BB. KING / THE BLUES

B.B. King spread joy to millions by giving them the blues.

The iconic musician, along with his ever-present guitar Lucille, spent nearly 70 years thrilling audiences and spreading the music he learned as a poverty-stricken youth in the Mississippi Delta all over the world.

King, 89, died in Las Vegas, his attorney announced late Thursday, according to the Associated Press.

"Blues is a tonic for whatever ails you," King told USA TODAY in 2005. "I could play the blues and then not be blue anymore.''

The same could be said of those who heard him play. No matter how stormy the tale he'd weave, by the time he was through, the clouds had parted.

"I fell in love with BB's voice before I ever picked up a guitar,'' said Warren Haynes, guitarist for Gov't Mule, and one of the hundreds of blues and rock musicians inspired by King's fluid, bent-note, vibrato-laden playing style and consummate showmanship. "When I started playing guitar a few years later I realized his voice and his guitar were the same thing. That inspired me to try and achieve that balance myself."

"B.B. King was one of the few classic blues artists to have songs on mainstream radio,'' noted Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry. "Because I was able to hear his guitar playing on the The Thrill is Gone, it showed that given the right song you could sneak some great guitar sounds into top 40 radio."

Almost as well-known as King's artistry and recordings was his prolific performing schedule. Director Jon Brewer's 2014 documentary B.B. King: The Life of Riley, which featured appearances by Carlos Santana, Bono, Eric Clapton and Ringo Starr, detailed his non-stop touring, which at the time of his death had exceeded 15,000 shows. King outlived his tour manager, Norman Matthews, who died in May 2014.

He received nearly every accolade in his field: 15 Grammy Awards (not counting a Lifetime Achievement nod in 1987); inductions into the Rock and Roll and Blues Foundation halls of fame; a Kennedy Center Honor; Presidential Medal of the Arts; President Medal of Freedom; the international Polar Music Prize; and honorary doctorates from Yale and Brown.

One of his most deeply affecting honors came in 2005 when the Mississippi state Legislature honored him with B.B. King Day.

"In my early years, I was afraid to even go across the grounds of the state Capitol (in Jackson)," King said. "Being there did more for me than anything else, anywhere else. One of the reasons was it hadn't happened to any black person that I know about. To be this sharecropper from a plantation and to be there was a great honor for me. And I cried."

A segment of U.S. 61 (the legendary Blues Highway, which stretches from New Orleans to Minnesota) in Tennessee was named after him — an appropriate honor for a man who spent most of his life on the road. In 1956, he said he played 342 one-nighters, and he routinely did more than 200 gigs a year, tapering to 100 in recent years. His appearance at the 2013 New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival was a late-career highlight.

King's influence on other musicians is well-documented. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine listed him at No. 6 on its list of 100 greatest guitarists, behind No. 1 Jimi Hendrix, Clapton, Jimmy Page, Keith Richards and Jeff Beck. Among the numerous acts he performed or recorded with were Hendrix, Clapton, U2, Bobby "Blue'' Bland, Ronnie Wood, Derek Trucks and Sheryl Crow.

Most important, his music reached a vast audience. King "has done more, by far, for putting the blues into the mainstream of American music than anyone ever has," said former Roomful of Blues guitarist and two-time Grammy Award nominee Duke Robillard. "He was a warm and gracious man whose encouragement has meant more than anything to me. A truly beautiful person.''

King himself was influenced by bluesmen T-Bone Walker, Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, and jazz guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. He was also enamored with Delta blues players, including his cousin Bukka White.

His constant companion, Lucille, is almost as famous as he is. There were more than a dozen Lucilles (he often joked that he kept forgetting to return loaners to Gibson guitar company, when he sent his own guitars in for repairs). The original was named when he rescued the $30 instrument from a juke-joint fire, which started when two men fighting over a woman named Lucille knocked over a kerosene lamp. The name served as a reminder for him to never again run into a burning building, but King also liked the idea of seeing his guitar as a lady.

Among the many tributes in the 2005 book The B.B. King Treasures, Santana recalls seeing King at a 1968 concert at San Francisco's Fillmore auditorium. The show helped introduce him to mainstream rock audiences, and a year later he would open for the Rolling Stones on their American tour.

"When he hit the note to bring the band in, my whole life was changed,'' Santana said. "I could see what Michael Bloomfield and Eric Clapton and everybody else saw in him. ... When you play like that, you heal yourself and you heal other people.''

King's music was a unique blend of traditional blues, jazz, pop and swing. And although he was highly skilled on the guitar, he never learned to play and sing at the same time. His songs nearly always alternated between his rustic, crying vocals and his spine-tingling, bent-note playing, both accompanied by facial expressions that were at turns ugly and beatific.

As he explained in his 1996 autobiography Blues All Around Me with David Ritz, "My wife Martha used to call me ol' lemon face because of my facial contortions when I play Lucille. I squeeze my eyes and open my mouth, raise my eyebrows, cock my head and God knows what else. I look like I'm in torture, when in truth, I'm in ecstasy. I don't do it for show. Every fiber of my being is tingling. Notes are passing through me and I'm feeling something down in my gut."

