Riley B. King (September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015), known professionally as B.B. King, was an American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and record producer who was the most influential blues musician of his generation and the music’s most potent symbol. He represented the blues as Louis Armstrong once represented jazz, a single performer who could nevertheless stand, and speak, for the whole genre.
Son of Albert and Nora Ella, Riley B King was born near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and grew up with the limited prospects of an African-American agricultural worker, a barrier he gradually worked to overcome as he learned the basics of guitar from a family friend and honed his singing with a quartet, the St John Gospel Singers of Indianola. In his early 20s he moved to Memphis, at first staying with the blues singer and guitarist Booker White, his cousin.Within a couple of years, thanks to some help from Sonny Boy Williamson, he had secured a residency at the Sixteenth Street Grill in West Memphis, Arkansas. He also became a disc jockey, presenting a show on the Memphis radio station WDIA. His billing, “The Beale Street Blues Boy”, was whittled down to “Blues Boy King” and thence to “BB”. After a single session in 1949 for the Nashville label Bullet, King began recording for the West Coast-based Modern Records in 1950.
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He had his first hit in 1952, with a dramatic rearrangement of Lowell Fulson’s Three O’Clock Blues, which topped the R&B chart for 15 weeks; it headed a list of successes such as Please
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Love Me, You Upset Me Baby, Ten Long Years, Sweet Little Angel and Sweet Sixteen. On these and his dozens of other recordings, most of them his own compositions, King developed a style that was both innovative and rooted in blues history.
Throughout the 1950s, King was the leading blues artist on the circuit of black-patronised theatres and clubs, wearing out buses, if not bandsmen, on interminable series of one-nighters. In 1956 he is supposed to have filled 342 engagements. He ventured to change that working pattern in 1962, rather like Ray Charles, by signing with a major label, ABC, but the first records under that contract, which tried to reshape him as a mainstream pop singer, were as unsatisfactory to his admirers as they were to ABC’s accountants.
The 1965 album Live at the Regal, however, proved the durability of King’s core blues repertoire as well as his magisterial stage presence, and has become iconic, a turning-point in the early listening of many younger musicians. He had further R&B hits with blues numbers including How Blue Can You Get?, Don’t Answer the Door and Paying the Cost to Be the Boss, and in 1969 he hit the upper reaches of the pop charts – territory where no blues artist had stepped for many years – with the subtly orchestrated The Thrill Is Gone.
It took him a while to establish himself with a rock audience, for whom the blues was largely defined by the Chicago school of Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, but he was brought forcibly to their attention by musicians who admired him. He acquired further rock credibility with the 1970 album Indianola Mississippi Seeds, on which he collaborated with Carole King and Joe Walsh and scored another enduring hit with Leon Russell’s song Hummingbird.
From then on, King was immovably established as “the chairman of the board of blues singers”. Imaginatively steered by his manager Sidney Seidenberg, he embarked on international concert tours that took him to Japan and Australia, and eventually to China and Russia. He also gave concerts to prisoners at the Cook County jail in Chicago and at San Quentin, experiences that led to his long involvement in rehabilitation programmes.The “chitlin circuit” now far behind him, he appeared at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, won approving notices from Playboy magazine, sang the theme-song for the television sitcom The Associates and the title number of the 1985 film Into the Night,
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was elected an honorary doctor of music at Yale and received innumerable awards from blues and guitar magazines. He recorded prolifically with luminaries in other fields, from the Crusaders, Branford Marsalis and Stevie Wonder to the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson and U2, with the last of whom he made the exuberant When Love Comes to Town in 1988.
was elected an honorary doctor of music at Yale and received innumerable awards from blues and guitar magazines. He recorded prolifically with luminaries in other fields, from the Crusaders, Branford Marsalis and Stevie Wonder to the Rolling Stones, Van Morrison, Willie Nelson and U2, with the last of whom he made the exuberant When Love Comes to Town in 1988.In 1990, King was diagnosed with diabetes and cut back his touring, but not so much that his followers outside the US could not catch up with him every year or two. Though he would now deliver most of his act seated, the strength of his singing and the fluency of his playing were only very gradually diminished. The celebrations
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for his 80th birthday in 2005 included a Grammy award-winning album of collaborations with Clapton, Mark Knopfler, Roger Daltrey, Gloria Estefan and others, a garland of tributes from musicians as diverse as Bono, Amadou Bagayoko and Elton John, and a “farewell tour” that proved not to be a farewell at all.
Iin 2009 King received a Grammy award, for best traditional blues album, for One Kind Favor. In 2012 he was celebrated in the documentary The Life of Riley; and also performed at a concert at the White House, where the US president, Barack Obama, joined him to sing Sweet Home Chicago.
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The remaining eight shows of his 2014 tour were cancelled because of health problems caused by complications from high blood pressure. King died in his sleep on May 14, 2015, at the age of 89, from vascular dementia caused by a series of small strokes as a consequence of his type 2 diabetes.
(Edited mainly from an obituary by Tony Russell @ the Guardian)