The story of B.B. King

A Delta childhood

Riley B. King was born on the sixteenth of September 1925, in a sharecropper's cabin by Bear Creek near Berclair, Mississippi, not far from the little town of Itta Bena. His parents, Albert and Nora Ella King, worked the cotton on shares. The family did not hold together for long. When Riley was about four, his mother left his father, and much of his early raising fell to his grandmother, Elnora Farr, up in the hill country around Kilmichael. In King's own telling, his mother went blind and died when he was only nine years old, and she was just twenty seven. He said that from nine until about fourteen he largely looked after himself, an only child working the land to get by.[1] [2] [3]

He was working like a grown man by the age of seven, chopping cotton and baling hay. In Kilmichael he became what locals called a house boy for a farmer named Flake Cartledge, milking twenty cows a day, ten in the morning and ten at night. His pay was fifteen dollars a month. When Riley wanted a guitar, Cartledge bought him one for fifteen dollars and took the money back out of his wages over two months. School came after chores. He walked five miles each way to a one room schoolhouse, where a teacher named Luther Henson told the children they would one day be judged by their deeds. Riley made it through the tenth grade. By one account, he did not see a light bulb until he was sixteen.[1] [2] [3]

Music first reached him through the church. He sang in the choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church in Kilmichael, but he was drawn to the Pentecostal Church of God in Christ, where the minister played a Sears Roebuck Silvertone guitar during services and taught the boy his first three chords. Riley dreamed of being a gospel singer, maybe even a preacher. He ordered guitar instruction books by a writer named Nick Manoloff from the Sears catalogue and studied them closely, which is how he learned to tune and even to read a little music. Then in November 1941 a radio show called King Biscuit Time began broadcasting live Delta blues from Helena, Arkansas. Riley listened on his lunch break, and he decided he wanted to be a radio musician.[1] [2] [3]

In 1943 he moved down to Indianola, the Delta town he would always call home, and went to work driving a tractor. He was proud of it. Years later he joked that he was a superstar tractor driver, earning twenty two dollars and fifty cents a week, good money next to the cents per hundred pounds paid for picking cotton. On Saturdays he sat on street corners with his guitar and a hat for tips, choosing a corner where both black and white passersby had to walk. He also sang with the Famous St. John's Gospel Singers, who performed in churches and on WGRM radio in Greenwood. When the Army drafted him during the Second World War, he was released because his tractor work was ruled essential to the war economy.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Memphis and the Beale Street Blues Boy

Riley made his first move to Memphis in 1946. He went to stay with his cousin Bukka White, a well known country blues guitarist whose mother was the sister of Riley's grandmother. White put him up for about ten months and helped him find work at the Newberry Equipment Company, where White built storage tanks. Memphis dazzled and humbled him. He later said that in Handy Park, just off Beale Street, the musicians were like a community college on the street, and he realized he was not nearly as good as he had thought back home. So he went back to Mississippi to work and practice. When he came north again around 1948, he was ready.[1] [2] [3] [4]

This time he started across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas. He got a spot on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program on KWEM, and that led to steady work at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill. Then came WDIA in Memphis, a station that had just switched to a format aimed entirely at black listeners, the first of its kind in the South. King got a short daily spot plugging a patent tonic called Pep Ti Kon, and it grew so popular that it became a longer show called the Sepia Swing Club. He also worked as a disc jockey. The station billed him as the Beale Street Blues Boy, which shrank to Blues Boy, and finally to just B.B.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Around Beale Street he fell in with a loose circle of young players known as the Beale Streeters, among them Bobby Bland, Johnny Ace, Rosco Gordon and Earl Forest. They sat in on each other's gigs and records. At WDIA he met his hero, T Bone Walker, whose electric guitar had hit him like a revelation. King said that once he heard Walker, he simply had to have an electric guitar himself. In November 1946 he had married Martha Lee Denton. In 1949 he cut his first record, for the Bullet label out of Nashville. The single was called Miss Martha King, named for his wife, and it featured a small band with horns and a young Phineas Newborn on piano. It did not chart.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