His itinerant musician's life didn't allow him to be much of a family man. He was married and divorced twice, and he reportedly fathered 15 children by 15 women. He confessed that his domestic life had been less than ideal.

"I have not been a good father, but no father has loved his children more," he told co-writer Ritz. "Like my father, I decided the best thing I could do for my kids was work and provide. Fortunately, I've been able to do that. Unfortunately, my work was on the road, and that's meant a life of one-nighters. I never stopped moving. But I never stopped loving them or caring for them."

Riley B. King was born on a cotton plantation in central Mississippi just outside Berclair, on Sept. 16, 1925. His early life was hard. He was educated in a one-room schoolhouse and had to overcome a stuttering problem. His parents separated when he was 4 and his mother died when he was 10.

As recounted in his autobiography, for the next four years he lived alone in his cabin, working the farm and picking cotton to support himself. His father came back to get him when he was in his mid-teens and moved him in with his new wife and kids, but Riley didn't stay long. He soon returned to the farm until a tractor accident convinced him to take his guitar and the $2.50 in his pocket and hitchhike up U.S. 49 to Memphis.

By that time, he was starting to gain proficiency on the instrument that he'd become enamored with when he was seven, after hearing a minister play. He made his own single-string "guitars" out of broomsticks and strands of wire until he bought his first real guitar for $15 when was 12.

King got his big break on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio show. He was called the "Beale Street Blues Boy,'' which soon became "Blues Boy King" and eventually B.B. King. He became popular enough to get own sponsored radio show on station WDIA.

He cut several records starting in 1949 for the Nashville-based Bullet label and some for Sam Phillips' RPM label. It was there that he did Three O'Clock Blues, which stayed atop the R&B charts for 15 weeks in 1951.

A long string of classics followed over the years, including How Blue Can You Get; Everyday I Have the Blues; Sweet Sixteen, Part 1; Please Love Me; Sweet Little Angel; and You Upset Me Baby. His biggest pop hit and signature tune was 1970's The Thrill Is Gone, which earned him his first Grammy and was given a Grammy Hall of Fame Award in 1998.

In recent years, his albums generally have won acclaim. His most recent studio work, 2008's One Kind Favor, was produced by T Bone Burnett and won a Grammy for best traditional blues album.

Earlier work, such as 1956's Singin' the Blues, 1965's Live at the Regal and his 1974 collaboration with Bland, Together for the First Time ... Live, are considered classics.

But King was much more than a mere hit-maker — he was the pre-eminent blues ambassador, playing for presidents (George H.W. Bush played with him onstage after his 1989 inauguration, and Barack Obama sang with him briefly in 2012) and kings.

He kept in touch with fans through his annual B.B. King Blues Festival tour, which featured top and emerging blues artists, and his B.B. King Homecoming Festival in Indianola, Miss. Indianola is also the site of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, which opened in 2008. Part of the museum is housed in the Last Brick Cotton Gin, where King worked in the 1940s.

But despite all of his success, King was forever a humble man who never lost sight for whom he was playing. In his closing quote from Treasures, the affable star said, "Each night I do a concert or do a show it's like an audition, 'cause I remember the days when it was. If you played a night and somebody came in the next night and played better than you, you didn't come back. So I still have that mentality ... that if these people didn't like me, what would I be doing? Probably plowing."

King, who picked cotton for 35 cents per 100 pounds and sang on street corners for dimes in his youth, never had to worry about people liking him whenever he played the blues.

Nació el 16 de septiembre de 1925 en una plantación algodonera de Itta Bena, Indianola, Mississippi, Estados Unidos.

Hijo de los aparceros Albert Lee King y Nora Ella Pully. Cuando tenía cuatro años de edad, su madre dejó a su padre por otro hombre y fue criado por su abuela materna, Elnora Farr, en Kilmichael, Mississippi. Su padre se desligó pronto de él y su madre falleció cuando tenía nueve años. Su madre le prohibía cantar blues, que ella llamaba la música del diablo, a pesar de que su primo era el reconocido músico de blues, Bukka White.

Su primera experiencia musical le llegó a los 12 años cuando formó parte de un grupo vocal de gospel y el predicador le enseñó sus primeros acordes con una guitarra; por entonces, recogía algodón en una granja de la ciudad de Lexington. Luego, lo hizo en Indianola. A los 14 compra su primera guitarra por 15 dólares y empezó a cantar en otros grupos de gospel o en solitario por los pueblos. En 1940 fallece su abuela y pasa a vivir con la nueva familia de su padre.

En aquella época recorría en bicicleta los 80 Km. que le separaban de Kilmichael, donde acudía a tocar con su grupo. Tras duras jornadas laborales como conductor de un tractor, dedicaba las noches a tocar blues en las esquinas de la calle principal, ganando más en una noche que en una semana de trabajo en el campo algodonero. Fue alistado en el ejército durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, pero fue licenciado debido a que conducía un tractor, una ocupación esencial durante la guerra.

