B. B. King died Thursday night in Las Vegas at the age of 89. He was one of the greatest, most influential guitarists in music history – and one of the most unusual. King never really mastered chords. There’s a funny scene in the documentary Life Of Riley (Riley was B.B.’s real first name), where King and U2 are working together and Bono recounts a moment where the musicians are talking through the arrangement of a song. “Gentlemen,” Bono quotes King as saying to them, “I don’t do chords."
And though he grew up with the blues, he disliked the acoustic guitar. B.B. King was a new kind of blues guitarist, pioneering the electric blues and the paving the way for blues rock and a tradition of guitar heroes who would sing his praises every chance they got. Eric Clapton, Carlos Santana, Johnny Winter, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield… the list of guitarists who trace their playing to B. B. King is long and distinguished.
B. B. King was not the first electric guitarist, and not even close to being the best – if by best you mean most virtuosic. So then why is his name on every meaningful list of the world’s greatest guitarists? Because “great” and “best” do not always mean the same thing. King was a great guitarist because he made the instrument sing. He grew up trying to emulate the slide guitar playing of his cousin, the great bluesman Bukka White. So the young B. B. King developed a way of bending and shaking the notes to imitate the almost vocal inflections that a slide guitar could get.
By the time of his 1952 hit “3 O’Clock Blues,” you can hear King’s deep roots in the blues, but there’s something else there too – something more streamlined and stinging in the guitar lines. Even better, listen to the “singing” of the guitar in “Sweet Little Angel” (1956) as it answers King’s own vocals. The lyrics are suggestive, and somehow, the guitar is too.
How great a guitarist was B. B. King? For a guitarist whose influence was so broad, he was never really successfully imitated. Eric Clapton once said, “I can tell B. B. from one note. Most of us can, I think." King elevated the electric guitar to the status of equal partner with the voice. Hell, he elevated the electric guitar to the point where it had its own name. Generations of guitarists know that “Lucille” is not a who, but a what. For most of his career, B. B. King played on a guitar called Lucille. Lucille was the subject of both a song and an album released in 1968, and was in fact not a single instrument but a series of mostly black Gibson solid-body guitars.
B. B. King loved Lucille. And he loved touring. And he loved women. Those things didn’t always go together so well. He married twice, but both marriages failed under the relentless pressure of King’s touring, which could easily top 300 dates a year, and which, according to legend, reached 365 days in a single grueling year. But King remained prolific: he made 48 albums on his own, not including his many collaborations; he apparently sired 15 children and has somewhere in the region of 50 grandkids.
He also became, in a quiet but indomitable way, a force for change. He credited Frank Sinatra with opening Las Vegas to him and other black artists, and Vegas would become his home on the rare days when he wasn’t out on the road. King himself began playing for mixed and mostly white audiences too, opening doors for other black performers that had remained stubbornly closed. B.B. King cried at his first show for a white audience, overwhelmed by the standing ovation the crowd gave him.
A darker story occurred in a Birmingham hotel in the mid-60s, when Martin Luther King Jr was staying in a room down the hall from B. B. King. Word got out that the two Kings were on the same floor of the hotel, but the information was not precise enough and according to B. B., during the night the rooms between the two men were blown up.
So perhaps the greatest of B. B. King’s achievements was that by the time a second and a third generation of rock guitarists had come along, and built their careers on the foundation of his electric playing (and I mean electric in both senses of the word), he was not seen as a great “black guitarist” or even “blues guitarist,” but as a musician who had helped shape the sound of the latter half of the 20th century.