One winter night in 1949, King was playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas. The room was heated by a barrel half full of burning kerosene in the middle of the floor. Two men started fighting, knocked the barrel over, and burning fuel spread across the floor. Everyone ran outside, King included. Then he realized his guitar was still inside, and he ran back into the burning building to get it. The next day he learned the two men had been fighting over a woman who worked there, named Lucille. He named that guitar Lucille, and every guitar after it, as a reminder never again to run into a burning building or fight over a woman. He later said the first Lucille was a little black Gibson acoustic fitted with a pickup.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The door to a real record career opened through Ike Turner, then a teenage talent scout for the Bihari brothers of Los Angeles, who owned Modern Records and its offshoot RPM. Both King and Joe Bihari said it was Turner who brought him to their attention. King signed with RPM and began recording in Memphis, where Sam Phillips, the man who would soon found Sun Records, produced many of his early sides. King put together his own band, the B.B. King Review, led by Millard Lee, and hired a trained arranger named Onzie Horne to help with the writing. King was frank about his limits. He admitted he could not play chords well and always relied on improvising single note lines.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Three O'Clock Blues and the chitlin circuit

The breakthrough came with a song by Lowell Fulson called Three O'Clock Blues. King recorded it for RPM around September 1951, in a makeshift studio set up in a room at the Memphis YMCA, with Ike Turner on piano and a horn section behind him. The sound was rougher than the Sam Phillips sessions, but something clicked, the way his voice and guitar answered each other. RPM released it in December 1951. By early 1952 it had reached number one on Billboard's rhythm and blues chart, where it stayed for five weeks. Almost overnight his weekly earnings jumped from about eighty five dollars to around two thousand five hundred, and he was booked into the Howard Theater in Washington and the Apollo in New York.[1] [2] [3] [4]

A long run of hits followed through the fifties, including You Know I Love You, Woke Up This Morning, Please Love Me, You Upset Me Baby and Sweet Little Angel. In 1955 he recorded Every Day I Have the Blues with the arranger Maxwell Davis, whose relaxed, crisp charts King loved so much that he made the song his theme. It was cut at Capitol's old studio in Hollywood, and Joe Bihari recalled that they plugged King's guitar straight into the mixing board, which gave it a different sound. King kept his WDIA show going from 1949 to about 1955, driving as far as he could and still getting back for the next broadcast, before he gave it up to tour full time.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The road became his life. In 1955 he bought an old bus the band called Big Red, and in 1956 he played three hundred and forty two one night stands, taking just fourteen days off in a leap year. His guarantee, he recalled, was about two hundred and fifty dollars a night. That same year he started his own small label, Blues Boys Kingdom, based on Beale Street, where he produced local acts. He worked the chitlin circuit, the network of black owned clubs, dance halls and theaters across the segregated South and the cities of the North. In 1957 the Biharis gathered his hits onto his first album, Singin' the Blues, on their budget label Crown.[1] [2] [3] [4]

There was a darker side to those early records. The Bihari brothers often added themselves as co writers on songs they had not written, under invented names. Jules Bihari appeared as Jules Taub, Joe as Joe Josea, and Saul as Sam Ling. That way the company collected half the songwriting money. King said plainly that there was no such person as Ling or Josea, and that he only learned later what had been done with his songs. Looking at the credits of his early classics, the names are right there beside his own. He stayed with the Biharis' labels until the early sixties, and he later said that at least the brothers were always accessible and would talk to him.[1] [2] [3]

In 1958 disaster struck. King had played Monroe, Louisiana, and his bus left for Dallas without him. On a rainy Texas bridge the driver swerved to avoid a car, hit the barrier, and bounced into the path of an oncoming butane gas truck. The front of Big Red burned away. A man was killed and another badly burned, though King's own musicians survived. On that very day, King said, a letter arrived telling him his insurance had been terminated. He was sued, and the claim was settled at around a million dollars, which took him years to pay off. That same year he married again, to Sue Carol Hall, in a ceremony performed by the Reverend C.L. Franklin, father of Aretha Franklin.[1] [2] [3]

ABC, the Regal and a new audience

In 1962 King left the Biharis and signed with ABC Paramount, a major label. It was a tricky time. Young black listeners were turning toward soul music and the new Motown sound, and his original fans were getting older. The Biharis kept releasing his older recordings on their Kent label, including the 1964 hit Rock Me Baby, so his old and new records competed with each other. King kept doing what he always did, which was to play almost every night. He later described blues players as being stuck at the bottom of the totem pole, earning far less than rock and roll or jazz acts, and relying on constant touring to keep a band on salary.[1] [2] [3] [4]

