B. B. King

Riley B. King was born on the sixteenth of September 1925 on the Berclair tenant-farm of the Bryant plantation outside Itta Bena, Mississippi, the only child of Albert King and Nora Ella King, both sharecroppers. His parents separated when he was four. He was raised by his maternal grandmother Elnora Farr at Kilmichael in the Mississippi hill country and by his mother at Lexington until his mother's death when he was nine. He worked at twelve as a tenant farmer on the Cartledge plantation at Kilmichael for thirty-five cents a day. He attended the Elkhorn Baptist School at Kilmichael through eighth grade and received his first guitar at twelve as a Christmas gift from his cousin Bukka White.

He moved to Indianola in the Mississippi Delta in 1943 at eighteen and worked the picking season at the Johnson Barrett plantation. He joined in 1943 the Famous St. John's Quartet — the local Pentecostal-Holiness gospel singing group — and performed across the Indianola juke joints in his off-hours. He moved to Memphis in 1947 to live with Bukka White, played as a young sideman at the WDIA radio station, and from 1948 hosted under the name Beale Street Blues Boy — abbreviated within months to B. B. — the Sepia Swing Club program from the WDIA studios. The name became his permanent professional identification.

He recorded his first sides for the Bullet label in 1949 and signed with the RPM label in 1950. The 1951 single "Three O'Clock Blues" rose to number one on the Billboard R&B chart and remained there for fifteen weeks. He bought his first Gibson guitar in 1951 and named it Lucille — the name he would across his career carry across fifteen successive Gibson guitars after the original was abandoned in a 1949 burning juke joint when a fight had erupted over a woman named Lucille.

He produced across the following six decades over fifty studio albums, recorded the 1969 album Completely Well that produced "The Thrill Is Gone" (his greatest commercial single), and performed an average of two hundred and fifty nights a year across the four decades from 1956 to 1996. The 1970 cross-over crossover at the Royal Albert Hall in London — at which he played to a six-thousand-seat sold-out audience of largely white British rock-blues fans — was the moment from which his international career took its decisive direction.

He received fifteen Grammy Awards, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006, and the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995.

He died at Las Vegas on the fourteenth of May 2015, at eighty-nine.

He is honored here as the King of the Blues.