Guitar Lesson Blog

B.B. King Biography

Is there anyone who wouldn’t know the one and only king of the blues, B.B. King?

His visual image and his guitar Lucille has become iconic, while his powerful singing and unparalleled in emotion vibrato has changed the would of guitar playing. I wanted to share in this post some of the interesting facts of B.B.’s biography that may inspire you pick up your axe more often.

Born September 16, 1925 on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, Riley B. King is without any doubt one of the most influential guitarists of all time,  ranked by the Rolling Stone magazine #3 on its list of the “100 greatest guitarists of all time.  It was him who joined the raw blues licks with a cleaner and more concise approach of the jazz players, such as Charlie christian and Django Reinhardt, whom B.B King greatly admired. It was him who introduced fluid string bending and shimmering vibrato, the path which virtually every electric blues guitarist has since followed.

Since the age of eight he worked on plantation  where he was paid 35 cents for each hundred pounds of cotton he picked. At age 14 he bought his first guitar – three-quarter-sized Stella for $15.00. As that was his monthly salary he paid a deposit of seven dollars and fifty cents the first month and the balance the following month. His next guitar was bought with a help of his cousin, and it was an acoustic Gibson to which he later fitted a DeArmond pick-up. At some point he also had an early Fender Telecaster, but opted for Gibson ES-335. Ever since King played a custom-built Gibson based on ES-335 design but with a closed body to reduce the amount of feedback. Prior to that B.B. had stuffed the insides of his 335s with towels to overcome this problem. And his first choice for strings and amplification also turns out to be Gibson.

Moving from being a tractor driver to being a disk jokey at the local radio station WDIA, where he gained his nickname “Beale Street Blues Boy”, later transformed to “B.B.” There he played guitar between the shows with visiting jazz and blues musicians and it was there that he first met T-Bone Walker. As King states,”From the moment I had heard him for the first time, I knew I would have to have an electric guitar myself!”.

So many of King’s tunes entered the Hall of Fame. His first successful hits were “Woke Up This Morning”, “Three O’Clock Blues” and “Sweet Little Angel”. King won a Grammy for a tune called “The Thrill Is Gone” and was shortly inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame. From the 1980s and onward King breaks the record appearing on numerous television shows and performing well over 300 nights a year. In 1988, King reaches a new generation of fans with his single “When Love Comes to Town”, co-working with the Irish band U2. In 2000, King teams up with another guitar legend Eric Clapton to record album called Riding With the King.

B.B. King is also proficient in a number of other instruments  and is also described as a “musicologist” owning over 30,000 records. He has had Type II diabetes for over twenty years and is an FAA licensed Private Pilot who frequently flew to gigs.