On the twenty first of November 1964 he recorded a show at the Regal Theater in Chicago, a room he said he had played hundreds of times. His band that night included Sonny Freeman on drums, Leo Lauchie on bass, Kenny Sands on trumpet, Johnny Board and Bobby Forte on saxophones, and Duke Jethro on piano. Jethro was meant to play organ, but it broke. When he protested that he did not really play piano, King told him to just sit there and pretend, which he said was what Jethro did most of the time anyway. The album, Live at the Regal, came out in 1965. In 2005 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.[1] [2] [3]

Meanwhile a new audience was forming across the Atlantic. British players such as Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Peter Green were studying American blues records, and King's name kept coming up. He called it the British bands reimporting the blues, making Americans notice music that had been in their own backyard all along. He also broadened his act, adding horns until the group felt like a small big band, which got him into rooms like Mister Kelly's in Chicago, a club that had never booked blues before. And he credited Frank Sinatra, his favorite singer, with arranging for him to play the main clubs in Las Vegas at a time when those rooms were largely closed to black entertainers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

His second marriage ended in 1966. King blamed both divorces on the relentless demands of the road, often two hundred and fifty shows a year. In the late sixties a new manager, Sid Seidenberg, an accountant by training, began steering him toward rock venues. The turning point came in San Francisco, when promoter Bill Graham booked him at the Fillmore. King saw long haired young white fans packed onto the stairs and assumed there had been a booking mistake. Graham introduced him simply as the Chairman of the Board, and the crowd rose to its feet before he had played a note. King said he stood on stage and cried. In 1967 he also jammed in New York with a young Eric Clapton, then in Cream.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The Thrill Is Gone

At ABC a young producer named Bill Szymczyk, a former Navy sonar operator with no background as a musician, took a pay cut to move from engineering into producing, and lobbied to work with King, his longtime idol. He convinced King he could widen his audience. Their first project, Live and Well, came out in 1969, with one side recorded live at the Village Gate in New York and the other in the studio at the Hit Factory with top session players. It became King's first album ever to reach the top one hundred. Szymczyk went on to produce the Eagles and Joe Walsh, but King gave him his first real hit.[1] [2] [3]

In June 1969 they recorded Completely Well, and on it was a slow minor key blues called The Thrill Is Gone. It had been written in 1951 by Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell, and Hawkins had a modest hit with it. At Szymczyk's suggestion, strings were added, arranged by Bert DeCoteaux, which was a big departure for a blues record. The single came out in December 1969. It climbed to number three on the soul chart and number fifteen on the Billboard Hot 100, the highest pop placing of King's career. The album reached number thirty eight, his first top forty album. The song won him his first Grammy, for Best Male R and B Vocal Performance, and became his signature.[1] [2] [3] [4]

That same year the Rolling Stones invited King to open their 1969 American tour, putting him in front of huge rock crowds night after night. He also played the Harlem Cultural Festival that summer, a series of free concerts in Mount Morris Park that later became the subject of the 2021 documentary Summer of Soul. On the second of May 1970 he made his debut at Carnegie Hall. Later in 1970 came Indianola Mississippi Seeds, named for his hometown, with Carole King, Leon Russell and Joe Walsh among the guests, and a hit version of Russell's Hummingbird. King himself said that despite what critics wrote about the live albums, this was the best record he ever made artistically.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the tenth of September 1970, King played Cook County Jail in Chicago. The warden, Winston Moore, had asked him after a show at Mister Kelly's. More than two thousand prisoners filled a courtyard, and when jail officials were introduced the crowd booed loudly. The jail hired extra security for the day, mostly retired boxers. King played mostly his old slow blues, plus The Thrill Is Gone. Released in January 1971, Live in Cook County Jail became his only album to top the R and B chart. Press coverage exposed how long many inmates had waited for trial, which led to some changes. King went on to play more than fifty prisons, and in 1972 he helped found a prison reform foundation with the attorney F. Lee Bailey.[1] [2] [3]

Ambassador of the blues

Through the seventies King chased both audiences at once. In June 1971 he recorded the album B.B. King in London, with Ringo Starr among the musicians in the studio. On the soul side he cut To Know You Is to Love You, written by Stevie Wonder and Syreeta Wright, with Wonder himself on the record. He also teamed up with his old Beale Street friend Bobby Bland for two live albums, Together for the First Time in 1974 and Together Again in 1976. The critic Mark Anthony Neal has argued these soul flavored records were an attempt to win back young black listeners who were drifting away from the blues, even as white rock fans were discovering it.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In September 1974 King flew to Kinshasa for Zaire 74, a three night music festival staged to promote the heavyweight fight between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman, known as the Rumble in the Jungle. He shared the bill with James Brown, Bill Withers, the Spinners, Celia Cruz and Miriam Makeba, among others. His set later appeared in the documentary Soul Power and in full as B.B. King Live in Africa. That same year he played the Konserthuset in Stockholm. In 1978 he made Midnight Believer with the jazz funk band the Crusaders, built on songs by Will Jennings and Joe Sample, and it gave him an R and B hit with Never Make a Move Too Soon.[1] [2] [3] [4]

