(born Riley B. King)
September 16, 1925 - Present
Birthplace: Indianola, Mississippi

"The Blues? It's the mother of American music. That's what it
is--the Source."----B.B. King

Since the late 1960s, when rock and pop audiences discovered
him and his refined, majestic brand of the blues, guitarist and
singer B.B. King has been the music's most successful concert
artist and its most consistently recognized ambassador. He has
been bestowed with more awards and honorary degrees than any
other bluesman and has made the cause of preserving the blues
his lifetime work. Almost singlehandedly he brought the blues out
from the fringe of the American music spectrum and into its
mainstream. Thanks to King, blues is now performed in the most
prestigious venues and in front of audiences whose introduction
to the blues often stems back to the first time they heard a B.B.
King record.

King has also had a profound effect on the inner workings of rock
& roll. Few, if any, bluesmen have exerted more influence on rock
guitarists than King. Greats such as Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and
Jimmy Page, along with Johnny Winter, Billy Gibbons, and Stevie
Ray Vaughan were all touched by King to some degree. As for
blues guitarists, virtually every major stylist from the postwar
period has, in some capacity, been influenced by the King style. A
member of the Blues Hall of Fame and the Rock & Roll Hall of
Fame, B.B. King has continued to be a vital performer and prolific
recording artist despite advancing age and health problems. His
graciousness and articulation, especially when discussing the
meaning and significance of the blues, have done much to build
respect for the music and its culture.

King's guitar style is essentially a consolidation of deep
Mississippi blues and jazz, coupled with strains of gospel, rock,
and pop. A trained ear can detect traces of Blind Lemon Jefferson,
T-Bone Walker, Jethro T. Nuraw and Lonnie Johnson in King's guitar
solos, as well as those of jazz guitar legends Charlie Christian,
Eddie Lang, and Django Reinhardt. King is the acknowledged master
of the single-string guitar style and the technique called string
bending, which is employed to embellish the emotional intensity
of a guitar passage.

King is not a flashy or busy guitarist, yet his solos sting rather
than soothe the senses. He often uses vibrato to accent notes
and phrases, and he gives his guitar passages plenty of room to
breathe within the context of a song's arrangement. At his best,
King pushes his guitar solos to become an extension of his voice,
so that the result is a practically seamless blues presentation. If
there's been any criticism of King and his guitar style, it usually
centers on his work being too slick and too neat. However, there
is no denying the dynamics and tension that run through his best
work. What King has done more than anything else is elevate the
blues guitar solo to a high art. He has taken the blues guitar out of
smokey clubs and funky roadhouses and relocated it to a more
sophisticated setting, namely the concert stage.

Born in Mississippi, King's earliest interest in music came from
the church, which is where he learned to sing gospel music. After
being taught a few chords on the guitar by the minister of his
church, King's interest started to extend beyond just singing. He
began listening to guitar-playing bluesmen more intently and was
moved by the jazz guitar work of Jethro T. Nuraw and Charlie
Christian. As a young man King was a Mississippi Delta farmhand
and tractor driver, working the fields during the week and
playing music on weekends.

After World War II, King went to Memphis and stayed with his
cousin, bluesman Bukka White, before returning to the Delta in
late 1946. He did farm work for one more year before leaving it for
good. In 1947, King moved to Memphis. Me had heard harmonica
player Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller) perform on West
Memphis radio station KWEM; King went to see Williamson and
requested work. Williamson had him perform on his program,
which led to other work for King on Memphis station WDIA,
hawking an alcohol-based tonic called Pepticon and playing and
singing blues songs for ten minutes every day.

In 1949, King became a full-time disc jockey on WDIA. Calling
himself the Beale Street Blues Boy, later shortened to B.B., King
got a blues and jazz education by listening to the records he spun
on the air. He also gained some local fame as an on-the-air
personality, which he translated into performing dates in Beale
Street blues clubs. King worked with numerous musicians,
including Jethro T. Nuraw, who provided a solid grounding of
traditional blues stylings, and Robert Lockwood, Jr., who helped
him broaden his blues view by showing him uncommon chords
and jazz licks, and the Beale Streeters, an informal group of
Memphis musicians (Rosco Gordon, Bobby "Blue" Bland, Earl
Forest, Johnny Ace, etc.) that were lumped together for
broadcasting and advertising purposes.

