King Of The Blues

   
BOOK REVIEW by Willard Manus

Five biographies of the blues icon B.B. King have been published in recent years. But the latest, KING OF THE BLUES–-THE RISE AND FALL OF B.B. KING, is by far the best. Written by Daniel De Vise and published by Atlantic Monthly Press, it is exhaustively researched and vibrantly told.

Born in the Mississippi Delta to a share-cropping family, King managed to escape poverty and discrimination, thanks to his musical gifts, which were honed in black church and juke joints where bluesmen like Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson and Sonny Boy Williamson plied their trade. Although King wasn’t a prodigy, he practiced diligently on the guitar and sang when he could with a local group, The Famous St. John Gospel singers.

Then, as De Vise explains, “King summoned the courage to plant himself in downtown Indianola on Saturdays to play his guitar alone.” But serenading pedestrians with such familiar gospel tunes as “The Old Rugged Cross” and “I’m Working on a Building” did not prove profitable, so he switched to “the devil’s music,” the blues.

“The blues meant money,” King recalled. “And money meant a better life.”

Powerful, warring impulses of “faith, ambition and lust churned within King’s soul.” And then came an epiphany: “God has the blues.”

Look at the story of Jesus, he would later explain. “I’ll be damned if that ain’t a blues story. And I’ll be damned if Jesus wasn’t a bluesman. Wandering around. No home. No money. Yet all that time talking about love. But not everyone’s loving on him...Sitting in that garden, he knows the world’s about to do him in. That’s the blues, son. The sure-enough blues.”

In 1946, King was still only a weekend musician; he supported himself by driving a farm tractor. But when he accidentally backed the tractor into a barn wall and snapped off the exhaust pipe, “he panicked, fearing the bossman’s reaction. He’d have to labor for years to pay him back.

“I didn’t know what to do,” he said. “I didn’t know what to tell him. I didn’t know anything. So I just started to walking.”

It’s fair to say King kept walking the rest of his life, starting with a stay in Memphis, where he soon had his own show on WDIA, an African-American radio station. As a d.j. he played the music of Charlie Brown, Dinah Washington, Charlie Christian and T-Bone Walker. Before long he was playing and singing his own songs on the show, and touring locally as well.

King’s increasing skills as a musician led to his first record deal, with a small music company owned by the Biharis brothers. That was followed by an album recorded at Sun Studios, which attracted the attention of the Chess brothers in Chicago. They controlled the blues scene there, beginning with Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf (both of whom played Mississippi blues). King fit right in with them and soon began challenging them on his electric guitar, which he famously called Lucille.

Hit records and fame came next. King became wealthy, only to gamble away a big portion of his earnings. He was addicted to gambling–-and women. Although he married early and swore that he loved his wife, King fathered a dozen or more children with an assortment of women–-all of whom he acknowledged and provided for over the years. To maintain that expensive lifestyle, King toured 300 days a year and recorded a staggering number of albums, many of which made the charts and won a slew of major awards.

King was also tapped by the US government to tour Africa, Japan and the Soviet Union as a good-will ambassador. Then came invitations to sing at Federal prisons, the White House, and in major Hollywood films (such as “Blues Brothers”). King was even invited back to his formerly segregated hometown of Indianola, where he was hailed as a native son and asked to cut the ribbon on a blues museum named after himself.


Through it all, King kept touring and performing, even when he was slowed by illness and age, performing his shows sitting down. “I’ll bet you thought you’d never live long enough to see B.B. King sit down,” he said. He worked the chair into his act and began playing “a series of softer, more intimate songs...and telling stories between songs.”

King had battled weight gain since middle age. By 1990 he weighed over 300 pounds, far too heavy for a man of five ten. To control his diabetes and weight problem, he turned to the Pritikin diet and gradually began to slim down. That gave him another twenty years of life and work, though with ever-decreasing energy and vitality. He died on April 30, 2015; his last thoughts were about going back on tour.

It’s all there in KING OF THE BLUES, all the ups and downs, good times and bad times, in the life of the blues icon, B.B. King. As Stewart Levine, B.B.’s producer said, “His legacy is that he introduced America to its own music. And that’s about as big a legacy as you could have.”

(Groveatlantic.com)

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