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1 on the national R&B chart and stayed there for five weeks.ĭuring 11 years on Modern’s labels, he released three more No. R&B label Modern Records’ RPM imprint spawned the 1952 hit “3 O’Clock Blues.” The impassioned slow blues, recorded at the Memphis YMCA, soared to No. He began performing and DJing as “the Beale Street Blues Boy” - soon shortened to “Bee Bee” King and finally to B.B.Ī first single for Nashville’s Bullet Records went nowhere, and a session produced by future Sun Records impresario Sam Phillips came to nothing. Permanently installed in Memphis by 1949, King convinced the owner of WDIA, then the only radio outlet in the nation catering exclusively to black listeners, to give him a 10-minute daily show.
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He also became more deeply involved in the music through his cousin Bukka White, an ex-convict and brilliant blues singer who had recorded for Victor and Vocalion.įollowing a brief stint in the Army during WWII, King returned to farming, but after a 1946 accident in which he totaled a tractor, he fled with his guitar to nearby Memphis, where he lived with White and began to hone his professional chops. Like many bluesmen, he got his start singing gospel, but as a teen he was drawn to the accomplished Lonnie Johnson, among the most fluent of pre-war blues guitarists.
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As a boy, he picked cotton and later, in nearby Indianola, he labored as a tractor driver for $22.50 a week. King in Berclair, Miss., he took up the guitar at age 12. By the end of the decade, he had released a top-20 pop hit, “The Thrill Is Gone,” and was on the way to becoming an icon whose renown transcended his art’s humble origins in the Deep South.īorn Riley B. His forceful yet elegant single-string picking and roaring, emotion-packed singing won him devotees like the white blues-rock guitarists Michael Bloomfield, Steve Miller and Eric Clapton, who helped introduce him to a youthful new audience in the late ’60s. Masterfully synthesizing divergent streams of blues and jazz on his instrument - the Gibson ES-355 he lovingly dubbed “Lucille” - he fused the approaches of such sophisticated precursors as Charlie Christian, Django Reinhardt, Lonnie Johnson and T-Bone Walker into a fluid, hotwired attack all his own. He lifted blues guitar playing to a new level of virtuosity on those recordings.
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“You don’t have to be a blues fan to have heard of King.” He was a star in music for 60 years, and his fame grew exponentially over that time.įrom the late ’40s to the late ’60s, King developed his style before exclusively black audiences on the Southern “chitlin circuit” and initially won stardom with a series of authoritative R&B hits backed by brawny big bands on the Modern and ABC labels. “King’s is now the name most synonymous with the blues, much as Louis Armstrong’s once was with jazz,” critic Francis Davis wrote in “The History of the Blues” (1995).