King was taking the blues to places it had rarely gone. In 1979 he toured the Soviet Union, and he remembered a vast Moscow hotel where attendants watched every floor and a request for coffee seemed to be overheard by someone who promptly knocked on the door. Honors started piling up, including honorary doctorates from Tougaloo College in 1973 and Yale in 1977, and a place in the first class of the Blues Hall of Fame in 1980. Back home there were old wounds. Through the sixties and seventies he avoided Indianola, angry that his band had been refused service in segregated restaurants and motels there. In the eighties, white and black residents began organizing homecoming shows for him together.[1] [2] [3]

In 1980 Gibson launched the B.B. King Lucille, a guitar based on its ES 355 but with no f holes on the top, at King's request, to cut down on feedback. He kept picking up Grammys through the decade, and in 1985 he sang the title song for the film Into the Night and made a cameo in Spies Like Us. He played Live Aid and the first Farm Aid, and from the mid eighties he became a familiar face in McDonald's commercials. In 1987 he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. By then he was a regular on television, from The Tonight Show to Sesame Street.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Love comes to town

In late 1987 U2 were touring America and exploring its roots music. On the twenty fourth of November 1987 in Fort Worth, Texas, King joined them on stage for the first performance of a new song, When Love Comes to Town. They recorded it at Sun Studio in Memphis, and it appeared on Rattle and Hum in October 1988. Released as a single in 1989, it went to number one in Ireland and number six in the United Kingdom, and it was King's last entry on the Billboard Hot 100. He then toured with U2 on the Lovetown Tour, joining them for the song at forty six of its forty seven shows. It introduced him to millions of young rock fans when he was in his sixties.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In 1990 King was diagnosed with diabetes, and he later became a public spokesman for people living with the disease. That same year he received the National Medal of Arts, followed in 1991 by a National Heritage Fellowship. His 1990 album Live at San Quentin, recorded at the California prison, won a Grammy. Also in 1991, the Beale Street developer John Elkington recruited him to open B.B. King's Blues Club in Memphis, on the street that gave him his name. Clubs followed in Los Angeles in 1994 and Times Square in New York in 2000, among others. In 1993 his duets album Blues Summit, with guests such as John Lee Hooker, Etta James and Buddy Guy, won another Grammy.[1] [2] [3] [4]

King had a surprising passion. He was a licensed private pilot who learned to fly in 1963 at an airport in Lansing, Illinois, and he often flew himself to gigs. In 1995, when he was about seventy, his insurers and his manager asked him to fly only with another certified pilot, so he gave it up. That December he received the Kennedy Center Honors. In 1996 he published his autobiography, Blues All Around Me, written with David Ritz. In December 1997 he played the Vatican's Christmas concert and presented one of his Lucilles to Pope John Paul the Second. The same year brought Deuces Wild, a duets album with guests from Van Morrison and Tracy Chapman to the Rolling Stones, Willie Nelson and D'Angelo.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Eric Clapton had wanted to make an album with King for decades. In 2000 it finally happened. Riding with the King paired a fifty five year old Clapton with a seventy four year old King, mixing vintage King songs like Ten Long Years and Three O'Clock Blues with blues standards and a title track by John Hiatt. Clapton chose the songs and co produced, but he gave King the spotlight. The cover shows Clapton at the wheel of a vintage Cadillac convertible with King riding along. It won the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album and went double platinum in the United States. King said of Clapton that he was number one in rock and roll as a guitarist, and number one as a person.[1] [2] [3]

In May 2004 King traveled to Stockholm to receive the Polar Music Prize, sharing it that year with the composer Gyorgy Ligeti. Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin read the citation, and King Carl the Sixteenth Gustaf of Sweden presented the prize. King called it the highlight of his career. For his eightieth birthday in 2005 came the album B.B. King and Friends, simply titled 80, with duets featuring Van Morrison, Sheryl Crow, Elton John, Mark Knopfler, Gloria Estefan and his old friend Bobby Bland. It won yet another Grammy. Gibson marked the occasion with a special run of eighty Lucille guitars and gave him the first prototype, which became his main guitar.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The long goodbye

