It's the middle of May and it's a Friday, so not a whole heck of a lot going on in the college football world.
So it's a great time to reflect on the passing of B.B. King. The thrill is gone...
(Above photo, by the way, is of King and Elvis in 1956)
Here's what Buddy Guy posted on his Instagram account:
Here's King with Etta James, Gladys Knight and Chaka Khan:
The New York Times publishes its obit for "the defining bluesman for generations."
Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.
When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”
“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”
Here's the obit in the L.A. Times.
“B.B. King taps into something universal,” Eric Clapton told The Times in 2005. “He can't be confined to any one genre. That's why I've called him a ‘global musician.’”
King spent decades honing the craft that helped him escape the poverty of the Deep South, where he grew up on a Mississippi plantation as the son of a sharecropper who became a teenage sharecropper himself before singing and playing his way out of the cotton fields.
He was an indefatigable performer who seldom left the concert trail for more than a few days at a time. In 1956 he played 342 shows and even in his later years kept a schedule that would test the endurance of musicians half his age.
And The Washington Post said stamina, among other things, is what made B.B. great.
Stamina: You might prefer Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf or Albert King, but none of these survived long enough to be “ambassador of the blues,” as King was called. Well into his ninth decade, this guy toured until he dropped. Even John Lee Hooker died at 83.
King played on street corners. He played the “chitlin’ circuit.” He played “The Ed Sullivan Show.” He played with younger, more famous rock star admirers. He played the White House. He played casinos. He played for presidents.
“Out of all these years of playing, I guess I’ve missed about 10 or 15 days,” King told CBS in 2013.
He just averaged 300 shows a year for 47 years, by one accounting in 1995. To put that in perspective: A working stiff with a 9-to-5 job who first clocks in age 22 works about 250 days per year for 43 years before retiring at 65.
So, in sum: B.B. King probably worked harder than you do, probably worked longer than you do or will, and probably lived longer than you will. And unless you’re Jeff Beck, Keith Richards, Jimmy Page or Eric Clapton, he was a better guitar player than you, too, according to Rolling Stone.
Oh, right: Many of the 14,000 shows he played — again, by 1995 — were one-nighters.
“I like to feel that I pay my own way, no free lunch,” he said in 1986. “… I’m not inventing anything that’s going to stop cancer or muscular dystrophy or anything, but I like to feel that my time and talent is always there for the people that need it. When someone do say something negative, most times I think about it, but it don’t bother me that much.”
LW
