B.B. King

Following are excerpts taken from B.B. King: There Is Always One More Time (David McGee)

This book about B.B. King chronicles his life and work, giving insight into this ‘rags to riches’ story of the man who would be called “King of the Blues”. B.B.’s early spiritual and musical foundations came from a solid Christian upbringing, which gave him a consistent attitude of decency and a ‘positive’ outlook on life while navigating radical changes to the music industry, deep racism in the South, and difficult personal relationships. He always seemed to come out on top, and he always chose to look at the bright side of life. Even though by his own admission he wasn’t the most talented individual, he was consistent, hard-working, and good-natured throughout his long career, which are all characteristics that brought him to the top of his profession. We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to have not only musical skill, but personal values, as well.

“I was born in the great Mississippi Delta, that part of America that someone called the most Southern place on earth. Born of September 16, 1925, on the bank of Blue Lake, between Indianola and Greenwood.” Upon his parent’s divorce, he has a faint memory from early in his life, “(Daddy) only comes into focus when I see him waving good-bye. He’s standing still, but me and Mama are moving.”

His great-grandmother taught him about ‘the beginnings of the blues’. She told him that singing helped get the field hands through the long days of picking, that “singing about your sadness unburdens your soul.” At the same time, though, the field hands were using the blues to send each other coded messages, warning of the boss’s impending arrival. “Maybe you’d want to get out of his way or hide,” B.B. says. “That was important for the women because the master could have anything he wanted. If he liked a woman, he could take her sexually. And the woman only had two choices: do what the master demands or kill herself. There was no in-between. The blues could warn you what was coming. I could see the blues was about survival.”

“What mattered most in the Mississippi of my childhood was work,” B.B. recalls. He toiled in cotton and corn fields, milked 20 cows a day (ten in the morning, ten at night) on Flake Cartledge’s farm. After those morning milkings, he walked some three miles to the one-room schoolhouse that was home to kindergarten through grade 12, all taught by Luther Henson, “who had a powerful influence on my young brain.” By his own admission, B.B., who was afflicted with a pronounced stutter, was an indifferent student.

“Church was the highlight of the week. Church was not only a warm spiritual experience, it was exciting entertainment, it was where I could sit next to a pretty girl, and mostly it was where the music go all over my body and made me wanna jump. Sunday was the day.”

B.B. (or Riley, as was his name) attended the Church of God in Christ. “That means they’ll be doing whatever it takes to praise the Lord, making a joyful noise, even talking in tongues.” There the Reverend Archie Fair commanded his flock’s attention with both biblically charged words and his Sears Roebuck Silvertone guitar, “the one object in the whole church that fascinated me most.” One day Riley got close to the instrument. “While they’re not looking, I reach over and, oh so carefully, touch the wood of the guitar…I wonder, How do you get her to make those sounds? How do you get her to sing?”

These questions were answered in short order, when the Rev. caught Riley admiring his guitar. Although “Mama’s mad I touched something that don’t belong to me,” Reverend Fair was more sanguine about the child’s transgression. In fact, he encouraged Riley to “touch it”, adding, “It ain’t gonna bite you.” He showed Riley how to hold the instrument, then how to make a few simple chords and get music out of it…to this instruction the Reverend added a bit of wisdom Riley would never forget: “The guitar is a precious instrument. It’s another way to express God’s love.”

The Church of God in Christ enriched his spirit in every way. “Church had the singing, church had the guitar, church had folks feeling good and happy; church was all I needed.” The boy’s enthusiasm and commitment, so evident that B.B. says people regarded him as a “church boy, and I was glad to be seen that way.” He was age seven. We take students of all ages in our music school in Odessa, Texas.

One day, his snuff-dipping Great Aunt Mima brought some old Victrola recordings of Jazz artists which captured Riley’s attention and musical imagination. Blind Lemon, Elmore James, Muddy Waters, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie were among his first musical influences. Young and impressionable, Riley was absorbing it all: gospel, acoustic blues, electric blues, and big band.

Racism was still alive and well, and Riley saw the sting of it. Riley’s sense was “never to give that kind of hurt to anyone else. My revenge was to change a bad feeling into a good one. If I’m working with you and I sense you’re feeling a little insecure, I try to make you feel great. That’s how I get rid of my old hurt. If I don’t do that, my hurt grows and makes me mean and vengeful. But if hurt can change to kindness- that’s something Mama showed me- the world becomes a little less cruel.”

His guitar gave him consolation. “If I was feeling lonely, I’d pick up the guitar; if something’s bugging me, just grab the guitar and play out the anger; happy, mad or sad, the guitar was right there, a righteous pacifier and comforting companion.”