In 2006 King set out on what was billed as a farewell world tour, partly supported by the Northern Irish guitarist Gary Moore. At the Montreux Jazz Festival in July, a place he had played for more than twenty years, he sat through a two and a half hour show and was joined by Gladys Knight, John McLaughlin, Stanley Clarke, Joe Sample and others. He told the crowd his knees and back hurt, and joked that maybe he should quit every night. The festival's founder, Claude Nobs, told him he was an honorary citizen of Montreux. The farewell did not really stick. That December, President George W. Bush gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and he kept on touring.[1] [2] [3]

On the thirteenth of September 2008, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center opened in Indianola. It was built around a brick cotton gin where King had worked as a young man, with exhibits on sharecropping, the Jim Crow era and the civil rights movement as well as his own life. That August he had released his final studio album, One Kind Favor, produced by T Bone Burnett, who liked the sound of King's fifties records. It was stripped down, with two drummers, Jim Keltner and Jay Bellerose, and three songs once recorded by his idol Lonnie Johnson. It won the Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album, and it was widely hailed as one of the strongest records of his career.[1] [2] [3] [4]

In the summer of 2009 his main guitar, the eightieth birthday Lucille, was stolen. It was traced through a Las Vegas pawnshop and returned to him in late November. In 2011, at eighty five, he played the living legend slot on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury, seated, clearly enjoying himself. On the twenty first of February 2012 he performed at the White House in a PBS concert called Red, White and Blues. After some encouragement from King, President Barack Obama took the microphone and sang a few lines of Sweet Home Chicago. Later that year came the documentary B.B. King, The Life of Riley, directed by Jon Brewer and narrated by Morgan Freeman.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

King was still touring into his late eighties. On the third of October 2014, after a show at the House of Blues in Chicago, a doctor found he was suffering from dehydration and exhaustion, and the last eight dates of the tour were cancelled. That Chicago show turned out to be his final concert. In April 2015 he spent several days in hospital, and on the first of May a message on his website said he was in home hospice care in Las Vegas. His old friend Buddy Guy later said he had tried to visit and was turned away. B.B. King died in his sleep at home on the fourteenth of May 2015, at the age of eighty nine.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

His physician and the county coroner said the cause of death was vascular dementia, also called multi infarct dementia, the result of a series of small strokes linked to his type two diabetes. Tributes poured in from around the world. Buddy Guy said there might not have been a Buddy Guy without B.B. King, and called him the greatest guitar player who ever lived. He added that modern players push a button for special effects, but King's special effect was his left hand, meaning that trembling vibrato no machine could copy. President Obama, Eric Clapton and Morgan Freeman were among those who mourned him publicly. But within days, grief turned into a bitter family dispute.[1] [2] [3]

After the thrill

About ten days after his death, two of King's daughters, Patty King and Karen Williams, filed identical affidavits accusing his business manager, LaVerne Toney, and his personal assistant, Myron Johnson, of poisoning him. They claimed the two had given him substances to induce diabetic shock, and that he had been kept away from family in his final week. Earlier that year the same daughters and a third, Rita Washington, had accused Toney of elder abuse, but a judge had thrown the case out for lack of evidence. Toney's lawyer, Brent Bryson, called the poisoning claims ridiculous and said the dispute was about money. Nevada officials ordered an autopsy before the funeral.[1] [2] [3]

In July 2015 the Clark County coroner, John Fudenberg, released his findings. There was no evidence of poisoning, and King had died of natural causes. Fudenberg named Alzheimer's disease as the primary contributing factor, with type two diabetes, heart disease, congestive heart failure, high blood pressure and cerebral vascular disease as significant contributing factors. The estate's lawyer said King's body had been put through a needless autopsy based on fictional claims, and that Toney and Johnson were glad to be cleared. The daughters' attorney said her clients would keep scrutinizing how their father had been cared for, and how Toney handled his affairs.[1] [2] [3]

