B.B. King Born: The Undisputed King of Blues

B.B. King defined the sound of electric blues through his signature vibrato and the conversational phrasing of his guitar Lucille, transforming the instrument into a singing voice. Born Riley B. King on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, in 1925, he picked cotton as a child and drove tractors as a teenager, hearing the blues on Saturday nights at juke joints and the gospel in church on Sunday mornings. He moved to Memphis in 1947, where he landed a spot on the radio station WDIA, becoming one of the first Black disc jockeys in the South. His radio name, "Beale Street Blues Boy," was shortened to "Blues Boy" and then simply "B.B." He named his guitar Lucille after a woman who inadvertently caused a fire at a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, where he was performing in 1949. Two men fighting over a woman named Lucille knocked over a barrel of kerosene being used for heating, setting the building ablaze. King ran back inside to save his guitar and named it Lucille to remind himself never to do something that foolish again. Every guitar he played afterward bore the same name. His five decades of relentless touring, often performing over three hundred shows a year, brought the Mississippi Delta blues to a worldwide audience. He influenced every rock and blues guitarist who followed, from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix to John Mayer and Gary Clark Jr. He won fifteen Grammy Awards and was among the first inductees into the Blues Hall of Fame. He performed nearly 15,000 concerts in his career and died on May 14, 2015, at eighty-nine, in Las Vegas.