While in Lexington, he witnessed random acts of violence between whites and blacks. In downtown Lexington, while running an errand for his step-mother one Saturday afternoon, he saw a group of white men hang the body of a dead black man from a beam on the front of the courthouse. He watched in silence, anger consuming him as he saw white people smiling as they strolled by the 19-year old’s limp form. “I feel disgust and disgrace and rage and every emotion that makes me cry without tears and scream without sound. I don’t make a sound…Blind hatred, my mother had taught me, poisons the soul. I kept hearing her say, ‘If you’re kind to people, they’ll be kind to you.’” That lesson remained with him the rest of his life and informed his approach to others in and out of the music business, and the personal dignity he exhibited through the years.

Riley eventually saved up $20 to buy a guitar. He joined a gospel group, the Famous St. John Gospel Singers. They began performing in local churches. All the while, Riley continued to search out opportunities to hear new music. He recalls “ten-cent vendors- a primitive screen attached to a projector that, for a dime, showed three-minute music pieces” where he saw and heard Benny Goodman, Charlie Christian and Charlie ‘Bird’ Parker.

Eventually, Riley began to feel restless and ‘stuck’ in the touring Gospel group. Purely out of a desire to make more money, he made a trip to Church Street on his own one Saturday night…plunked himself down on a curb, guitar in hand, and began playing gospel songs, belting out songs like “The Old Rugged Cross,” earning effusive praise and encouragement from the passersby. But the encouragement Riley was looking for- cold, hard cash in the form of tips…was not forthcoming. He began to strum the blues, making up words, remembering a few that he had heard, and sure enough, some of the same tightwads who had offered only verbal support for the gospel numbers responded to the blues by digging out some spare change.

“That was my first lesson in marketing,” B.B. related. “I saw something about the relationship between music and money that I’m still seeing today. Real-life songs where you feel the hurt and heat between man and woman have cash value. I took note. I started coming to town every Saturday and spent my afternoons on that curb, singing as many blues as I could remember- and making up the rest…confidence made me a better singer, and people tipped bigger when I sang with more conviction.”

By tenth-grade, Riley was a dropout, “School seemed like a burden.” Despite lingering regrets even today over his lack of education, “I feel like I’m missing a component, a way of understanding the world, that only more schooling could have provided.”

By now the blues had dug in and taken hold of Riley’s soul. Gospel would always have its place in his life, “My mother had filled my heart with a love for a compassionate God. Gospel songs sang of that love” – but the blues continued to light the path into the forbidden world revealed to him on those long Saturday nights…outside the Jones Night Spot.

“When I heard Aaron T-Bone Walker, I flat-out lost my mind. Thought Jesus himself had returned to earth playing electric guitar. T-Bone’s music filled my insides with joy and good feeling. I became his disciple. And remain so today. My greatest musical debt is to T-Bone…musically, he was everything I wanted to be.” We encourage students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to listen to a wide range of influences, in order to find inspiration for their own artistic journey.

Shortly after Riley was married, he was called into the service…and felt the sting of racism even while serving his country: white and black soldiers were segregated, and German prisoners of war were treated with more respect than the black G.I.s, who were not protected by the Geneva Convention rules. “We were seen as beasts of burden, dumb animals,” he said, “a level below the Germans. To watch the enemy get better treatment than yourself was a helluva thing to endure…as a 20-year old, fresh out of basic training, I was starting to feel the weight of the system. I felt the injustice. And I felt anger…The pain of the past is hard to describe. But it’s there. It lingers for life.”

Back home, “I dreamed about the house on the hill and having things like other people had. Not a lot of things, but nice things. An automobile, a family, a few bucks in the bank.” One day, while driving a tractor in the field, the breaking-point came. At the end of a long day…(the tractor’s) post-ignition lunge broke off its smokestack and destroyed part of its manifold. Seeing “hundreds of dollars in repairs, and it was all my fault,” he panicked. Hustling back to his living quarters, he gathered his guitar and all of his $2.50 in his pocket, and lit out for Highway 49 north. He left for Memphis.

In the early decades of the 20th Century, Memphis was the murder capital of the country, particularly Beale Street. But Beele Street was also the “main street of America.” Central to Beele Street’s culture was its music. B.B. recalls going to Beale Street was like “going to Berlin of Paris of London or someplace…every day on Beale Street to me was like a community college. I had a chance to learn so much just watching the people. There were famous people that would come into Memphis and they would hand on Beale Street.” While there, he saw guitarist, Django Reinhardt with violinist Stephan Grappelli, from France, among others.