King had asked to go home to Mississippi. On the twenty seventh of May 2015 his body was flown to Memphis, and a funeral procession moved down Beale Street behind a brass band playing When the Saints Go Marching In, with thousands lining the street. Then he was driven down Highway 61 to Indianola. More than four thousand people filed past his open casket at the museum, where he lay in a purple satin shirt and floral tuxedo jacket, with an image of Lucille embroidered inside the lid. The funeral was held on the thirtieth of May at Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church, on B.B. King Road. A letter from President Obama said there would be one killer blues session in heaven that night.[1] [2] [3] [4]

He was buried in the memorial garden at the museum in Indianola. His drummer of thirty seven years, Tony Coleman, said King never called himself the King of the Blues. As Coleman put it, King felt the blues itself was the king, and that it was his job to keep it that way. The fight over his estate went on. It was reported that in May 2016 his eleven surviving children went to court against his appointed trustee over an estate estimated at thirty to forty million dollars. Myron Johnson filed a defamation suit against family members who had accused him, including his own sister, Karen Williams. Other claims over his music estate followed.[1] [2] [3]

His story kept growing after him. At his funeral, former band members told the filmmaker Jon Brewer that his documentary had missed their life on the road, so Brewer made a second film, B.B. King, On the Road. In 2019 Google marked his birthday with an animated Doodle made with the B.B. King Museum. His 1969 Harlem set reappeared in Summer of Soul in 2021, and Rolling Stone ranked him the eighth greatest guitarist of all time in 2023. In September 2025 fans marked a hundred years since his birth, and his estate celebrated the centennial. As of 2026, his SiriusXM channel, B.B. King's Bluesville, still carries his name.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The people around B.B. King

B.B. King and Bukka White. Bukka White was a first cousin of King's mother, and one of the few people in the family who had made a name as a blues singer. When young Riley reached Memphis, White took him in for about ten months and helped him get a job at the tank factory where he worked. King always credited him with one lasting lesson, to dress for every show as if you were going to the bank to borrow money.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and T-Bone Walker. T Bone Walker was the guitarist who changed everything for King. Hearing Walker's electric guitar convinced him he had to have one himself. In his autobiography King said that on first hearing Walker he thought Jesus himself had returned playing electric guitar, called himself Walker's disciple, and said his biggest musical debt was to T Bone. He even bought a big three pickup Gibson because his idol played one.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and Ike Turner. A teenage talent scout for the Bihari brothers, Ike Turner connected King with the label that made his name, and he played piano on King's first two number ones. King in turn helped Turner's band find steady work and recommended them to Sam Phillips. King called Turner the best bandleader he had ever seen and one of the founding fathers of rock and roll.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and The Bihari brothers. Jules, Saul, Joe and Lester Bihari ran Modern Records and its RPM and Kent labels, home to King's classic fifties hits. King said they were always accessible. But they also added invented co writers such as Jules Taub, Joe Josea and Sam Ling to his songs, taking half the publishing money. King said bluntly that there was no such person as Ling or Josea.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and Bobby Bland. Bobby Bland came up alongside King among the Beale Streeters in late forties Memphis. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame called Bland second in stature only to King as a product of the Beale Street scene. The two made the live albums Together for the First Time in 1974 and Together Again in 1976, toured together for decades, and reunited on King's eightieth birthday album in 2005.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and Sid Seidenberg. Sid Seidenberg, a certified public accountant, became King's manager in the late sixties and pushed him into rock venues just as British guitarists were singing his praises. The partnership lasted more than three decades. King said Seidenberg's early investments meant he no longer had to work, and joked that Sid would give him a dollar if he asked for one but expected any loan to be paid back.[1] [2]

B.B. King and Eric Clapton. Eric Clapton first jammed with King in New York in 1967, when Clapton was twenty two and playing in Cream. He had long wanted to make an album with his hero, and finally did in 2000 with Riding with the King, which won a Grammy and went double platinum. King called Clapton number one in rock and roll as a guitarist and as a person. The two played together at Clapton's Crossroads festivals.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and U2. King joined U2 on stage in Fort Worth in November 1987 to debut When Love Comes to Town, then recorded it with them at Sun Studio for Rattle and Hum. He toured with them on the Lovetown Tour of 1989. The band later felt their roots detour had become a dead end, but King kept the song in his own shows, and U2 played it in tribute the night after he died.[1] [2]

B.B. King and Albert King. Albert King, born Albert Nelson, borrowed B.B.'s surname, his Blues Boy nickname and even named his guitar Lucy, while claiming to be his brother. B.B. was annoyed at first, then warmed to him. Together with Freddie King, the unrelated pair became known as the Three Kings of the Blues. When Albert died in 1992, he was planning a tour with B.B. and Bobby Bland.[1] [2] [3]

