vegas for a short Christmas break. Then it's back on the road again.
King's tireless schedule, his familiar face and his constant exposure camouflage an important fact about this artist. He's more than just the King of the Blues - he is a giant, and a man whose career embraces the full breadth of American music. From sharecropper to superstar, from Delta blues to jump jazz to rock 'n' roll. Even sitting down, King towers above the arts landscape.
The Kennedy Center acknowledged this last month, honoring him for his contributions to society at a three-hour gala that had the unassuming bluesman sharing a stage with Sidney Poitier, Neil Simon and President Clinton, among others.
"I'm sitting next to the president and the first lady, " King said backstage, "and it's just an emotional thing for a guy from Indianola, Miss."
Indianola is 101 miles south of Tunica and light-years from Sam's Town. Born Sept. 16, 1925, between Indianola and Itta Bena, Riley B. King is the only surviving child (a sibling died in infancy) of sharecroppers Albert and Nora Ella King.
His parents separated when he was 4, and his mother died when he was 9, leaving him to live with his grandmother, Elnora Farr, in Kilmichael. He also lived briefly with his father and stepsiblings in Lexington, Miss., but the new stepson was the odd man out.
"I found I had three sisters and a brother and, again I must add, I still felt somewhat alone, " says King, in his preshow casual wear, an impeccable houndstooth jacket.
The young man married Martha Denton when he was 19 and graduated from picking cotton (at 35 cents per 100 pounds) to become a tractor driver.
But he'd set his sights elsewhere. Carrying his mail-order Stella guitar to Indianola and other nearby towns on weekends, he'd play on street corners. Though he was schooled in gospel music, King quickly discovered that a blues tune by T-Bone Walker or Ivory Joe Hunter earned the bigger tip.
Time was right
In 1948, his ambitions drew him up U.S. 61 to Memphis, and it couldn't have happened at a better time. Radio station WDIA was on the eve of becoming the first black-format station in the country and needed on-air talent. King was hired, partly because he was quick enough to compose, on the spot, a jingle for Pep-Ti-Kon, a new health tonic that the station had a stake in.
"The Beale Street Blues Boy" (later shortened to "B.B.") performed live on the air, spun records and promoted his performances in clubs around the city. Fellow WDIA disc jockey Rufus Thomas, later famous for "Walkin' the Dog, " was an emcee at a weekly talent show at the Palace Theater, where a much skinnier King won the $1 first prize week after week. "He needed it, " Thomas says today.
Pianist Ford Nelson often joined the band when King performed at gigs around Tennessee, Mississippi and Arkansas. "A lot of us knew more about chord structure than he did, " Nelson says, "but he had a work ethic that I admired. He believed in giving his sponsors 100 percent."
Nelson says the audiences were rough. "They would kid me, when we'd play these rural towns, about hiding behind the piano. Which literally was true: bottles would be flying. You get the picture."
In 1952, King's seventh single, "Three O'Clock Blues, " went to No. 1 on Billboard's R&B chart. "He just skyrocketed, " Nelson says. (Still childless, King also divorced his first wife that year.)
King's career took off in the '50s, but stalled in the '60s. Elvis Presley and rock 'n' roll took over, and the blues were considered old- fashioned, even by King's core black audience.
Several events in the late '60s helped change that. The Top 20 success of his 1969 tune "The Thrill Is Gone" earned him a spot on "The Tonight Show" - making him the first blues entertainer to appear there. King made his debut at rock venues such as the Fillmores West and East and signed with high-powered manager Sid Seidenberg. Stepping onto the stage at the Fillmore East in 1968, King was afforded a standing ovation before he played a note.
"The white kids have come to my rescue, man, " King told writer Stanley Booth in 1969.
From the late 1960s until today, King has moved too fast to become an institution. "I'd like anybody to try and keep up with him, " says blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan, who toured with King last summer, "because he's got the energy of 10 18-year-old guys."
His family life has suffered from his constant traveling. Married and divorced twice, King has sired eight children out of wedlock, all of whom he supports. He is putting seven grandchildren through college.
"Yes, I haven't been the best father, but nobody could love them as much as I have, nobody could have worked for them more than I have, " he says, his face clouding. "My children quite often say, 'We understand the work, but we want you here.' But when you grow up as I did, with nothing, you want to make things better for yourself, for your family."
The "family" that sees him most is his eight-man band, some of whom have been with him more than a decade (trumpeter James Bolden has seniority: 17 years).
Part, parcel of Memphis
Though King has lived in Las Vegas for two decades, you'd never know it visiting Memphis, where he is incorporated into that town's self- image. His name and image appear everywhere - at radio station WDIA; at Sun Studios, where he first recorded; at the Center for Southern Folklore; and on Beale Street's Walk of Fame.
The central shrine to the King is his own Beale Street nightspot, B.B. King's Blues Club, opened in 1991 and credited with spurring a revival of the once-vital blues boulevard.
Signed guitars are on the walls, along with photos of King with Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and many others. Onstage at the club one recent night, blues singer Ruby Wilson sings praises to the King. "Just think, " Wilson preaches, "if B.B. King was played in quadraphonic sound all the way around the world, North, South, West and East, 24 hours a day? There wouldn't be time for any hate!"
King repays the adulation. He used his 70th birthday party in Memphis to raise money for sickle-cell research. In February 1992, he brought his full band to Riverview Junior High in Memphis and gave a free concert in honor of black history month. "It was the thrill of my lifetime, " says teacher Jessie Rhoden. "He is black music history, himself."
When will King get a chance to rest on his laurels? He recently cut back his performance schedule but doesn't plan to stop touring anytime soon.
His explanation is pure economics. "I'm a blues player, and being a blues player, you're at the bottom of the totem pole."
There is no blues version of MTV, no blues on most commercial radio; any headway that he's made, King says, he's had to carve for himself. Until recently, he says, "a rock 'n' roll player would demand more money in one day than I could make in two or three weeks."
Friends suggest that King's longtime fondness for gambling has cut into his nest egg and kept him on the road. "Some habits can keep you working forever, " says Memphis arranger Emerson Able, who once wrote charts for King's band.
King disagrees, but after his shows at Sam's Town, he jokes about his gambling while chatting with visitors backstage. "If you don't leave, I'll probably come into the casino after a while, " he advises them. "I've got two chandeliers out there that I have to make some payments on."
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