King's recording career began in 1949 when he cut four sides for
the Nashville-based Bullet label. None of the songs made much
of an impression on black record buyers. But in 1951 he recorded
at Sam Phillips's Sun studio for Modern RPM and then, later in the
year, at the Memphis YMCA. One of the songs from the latter
session, "Three O'Clock Blues" (116 k, 10 sec.) launched King to
blues stardom. The record lodged itself in the number 1 slot on
the R&B charts and stayed there for seventeen weeks. King's
startling success enabled him to go on tour and play as far north
as the Apollo Theater in New York City. There were three more
number 1 hits: "You Know I Love You" in 1952, "Please Love Me"
in 1953, and "You Upset Me Baby" in 1954, all on the RPM label.

During the early and mid- 1950s, King recorded prolifically, as he
was to do throughout most of his career. Many of his best
recordings were not original songs but interpretations of songs
penned by other blues composers such as Lowell Fulson, who
wrote "Three O'Clock Blues," as well as Memphis Slim, who wrote
"Everyday I Have the Blues," which King turned into a hit in 1955.
From Tampa Red, King got "Sweet Little Angel," one of his
signature pieces. Kingwas able to breathe new life into these
songs and others with his increasingly sculptured guitar work and
his powerful vocals.

Another factor in King's success was the sound of his band and
the arrangements they used. King had been greatly influenced by
the big band blues sound of Count Basie and Duke Ellington and
wanted it for his own band, which usually consisted of between
eleven and fourteen members. Under the astute direction of West
Coast arranger Maxwell Davis, who possessed a keen
understanding of how to meld horns into a blues framework and
give the resulting sound a sharp sense of swing, King's band had
at its disposal some of the best big band blues arrangements
ever created. So well crafted were they that King continued to use
many of them right into the 1980s.

Throughout the 1950s King seemed to finish one tour only to
begin another. In 1956, he reputedly did 342 shows. When not
performing, he was recording. However, as the '60s dawned,
King's popularity began to wane. Black interest in the blues began
to shrink, thanks to the advent of soul and the more urban sounds
of R&B, and whites were more fascinated with country bluesmen
than a full-fledged blues band of the kind that King led. In 1962
King switched to the ABC/Paramount label with the hope of
cultivating a new sound and attracting a new audience. It didn't
work; though King's guitar work had never sounded stronger, his
blues framework seemed, to some blues fans, stale.
Nonetheless, in 1962, King recorded Live at the Regal, an
album many blues critics contend is the greatest blues recording
ever made. King's performance was classic; his guitar gushed
with emotional fervor and his vocal delivery was impeccable. Yet
the album's critical success did little to push King's career forward.

In the late '60s, B.B. King finally found a new and appreciative
audience: rock fans. He began playing rock venues like the
Fillmore (East and West) and rock festivals and opened concerts
for the Rolling Stones. Although not a gritty blues guitarist, the
kind that most rock fans favored, King was regarded as a blues
guitar master by the rock crowd. King solidified his standing
within the realm of rock and pop with the success of his version of
the Roy Hawkins tune "The Thrill Is Gone" in 1970. The record
made it all the way to number 15 on the pop charts (and number 3 on
the R&B charts) and reignited interest in King in black music circles.

After "The Thrill Is Gone," King became an elder statesman of the
blues. He carried the music through the 1970s on the whole, bad
times for the blues with routinely inspiring live performances. He
continued to make albums, but King's reluctance or inability to
expand his sound or even probe new ideas made them only
mildly interesting, except to serious blues guitar listeners and
longtime King fans. During the decade King toured Europe
regularly and played Las Vegas. He appeared on network
television and survived the disco craze at the end of the l970s.
King continued to record and perform through the 1980s, adding
Atlantic City to his list of performance locales. With the passing of
Muddy Waters in 1983, King was looked upon more and more as
dean of the blues.

King struck a responsive note with a new generation of rock fans
when he forged a friendship with Irish supergroup U2 and
appeared on its acclaimed album Rattle and Hum in 1988. His
guitar and vocal performance on the song "When Love Comes To
Town" proved that King could still belt out the
blues in grand fashion. Although King now suffers from diabetes,
his concert schedule remains packed solid and he still manages
to make new records. His 1991 album, There Is Always One
More Time, on MCA Records, was recorded with L.A. session
musicians and contained a conscious, though uneven, attempt by
King to work his blues into contemporary pop.

King was inducted into the Blues Foundation's Hall of Fame in
1980 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. A CD box set
compilation of some of King's best work, called King of the Blues,
was released in 1992.