Riley King’s (“B.B.” stands for “Blues Boy,” the moniker he took as a DJ on a Memphis radio station) early life followed the template of many of the blues greats. Born in the rural South (in his case, Mississippi), he worked in the cotton fields and learned to play blues guitar from a musician uncle. He honed his skills playing on street corners, and eventually made his Great Migration up to Memphis, Tennessee. There he continued to hone his craft and also got a gig as a DJ on a local rhythm and blues radio station.
King is famous for his deceptively simple, stinging, single note soloing style. There is that legendary scene from U2’s ‘Rattle and Hum’ film where the band is collaborating with King on “When Love Comes To Town.” U2’s guitarist Edge is trying to show King the chords for the song, and King replies, “oh, I don’t play no chords,” and Edge just stares at him for a moment, incredulous. The guy didn’t have to “play no chords.” You can hire people to do that for you. It sounds like such a cliché, but with King it is so true: he said so much more by playing less. It was a stinging, stabbing tone that had such a flow to it. Guitar players who play more notes and much faster than King cannot approach his expressiveness and placement. Placement both as to which notes he chooses to place where, but also placement within the rhythm of the song. Add to that his at times smooth, at other times explosive vocal style, and it was a unique one-two punch.
The tone he got from his successive guitars that he dubbed “Lucille” was such a fat, full, beautiful tone. (The best descendant of both the tone and style would be Robert Cray). How he named his guitar Lucille is an oft-told tale, but a great one. He was playing a gig at a club in Arkansas, and a fight broke out. Two men were fighting and knocked over a heater that started a fire, and the crowd and musicians ran out of the club. Realizing he had left his guitar inside, King risked his life to dash back into the burning building to save his prized axe. Later he found out the two men had been fighting over a woman named Lucille, hence the moniker for his guitars ever since.
What I really loved about King’s music, and what I think separated him from some of the other legendary blues artists of his generation and from similar backgrounds (Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, John Lee Hooker, etc.) was his restrained sophistication. King could play with fire on traditional blues of course (“Sweet Little Angel,” for example), but there was often something more, I don’t know, uptown about his style. Whereas with these other guys, the grittier and tougher the sound the better, my favorite B.B. King songs are the ones where he tries to add a sophisticated pop sheen to them, often with strings. Accoutrements that when used by other blues artists dilute their strengths, for some reason brought out the best in King. Songs like “Hummingbird,” “Ain’t Nobody Home,” “Help the Poor,” “Ghetto Woman” and of course his signature song “The Thrill Is Gone,” are King at his best in my view.
No comments:
Post a Comment