Post-war America saw enormous, even cataclysmic changes in everything from science and technology to civil rights to popular entertainment. With the rise of mechanization, sharecropping was in its death throes, and blacks were migrating en masse out of the South to the industrial areas of the North, which promised better-paying factory work and a more tolerant racial atmosphere.

In Memphis, there was a new talk radio station, WDIA, that wanted to start a new concept of “blacks talking to other blacks on the air.” Riley found this station, looking through the window at Memphis’ first black DJ, Nat. B. Williams. Riley auditioned for the station, and the men like what they heard, but Fergussen asked Riley if he would be willing to do commercials for Pepticon. Agreeing, Riley’s Pepticon show proved popular. Finally, being fully vested in the WDIA disc jockey family, they gave him the nickname: Beale Street Blues Boy, which soon mutated into Bee Bee, and at last simply B.B.

B.B. emulating the folksy manner of one of radio’s top stars, Arthur Godfrey, looks back and says he developed “a believable on-air personality. I was just me. I like to say I played everything from Bing Crosby to Lightnin’ Hopkins…Generally I soft-pedalled myself as a deejay…I tried to please the public while, at the same time, education myself on the new music.” He was also gaining an education in showmanship that he would carry onto the stage and into the recording studio. He said his radio experience “taught me my technique, it taught me things about either too loud or not loud enough, even playing as well as singing, it taught me a little bit about projection, how to get an audience to listen; you know you have the imaginary audience when you are sitting in front of the microphone, you don’t see them, but you know they are there, then there are times when you figure that they aren’t these. That helped me a lot.”

By the end of the 1940’s it felt like black music was on fire. Instead of trying to emulate other artists, he realize that he had to be himself. He explained, “my fingers were to stupid and my mind refused to word that way…By bending the strings, by trilling my hand- and I have big fat hands- I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato…I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions….I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy of sad, bouncy of bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing. Singing is the most basic musical act…to me singing is like talking. If it ain’t natural, it ain’t right.” We endeavor to help students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to find their own path that is natural to them. Everyone has their own journey.

He also developed another technique involving his singing. “He never played while he was singing,” noted Peter Guralnick. “When the vocal was over, the guitar was introduced to play single notes that extended the vocal line.” B.B. himself said, “Both sounds- guitar and voice- were coming out of me, but they issued from different part of my soul.”

Through B.B.s years working in Memphis, he came into contact with many other artists who he would eventually perform with, such as arranger/trumpet player Joe Scott, singer Bobby Bland, and pianist Earl Forest. B.B. began putting together his own band, and asked WDIA owner Jim Ferguson if he could cut a record in the radio station’s studio. This marked B.B.’s first recordings.

At this time, Rock ’n’ Roll began to be the primary audience of the younger generation. With the Biharis failing to shape B.B. into a mainstream artist who could deliver the rock ‘n’ roll teen market- and, most important, the buying power it wielded and for which every pop label lusted- B.B. began looking at other possible musical homes. Other labels were vying for B.B.s attention, but the relatively young ABC-Paramount label most piqued his interest, which he finally joined, with the hopes of bringing his blues to the crossover audience he knew was out there waiting for it.

In 1962, Soul music was taking root, and it flowered in Memphis as well as Detroit. Giants, such as Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding, Aretha Franklin, Soloman Burke, Sam and Dave, the Temptations. James Brown and Ray Charles also emerged from this era. James Brown’s tremendous success with his “Live at the Apollo” album, gave B.B. producer Johnny Pate inspiration to feature B.B. in a live album, “Live at the Regal.” This album, in 1964, was and has been regarded as a pinnacle moment in B.B.’s career. Released the same year the Beatles landed in America, “Live at the Regal” could not have been better-timed in terms of enhancing his public profile. The Beatles, along with other British bands had an energized style built on the foundations of early American rock ‘n’ roll, country, blues, and R&B they had learned off imported recordings. A number of these bands boasted guitarists who were steeped in the blues, especially B.B. King’s blues, and in interviews they were quick to praise his word, which had the effect of enlightening a new generation.

B.B., in 1981, need a new direction, and his contemporary Doc Pomus focused on writing songs that addressed issues and feelings common to older adults. Levine thought this was a good place to start a new album, “There Must Be a Better World Somewhere”. Levine and B.B. produced four consecutive albums that had raised the musical and aesthetic ante, and the result was a revived artist. Levine and B.B. would work together again, but not for another eight years. And the case could be made that come their next project together, B.B. was again in need of the direction and vision Levine could supply.

