The Thrill Is Gone, But Not Forgotten: Remembering BB King

BB King was a guitar player’s guitar player, a man who found commercial success by crossing over from black to white audiences while staying true his signature sound.

It’s a hot and humid day in June and we’re at Eric Clapton’s Crossroads Festival 2010 in Chicago, the biannual concert that Clapton puts together to benefit his Crossroads Foundation to help fight substance abuse. The all-day festival features performances by guitar players who are there at Clapton’s personal invitation. The line-up is who’s who of the world of blues musicians. The flashy Jeff Beck, Clapton’s old pal from the Yardbirds days, is there. ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons is there too, beard and all. So is Joe Bonamassa, jamming with Robert Randolph. Slide maestro Derek Trucks is there, with guitar player/singer wife Susan Tedeschi and the wonderful Warren Haynes. Buddy Guy, Chicago’s own homeboy, is there with his perky beret and his polka dot Stratocaster. Comedian Bill Murray makes a cameo appearance dressed as Hendrix. Very groovy. Even the pale and frail Johnny Winter is there, barely able to walk to his chair, as is Hubert “Smokestack Lightning” Sumlin, guitar man for the great Howlin’ Wolf. Sadly, we would lose them both in the next few years.

The best, however, has been saved for the last. The crowd stands up as the King himself walks on stage with his trademark black Gibson ES 335 – his Lucille – slung across his broad shoulders. In his mid-eighties now, he has to sit down to play. Eric Clapton is there, so is Robert Cray, and Jimmie Vaughan, big brother to the late, great Stevie Ray Vaughan. They take their seats on chairs in deference to the master.  It’s like an intimate family reunion – except that 30,000 others have been invited as well.  As the half-moon shines down, the King picks out his first few notes and the Robert Cray Band follows him into the opening bars of The Thrill is Gone.

The arc of BB King’s life takes us from a childhood of poverty in the Mississippi cotton plantations, whose fertile soil produced all the music that forms the bedrock of the Blues, to President Obama’s White House in 2012 where the President himself joins the King in a rendition of Sweet Home Chicago.

Born Riley King, and nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy (after Beale Street in Memphis on whose street corners he started performing at the age of fifteen), shortened to Blues Boy, and eventually to BB, the King was one of the very few, along with Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf and Muddy Waters, whose music found its way to the British isles in the sixties. Once there, the music influenced British artistes such as Eric Clapton of John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, and Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones, to record this wonderful music in their own voice.  Clapton and the Stones would eventually bring it to a broader audience across the Atlantic, into America. Ironically, this would not be the first time American music would find recognition abroad. Francis Wolff, a refugee who migrated to America from Germany during WWII, had done the same for jazz musicians by launching the Blue Note record label.

As the opening act for the Stones on their 1969 tour, BB King crossed over from a black to a white audience, a key milestone for not just BB, but for an entire generation of blues musicians who found the direct public recognition they deserved, instead of being heard through ersatz renditions of their songs by white musicians from England. Even Eric Clapton said, when asked to comment on the Clapton is God graffiti in the London Underground in the sixties – Why the fuss? All I did was copy BB King. Indeed, BB King may be legitimately credited with bringing the blues to a mass audience.

BB King probably enjoyed more commercial success than others of his time. Part of that was his willingness to cross over, to play with all kinds of musicians, while remaining true to his trademark style. His commercial success was also in part due to Clapton’s efforts to pay his debt of gratitude to BB, releasing several albums jointly with King, and inviting him on stage whenever possible.

A visibly shaken and trembling Clapton, announcing BB’s passing via a home video recording, paid his brief, emotional tribute to the master, and struck a somber note about the decline of a pure form of the blues that BB King represented. His concerns may be valid. After all, there are very few of the old blues masters left. Buddy Guy is one of those few, performing continuously across the world, keeping the flame alive. He comes home to Chicago every year in January and performs a series of dates at his club Buddy Guy’s Legends, making it a point to provide exposure to opening acts from the younger generation.

In an era dominated by hip-hop, at a time when artistes like Kiss and Sting have declared that rock music is dead or dying, there are disturbingly few examples of commercially successful blues musicians. We rely on aging rock stars such as Clapton to carry the torch and inspire the younger generation, many of whom he performs with in support of the music. The commercial success of artists like Joe Bonamassa and Kenny Wayne Shepherd who play a blend of blues and rock may point to the kind of bridge between the past and the future that will eventually keep the blues alive.

To paraphrase a wise man, reports of the demise of the blues may be greatly exaggerated, and we certainly hope so. Regardless, the singular legacy of BB King will be remembered for a long time. BB King has routinely ranked among the top 10 guitar players of all time. BB King was a guitar player’s guitar player, a man who didn’t have to play a flurry of notes to announce his arrival, and certainly did not need Rolling Stone magazine’s endorsement to stake his claim to guitar greatness. Clapton once said, playing music that touches people is about boiling down all your emotions down to playing that one single note.  At the heart of BB King’s signature sound was that single note he hit every night, 300 nights a year, for over 60 years, up until the very end.

There is a musician joke that goes like this: How many blues musicians does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is four – one to actually change the bulb, and the other three to moan about how good the old bulb was. Loss and longing are central themes in blues music. Today we mourn the loss of one of the most influential musicians of our generation. To quote from a Grateful Dead song:

Fare thee well, let your life proceed by its own design

Nothing to tell, let the words be your, I’m done with mine.