B.B. King and Martha Lee Denton and Sue Carol Hall. King married Martha Lee Denton in 1946, and his very first single, Miss Martha King, carried her name. They divorced in 1952 as his career took off. In 1958 he married Sue Carol Hall in a ceremony performed by the Reverend C.L. Franklin, and they divorced in 1966. King blamed both breakups on constant touring. Neither marriage produced children.[1] [2] [3] [4]

B.B. King and LaVerne Toney and Myron Johnson. LaVerne Toney, his longtime business manager, and Myron Johnson, his personal assistant, were closest to King at the end. Some of his daughters accused them of elder abuse and later of poisoning him. A judge dismissed the abuse case, and the coroner found no poisoning. Buddy Guy said that in King's final weeks Toney would not let him visit. Toney went on to administer the estate.[1] [2] [3] [4]

B.B. King and Frank Sinatra. Frank Sinatra was King's favorite singer. King called himself a Sinatra nut and said he fell asleep most nights to the album In the Wee Small Hours. In the sixties Sinatra arranged for King to play the main rooms in Las Vegas, and King credited him with opening doors for black entertainers who were being kept out of white venues.[1] [2]

Rare facts about B.B. King

• He learned to fly in 1963 and often piloted himself to gigs. King was a licensed private pilot who learned to fly in 1963 at an airport in Lansing, Illinois. He flew himself to shows until 1995, when his insurers and manager asked him to fly only with another certified pilot.[1] [2]
• In 1956 he played three hundred and forty two one night stands. In 1956 King and his band played three hundred and forty two one night stands, taking just fourteen days off in a leap year.[1] [2]
• He said he could not sing and play guitar at the same time. King never played guitar and sang simultaneously. He gave his full attention to one or the other, which created his famous call and response between voice and Lucille.[1] [2]
• His first single was named after his first wife. King's debut single in 1949, recorded for the Bullet label in Nashville, was called Miss Martha King, after his wife Martha Lee Denton. It did not chart.[1] [2]
• Three O'Clock Blues was recorded in a room at the Memphis YMCA. His breakthrough hit was cut around September 1951 in an improvised studio set up in a room at the Memphis YMCA, with Ike Turner playing piano.[1] [2]
• Tina Turner first sang with Ike Turner's band on a B.B. King song. In 1956 a young Ann Bullock grabbed the microphone during an intermission at an East St. Louis club and sang King's You Know I Love You. Ike Turner was so impressed he invited her to sing with his band.[1]
• Freddie King was rejected by Chess Records for sounding too much like B.B. When Freddie King auditioned for Chess Records in Chicago, he was repeatedly turned down. The complaint was that he sang too much like B.B. King.[1]
• His WDIA show was sponsored by a patent tonic called Pep Ti Kon. When King joined WDIA in early 1949, his daily fifteen minute show promoted a patent medicine called Pep Ti Kon, and later Lucky Strike cigarettes, the station's first major advertiser.[1]
• Johnny Ace took over King's WDIA radio show. When King left for the road, fellow Beale Streeter Johnny Ace took over his WDIA show. Ace died on Christmas Day 1954 after accidentally shooting himself backstage in Houston.[1]
• His guitar was plugged straight into the mixing desk on Every Day I Have the Blues. For the 1955 recording of Every Day I Have the Blues, Joe Bihari said they jacked King's guitar straight into the board instead of miking his amp, which made it sound a little different.[1]
• The 1958 bus crash left him with a lawsuit of around a million dollars. In 1958 his bus Big Red hit a butane truck on a Texas bridge, killing a man. King's insurance had been cancelled that same day, and he spent years paying off a settlement of around a million dollars.[1]
• Aretha Franklin's father married him to his second wife. King's 1958 wedding to Sue Carol Hall was officiated by the Reverend C.L. Franklin, the Detroit preacher and father of Aretha Franklin.[1]
• Lucille has no f holes because King asked Gibson to remove them. When Gibson launched the B.B. King Lucille model in 1980, King asked for the f holes to be left off the top to reduce feedback. He also had fine tuners and a varitone he never used.[1] [2]
• His favorite amplifier was a solid state Lab Series amp. King fell in love with a Lab Series amp made for Gibson in the seventies and eighties, saying its sound sat right between the old Fender tube amps and the Fender Twin.[1] [2]
• He gave one of his Lucilles to Pope John Paul the Second. After playing the Vatican's Christmas concert in December 1997, King presented one of his trademark Lucille guitars to Pope John Paul the Second.[1]
