BB King obituary

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/15/bb-king-obituary-mississippi-farmhand-blues-legend

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BB King, who has died aged 89, 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.

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Although much of his work, and arguably nearly all the best of it, was firmly within the discipline of the blues, King was unfailingly open-minded and interested when he found himself in other settings, bridging musical and cultural differences with affability and skill untainted by self-importance. More than 50 years ago the death of Big Bill Broonzy prompted writers to speak of “the last of the bluesmen”: it was premature then, as it would be to say it now, but it is hard to imagine any future blues artist matching King’s sway, in a career spanning 65 years, over musicians by the thousand and audiences by the million.

Son of Albert and Nora Ella, Riley B King (the B did not seem to stand for a name) 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 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. He was always ready to extol the musicians who had influenced him, and would usually mention T-Bone Walker first.

“I’ve tried my best to get that sound,” he told Guitar Player magazine. “I came pretty close, but never quite got it.” In an interview in the Guardian in 2001, he said: “If T-Bone Walker had been a woman I would have asked him to marry me.” But he would also cite the earlier blues guitarists Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson and the jazz players Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt.

Disarmingly, he once explained that his guitar technique was partly based on his lack of skill: “I started to bend notes because I could never play in the bottleneck style, like Elmore James and Booker White. I loved that sound but just couldn’t do it.” He was similarly self-deprecating about his singing, a sumptuous blend of honey and lemon, mixed half-and-half from crooners such as Nat King Cole or Al Hibbler and blues shouters such as Joe Turner and Dr Clayton. Probably his favourite composer and singer was Louis Jordan, whose buoyant, funny music he commemorated in the 1999 album Let the Good Times Roll.

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. In 1962. he ventured to change that working pattern, 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. “About a year and a half ago,” he said in 1969, “all of a sudden kids started coming up to me saying, ‘You’re the greatest blues guitarist in the world.’ And I’d say, ‘Who told you that?’ And they’d say, ‘Mike Bloomfield’, or ‘Eric Clapton’. It’s due to these youngsters that I owe my new popularity.” 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.

Related: BB King at 87: the last of the great bluesmen

From then on, King was immovably established as, in someone’s neat phrase, “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.

A dedicated player of Gibson guitars, he was featured in advertisements for the company, which created a special model named after the succession of Gibson ES 355s that he called Lucille. He also lent his name to advertising campaigns for Pepsi-Cola, the AT&T communications network and Cutty Sark whisky, and to clubs in Memphis and Los Angeles.

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, 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 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.

In 2008, the BB King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center was opened in Indianola, and in 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.

King was twice married and twice divorced. He is survived by 11 children by various partners; four others predeceased him.

• BB King (Riley King), blues musician, born 16 September 1925; died 14 May 2015