1.
If you really want to know something about B.B. King, consider this: He saw a boy lynched when he was a teenager.
He talks about it in a 2013 interview with Tavis Smiley. He recalls that the victim, a few years younger than himself, was dragged by a group of white men right past where King stood. The crime was apparently some kind of unsanctioned interaction with a white woman. King says that this frightened him and made him think "as it had happened to that guy, it could happen to me." Which, of course, is the point of lynchings. A brutality committed upon one body meant to regulate the behavior of all bodies.
I’ve wondered how much King thought about this when, two decades later, he was being introduced to all-white audiences for the first time as the opening act on the Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. tour.
2.
Like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and others, King’s "discovery" by white musicians is frequently subsumed into the narrative of "roots music" as an act of anthropological providence. We imagine him sitting on a crate in front of a dusty country store playing a guitar made from a cereal box and twine when an intrepid explorer stumbled upon him and recognized his primitive brilliance. But this is very far from the case. First of all, he was primarily distinguished from other musicians of the time by his extraordinary guitar work, a style that is now so ubiquitous that, like most blues, it comes across to modern ears as a trite cliche, something your dad would be into, everything we now hate about guitar rock. Yet in the 1950s he was the man who was inventing this. Aretha Franklin is rumored to have defined soul as "the ability to make other people feel what you’re feeling," and King had a way of isolating notes, bending his strings, vibrating tones with his fingers, alternately rushing and drawing out distinct phrases that made people feel exactly what he was feeling without him ever having to say it. Every musician wants that. B.B King was that.
But there’s another, perhaps more important, reason King’s work was picked up on by British kids nearly two decades after he played his first guitar.
His résumé.
In 1939, he was picking cotton for $1.50 per day. In 1941, he made his first appearance on the radio. In 1946, he made his first 45 rpm record and was paid two cents per side, 4 cents in total. By 1949 he was signed to a Los Angeles based label by Sam Phillips, who would go on to make a career of recording black music (though mostly sung by Elvis). By 1956 he was booking 342 concerts per year and owned his own record label. In 1962, he signed with ABC, which became MCA, which became Geffen. And by 1964, he had leveraged this robust marketing and distribution network to turn his recording Live at the Regal into an industry classic. He then began working with legendary manager Sid Siedenberg who had the connections to push King into the emerging blues rock scene. So by the time the Rolling Stones "discovered" him, he had been playing, recording, touring, traveling, and making incredibly accurate professional moves for two decades. He didn’t luck into fame. Like all people who grew up on hard labor, he had an exceptional work ethic and a knack for knowing exactly when to be confident and when to be just gentle enough that his career could continue. B.B. King was a masterful businessman who took very little, which is what most Black people had in those decades, and sculpted it into a great deal. In order for him to be "discovered" he had to still be there in the first place. Given the time and place of his life, this, alone, is an act of profound business capability.
And his business was The Blues, which is to say his business was trading in his pain for money.
3.
Scholars believe that The Blues originated with slaves, particularly those from the Igbo people in West Africa who allegedly had a penchant for expressing melancholy in song. Imagine you have been taken a long long way from home. Imagine you work on a plantation or a prison farm. Imagine you are a black man or woman living in the rural south in the 1910s. It would be fair to say, wouldn’t it, that beneath your daily experiences of love, loss, birth, life, death, victories, and failures, there would be a deep and persistent undercurrent of grief, of sadness for your inability to be free or to be human. The mantle of oppression would rest heavily on you and everyone you knew. If you were to resist or be aggressive or even overly confident, you may find yourself descended upon by mobs of people who may physically tear your body apart and hang your corpse from a tree. You may have even seen it happen.
Blues is the music that makes an art from this pervasive misery, exploring its nuances and contours, setting tones, waves, melodies, and hollers to it. Blues is the music that makes you feel it as we all feel it. But it does more. Because Blues is, by nature, an affirmation of humanity. It is not just about a call, but about a response to that call. I say how I feel and you know exactly what feeling that it is. Because even though the words are not specific, they are precise. Specificity means saying the exact words. Precision means saying the words in the exact right way. The way that makes you feel what I feel because you’ve felt it yourself. And you thought you were the only one. The Blues is telepathy. A simple language to communicate the complex, to reveal something you thought you were the only one who had. And everyone in that room has had it, that particular brand of heartache, or pain, or shame, or fear, or anger, or loss. And they express that by yelling, and nodding, and encouraging me to play on. That is what blues is. Connection over the pain we experience.
B.B. King not only facilitated this connection, but he figured out how to make a living of it. He recognized the market for it, and staked out a place for himself and his people in that market through shrewdness and hard work. He played over 250 dates a year well into his eighties; there are very few people in any job who work that hard, even in their physical prime, much less in their eighth decade.
But then B.B. King wasn’t like people today. He was a man from the South who saw someone get lynched with his own eyes and recognized that if it could happen to that kid, it could happen to any one of us. And he worked his life according to this knowledge. He was humble, kind, precise, and relentless, mastering a particular combination of honesty, humility, privacy, and distance. When you see an interview with B.B. King, you get the distinct sense that just like his guitar style, every word is carefully chosen for minimal friction and maximum impact. He delivered precisely what people wanted him to deliver and he did so excellently. Everything else, everything messy and raw, aggressive and intimidating, he put into his playing. It was in his playing that he hollered out and made it safe for us to holler back.
4.
The Blues is, for all intents and purposes, dead. No one under the age of fifty writes about it or talks about it anywhere prominently. It seems only to exist on public radio or in bloated PBS concert specials. But the pain that makes the blues is still very much alive. Black people still holler out to make it safe for us to holler back. N.W.A. sang the blues. Kendrick Lamar sings the blues, Nas, Black Thought, FKA twigs, Curtis Mayfield, Earl Sweatshirt, Lupe Fiasco, Wu-Tang, Azealia Banks all sing the blues. And it’s very likely that one day the music these people create will, like the blues, be stale and faded, the sole dominion of grandiloquent academics, musty museums, and, yes, even overly-wordy think piece writers.
In the day or so after his death, the Internet did a lot of mentioning of his status as an icon, which is to say, an image that we can all own without having to actually know. An icon is two dimensions. It isn’t the thing. It is an idea of the thing. A stand-in for an old style that we recognize from commercials and movies and cartoons, but never actually experience.
But if you really want to know something about B.B. King, imagine yourself picking 400 pounds of cotton a day and considering yourself lucky. If you really want to know something about B.B. King, imagine watching a younger version of yourself being dragged through the streets by a white mob to be killed with bare hands without the benefit of a trial or even evidence. If you really want to know something about B.B. King, imagine touring the country for decades playing in shacks, juke joints, witnessing fights, stabbings, and murders. If you really want to know something about B.B. King imagine that you only had one safe place to express all of the pain, confusion, hope, and frustration of your life. Imagine that it was an instrument that you held in your hands with a total of 12 notes on it. Imagine what it would be like to spend your entire life bending those 12 notes just to make other people feel what you feel.