• His eightieth birthday Lucille was stolen and turned up at a pawnshop. Gibson gave King the first of eighty special eightieth birthday Lucilles in 2005. It was stolen in the summer of 2009, traced through a Las Vegas pawnshop, and returned that November.[1]
• Live at the Regal's pianist was told to just pretend. At the 1964 Regal show, Duke Jethro's organ broke, so King told him to play piano. When Jethro protested, King told him to sit there and pretend, which was what he did most of the time anyway.[1]
• Cook County Jail officials hired retired boxers as extra security. For King's 1970 concert before more than two thousand inmates, officials at Cook County Jail brought in extra security, mostly retired boxers. The crowd loudly booed the jail administrators.[1]
• One of his own daughters was in the audience at a prison concert. King's daughter Patty was among the inmates when he played a correctional facility in Gainesville, Florida.[1]
• The Indianola Mississippi Seeds album package won a Grammy. The 1970 album's package, which reproduced what looks like King's birth certificate, won the Grammy for best album package for designer Robert Lockart and photographer Ivan Nagy.[1]
• He learned guitar partly from mail order books in the Sears catalogue. As a boy King ordered guitar instruction books by Nick Manoloff from the Sears Roebuck catalogue. They taught him to tune the guitar and to read music a little.[1]
• He donated thousands of his records to the University of Mississippi. King was a lifelong record collector. He said he once gave three or four thousand vinyl records to Ole Miss, then built up another collection just as large.[1]
• His favorite song of all time was a Willie Nelson song. Asked in an interview about his all time favorite song, King named Always on My Mind, the song made famous by Willie Nelson, and he recorded it himself.[1]
• He avoided his hometown for years because of segregation. In the sixties and seventies King stayed away from Indianola, angry that his band had been refused service at local restaurants and motels. The segregationist White Citizens Council had been founded there.[1]
• Jimmy Page read his Polar Music Prize citation. At the 2004 Polar Music Prize ceremony in Stockholm, Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page read the citation for King, and King Carl the Sixteenth Gustaf of Sweden handed him the prize.[1]
• A PBS children's show had a lion character based on him. In 2000 the PBS children's show Between the Lions featured a singing character called B.B. the King of Beasts, modeled on King.[1]
• He sang One Shoe Blues with sock puppets for a children's album. In 2007 King recorded One Shoe Blues for Sandra Boynton's children's album Blue Moo, with a music video starring a pair of sock puppets.[1]
• He encouraged President Obama to sing at the White House. At the 2012 Red, White and Blues concert, after encouragement from King, Barack Obama took the microphone from Mick Jagger and sang a few lines of Sweet Home Chicago.[1]
• His casket had Lucille embroidered inside the lid. At his 2015 funeral, the padded white lining inside King's casket lid bore an embroidered image of his guitar Lucille.[1] [2]
• Two of his daughters have recording careers of their own. Music databases list the singers Shirley King and Claudette King as his daughters. Shirley, from the Chicago area, said she was upset she never got to see him before he died.[1] [2]
• He sang on a Duke Ellington album in 1970. King contributed vocals to Don't Get Around Much Anymore on the 1970 album Stereophonic Duke Ellington.[1]
• He was dubbed the Mayor of Bluesville on satellite radio. SiriusXM's blues channel was renamed B.B. King's Bluesville in 2008. Program director Bill Wax called King the Mayor of Bluesville, and King hosted a weekly show on it.[1]
• He said he still had stage fright in his late seventies. In an interview at seventy eight, King admitted he still suffered from stage fright, and said he never thought he was any better than his last show.[1]
• A second documentary exists because his old band felt left out. At King's funeral, former band members told director Jon Brewer his first film had ignored life on the road. Brewer then made B.B. King, On the Road, with musicians telling stories aboard his tour bus.[1]
• Peter Green was the white British guitarist who could make him sweat. King once said Peter Green was a player who could make him sweat, and later insisted he meant it as praise for a great player, not for a white one.[1]
• The Cadillac on the Riding with the King cover was picked because it was for sale. The cover of Riding with the King shows Eric Clapton driving King in a vintage Cadillac convertible. Clapton noticed the car because it happened to be on sale, and the shot was taken on the Warner Brothers backlot.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.