B. B. King

Riley B. King was born on the sixteenth of September 1925 near Itta Bena, in the Berclair community of Leflore County, Mississippi, on a cotton plantation where his parents, Albert King and Nora Ella King, labored as sharecroppers. Raised as an only child, he came into a world of hard fields and thin wages, and by his own account was left largely on his own after his mother's early death, working as a tenant farmer while still a boy.

From the Delta's church pews and street corners he carried gospel and field song into a new music. Hitchhiking to Memphis in the 1940s, he found his voice on WDIA radio, where he became the "Beale Street Blues Boy" — shortened to "Blues Boy," then simply "B. B." His 1951 recording "Three O'Clock Blues" reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts and launched a touring life of extraordinary devotion.

On the electric guitar he forged a signature language: fluid string-bending, a shimmering left-hand vibrato, and singing, vocal-like phrasing on his beloved guitar "Lucille." AllMusic called him the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the twentieth century, and generations of blues and rock players learned to speak through his phrasing.

He toured almost without rest across sixty-six years, earning the title King of the Blues, a place in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and enduring honor. B. B. King died on the fourteenth of May 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada. He rose from a sharecropper's cabin to teach the whole world how one note, well bent, can carry a lifetime of feeling.