B.B. and Stevie Ray Vaughn worked together and were good friends. On August 26, 1990, Stevie Ray Vaughn and his band Double Trouble performed at a concert at Alpine Valley, Wisconsin. After his set, SRV board a helicopter that was to fly him and three other members of Clapton’s entourage back to Chicago. Shortly after midnight the helicopter crashed into a hillside, killing all on board. The news of Stevie Ray’s death devastated B.B. “I felt like I lost a part of myself.”

At an interview later in B.B.s life, the question was asked, “Would you, or do you, encourage young artists to get involved in things beyond just music and pursuing the dollar? He replied, “Sure I do. But I also tell them, you don’t break the camel’s back, of course, that you need to get your financial aid from. But you still stand up for your principles, you stand up for what you think is the right thing to do. And if you’re good at doing it, if you’re good at writing a song, performing the songs or whatever, do it. But only if this is what you want to do. Don’t do it simply because somebody else think you should do it. Do it if you want to do it. The world is still a good place, but it can be a better place.” We encourage the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to be true to their own artistic sense and unique journey.

He continues, “I’m trying to tell you that I grew up with this (racial segregation), and it was sort of like a brainwashing. And when everything was integrated, I still wasn’t comfortable. Even now I go to some of the places and it’s almost like, No, check this our first. I’m trying to say it takes me awhile to be comfortable. I think it’s been the same thing along the line in the music business. A lot of us blues singers, when we were growing up, didn’t rock the boat. Some of ‘em did. But then look what happened to some of ‘em. So the others didn’t rock the boat because we didn’t want to offend anyone. And we didn’t rock the boat so much. Like I say to many people today, especially when you’re traveling around the world, you go out of this country to other countries and always somebody want to ask you haw is the race relations. And it usually bugs me sometimes, because I’ve gone into many countries where there was one race of people and they’re killing each other and doing all this, and I say to myself, How can you ask me that? Here in the U.S. we got 100,000 different cultures; in other words, we can’t go to war today without fighting some of our people somewhere in the world. We go to Iraq, we got people here form Iraq; we got people here form you name it. We kill each other, but not as much as a lot of them do when it’s one people! So that part bothers me sometimes. And usually everybody want to ask me about race relations, and I say I think we doing good. Compared to a country where it’s just one race of people and they have different religions and they kill each other because of that. We don’t do that. You see what I’m saying.”

Interviewer: “You’ve achieved so much in your life and career- wealth beyond anything you could ever imaging, material goods…I wonder, how blue can you get?”

B.B.: “Well, when you get to be 72 years old, and you have a lot of people always praising you, you have to watch to keep your head form inflating- keep punching holes in it every once in a while to deflate it- but after a while you start to believe that people are for real and they’re praising you because they’re doing it because they want to; they don’t have to. I start to think, Have I done the best I can do? Can I do a little better? Do I really deserve some of these things that the people have given me? This is not false modesty. Because after a while you start to saying- and people sometimes seem to do this to you after you make a certain name, get to a certain place, they seem to want to pick on you then. You know, “He does the same old thing all the time.” So you had to work hard to get there. I think what I’m trying to tell you now is that any day I don’t learn something new is a day lost. I’m not trying to compete with anyone anymore but myself. Only me. And I know my limitations. I hear these people playing- George Benson, Kenny Burrell- and wherever they got these guitars from, those notes ain’t on my guitar…But, God, I’ve got a long ways to go. Long ways to go. All that practicing I still can’t find them notes, so I think they cheated me on my guitar…People praise you and do all these things that swell your head in some ways, but if you’re like me you deflate it right quick. You know everybody means well, but you know you can’t do this- I know. I have talent, yes, I play guitar pretty well. But I never thought about it until I heard John Lennon, in an interview, someone asked him what he’d like to do and he said, “Play guitar like B.B. King.” When I read that I almost fell out of my chair. Because to me it was just having fun. Having fun, trying to make a living. But when somebody as great as John Lennon said B.B. King, I said, Oh my God, I can’t believe it. Then I started to pay more attention. So new, each night when I hit the stage, I don’t know what young person might like B.B. King, but believe me, I do the best I can do. A lot of times the best is not as good as I’d like it to be, but you believe me- it was the best that I could do. Each night. I don’t care feeling good or bad. When I hit the stage, I feel good. When I get off I may feel like dying. [laughs] But I ‘m serious, because to me that means the most.” We expect the students in our music school in Odessa, Texas to always be the best they can be.

“I would like to say I’m happiest at this time as I’ve ever been in my life. Happiest I’ve ever been in my life. I know where I can get me a room tonight. I know where I can eat tomorrow. And I got a good guitar. Lot of friends. Lot of people I believe care about me, and a lot of people I love. So I’m very happy.”