 En 1946, tras romper un tractor y temer la enfurecida reacción de su patrón, se traslada a Memphis con una guitarra y dos dólares y medio en el bolsillo. Allí es acogido por su primo Bukka White, que le introduce definitivamente en el blues. A finales de los cuarenta y principios de los cincuenta desarrolló un estilo único: mezclaba el sonido rural del campo con la vitalidad eléctrica de la ciudad.

Conoció a Sonny Boy Williamson II, que le dio un espacio como DJ en su programa de radio. Fue ahí donde comenzaron a llamarle 'Blues Boy', nombre que él terminó abreviando a B.B. En 1949 nace la leyenda de Lucille, su famosa guitarra Gibson ES-355; el nombre pertenece a una mujer por la que dos hombres se pelearon durante una de sus actuaciones en Arkansas y que provocaron un incendio, en el que que arriesgó su vida al volver a entrar al local para recuperar su guitarra.

Desde 1950 comenzó a realizar grabaciones y en 1965 editó Live at the Regal, su primer disco de blues que consiguió situar en las listas de ventas de música pop. Tras firmar un contrato con los hermanos Bihari, se trasladó a California, donde organizó varias bandas introduciendo la sección de viento que daría forma a los "riffs" y utilizando saxos para los blues. En 1953 se trasladó a Houston, donde tocó con la banda de Bill Harvey hasta que comenzó a liderarla por problemas de salud de aquél. Fue entonces cuando inició su serie de interminables giras por todo el país: 300 actuaciones al año que se prolongaban durante cuatro o cinco horas.

En 1958, su autobús quedó destrozado tras chocar con un camión de butano en Texas. La compañía aseguradora del autobús no se hizo responsable al vencer su seguro dos días antes dejándolo con una deuda de millones de dólares que tardó años en saldar.

Su popularidad se extiende hasta los adolescentes blancos de la ciudad y entre sus fans se encuentra un joven Elvis Presley que a menudo se escabulle de noche de su casa para verle tocar. En 1955 ya es una figura nacional y actúa por todo el país. Algunos de sus trabajos más destacados son: Confessin' the Blues (1966), Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970) -utilizando como músicos a Joe Walsh, Leon Russell y Carole King- y Six Silver Strings (1985).

Su virtud con la guitarra le valió el apodo del 'rey del blues' y el renombre de 'uno de los tres reyes de la guitarra blues' junto a Albert King y Freddie King. Recibió varios Premios Grammy por 'The Thrill is Gone' (1970) y los elepés There Must Be a Better World Somewhere (1981), My Guitar Sings the Blues (1986), Live at San Quentin (1990), Live at the Apollo (1991) y Blues Summit (1992). En 1987 le otorgaron el Premio Grammy por su dedicación a la música e ingresó en el Salón de la Fama del Rock and Roll.

En 2000, graba Riding with the Kingse junto al guitarrista Eric Clapton. El 29 de marzo de 2006, con 80 años, tocó en el Sheffield's Hallam Arena dando inicio a su gira por Europa junto a Gary Moore. La gira finalizó el 4 de abril con un concierto en el Wembley Arena. En julio, regresa a Europa para despedirse en Suiza de sus seguidores. 

Actúa el 2 y 3 de julio en la décimo cuarta edición del Festival de Jazz de Montreux y también en Zúrich en el "Blues at Sunset" el 14 de julio. En su última actuación en Montreux, en el Salón Stravinski, tocó junto a Joe Sample, Randy Crawford, David Sanborn, Gladys Knight, Lella James, Earl Thomas, Stanley Clarke, John McLaughlin, Barbara Hendricks y George Duke. La gira de despedida finalizó en Luxemburgo el 19 de septiembre de 2006. En noviembre y diciembre, tocó seis veces en Brasil.

A pesar de que su música se utilizó en comerciales para Wendy y McDonald, fue vegetariano en sus últimos años. Se convirtió en piloto con licencia en 1963 y a menudo volaba hacia los sitios donde daba sus conciertos. A los 70 años dejó de volar a petición de su familia y allegados.

Estuvo casado con Martha Lee Denton (1946-1952) y con Sue Carol Hall (1958-1966). Cuando se casó con su segunda esposa, el reverendo fue CL Franklin, padre de la cantante Aretha Franklin. Fue padre de 15 hijos con diversas mujeres y tuvo más de 50 nietos. Una de sus hijas, Patty, estuvo entre los reclusos durante su concierto en un centro correccional de Gainesville, Florida.

B.B. King falleció mientras dormía, a las 9:40 pm hora local del jueves 14 de mayo de 2015, en Las Vegas, EE UU, a la edad de 89 años. Llevaba 20 años luchando contra una diabetes de tipo II. A pesar de sus problemas de salud, se mantuvo en activo dando unos cientos de conciertos al año hasta octubre de 2014, cuando se sintió enfermo durante una actuación. No volvió a actuar.