B.B. King

B.B. King was born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925, the son of a sharecropper in Indianola, Mississippi. His mother died while he was still a boy, and he was raised by his maternal grandmother, learning to sharecrop cotton fields in the same Mississippi Delta soil that shaped the blues tradition he would go on to carry to the rest of the world.^[1]

He earned his stage name working as a disc jockey on Memphis radio, where he was known on air as the "Beale Street Blues Boy," a nickname eventually shortened to B.B. It was during these Memphis years, in the early 1950s, that King first heard Roy Hawkins's original recording of "The Thrill Is Gone" and regularly played it as part of his own broadcast rotation, nearly two decades before he would record his own version of the song.^[1][2]

King's guitar, which he named Lucille and kept naming every instrument he owned afterward, took its name from a near-fatal fire at a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, in the winter of 1949. A fight between two men knocked over a barrel of burning kerosene used to heat the venue, and King ran back into the burning building to save his guitar, nearly losing his life in the process. He later learned the fight had broken out over a woman named Lucille, and he named the guitar after her, he said, as a reminder never to do anything so reckless again.^[3]

King spent two decades touring the segregated venues of the American South, earning deep respect within Black audiences but little recognition beyond them. That began to shift in the late 1960s, when promoter Bill Graham started booking him at the Fillmore alongside rock acts, and Eric Clapton began publicly naming King as his primary influence, introducing King's playing to a new generation of young, largely white listeners.^[4]

By 1969, that growing crossover recognition led the Rolling Stones to personally select King to open eighteen dates on their American tour. That same year, his album Completely Well and its single "The Thrill Is Gone" became his commercial breakthrough, earning him his first Grammy Award and permanently expanding his audience beyond the touring circuit that had sustained him for two decades.^[5]

King's personal life bore the cost of that relentless touring. He married twice, first to Martha Lee Denton in 1946 and later to Sue Carol Hall in 1958, and both marriages ended in divorce, undone in large part by a performing schedule that kept him on the road roughly two hundred fifty nights a year.^[6]