LIVING LEGEND:

Spinning Blues Into Gold, the Rough Way (BERNARD WEINRAUB, March 2, 2003, NY Times)

What defines Mr. King's style is the interplay of his strong voice and guitar as extensions of each other. He sings and plays and sings again. His guitar and voice, as Mr. King once said, come "from different parts of my soul." He added that he wanted his guitar to "sound human."

"By bending the strings, by trilling my hand - and I have big, fat hands - I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato," Mr. King said in his 1996 autobiography, "Blues All Around Me," written with David Ritz. He added: "I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions."

Peter Guralnick, author of the acclaimed two-volume biography of Elvis Presley, "Last Train to Memphis" and "Careless Love," offered a particularly rounded assessment of Mr. King's enormous contribution to blues and rock:

"It was King's style of rapidly picked single notes, embellishing and extending the vocal and rarely supporting it with full-bodied chords, which prevailed to create a whole blues-tinged vocabulary for modern rock.

"He never played while he was singing. He essentially played single notes that extended the vocal line. When the vocal was over, the guitar was introduced to play single notes that extended the vocal line. He made use of the treble end of the scale for dramatics in a way quite different from John Lee Hooker or Muddy Waters or traditional blues singers."

This made him a groundbreaking contributor to the genre, and coupled with the deeper values he embodied, it created the context through which "almost single-handedly B. B. King introduced the blues to white America," Mr. Guralnick said. He added that this was achieved by Mr. King - rather than by other blues legends - because of "the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to."

Mr. King's eclectic style - nurtured for years on the "chitlin circuit" of black clubs and dance halls - was derived from various sources: jazz, gospel, country, even Frank Sinatra and other stars. By contrast, the purer, Delta-rooted style of Muddy Waters, with its piercing slide-guitar attack, while exalted by critics and musicians for its energy and authenticity, had a narrower appeal. (On the other hand, the Waters song "Rollin' Stone" inspired the names of a band and a magazine.) [...]

He was born Riley B. King on Sept. 16, 1925, in a sharecropper's cabin near Indianola, Miss. His father, Albert, often worked two consecutive double shifts, 48 hours, at 50 cents a shift. Mr. King's parents separated when he was 4, and his mother took him to her family in Kilmichael, in the hills east of the Delta. Mr. King walked six miles round trip to a segregated one-room schoolhouse. He earned 35 cents a day picking cotton.

At 7 he became fascinated with the gospel singing and guitar playing of a sanctified preacher, Archie Fair, a distant relative, at the Church of God in Christ. That preacher let the young Riley play his guitar and urged him to become a minister. But against the wishes of his deeply religious mother, who called the blues "devil music," the boy listened to Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson on the radio.

At 9 Mr. King was left alone. His mother died at 25, perhaps of diabetes, and then his grandmother died. He said that a plantation owner named Floyd Cartledge and his family allowed him to live by himself on their property and earn his keep by performing house chores and milking cows. They kept a paternal eye on him. In his autobiography Mr. King said that while other plantation owners were "coldblooded racists," Cartledge - whom he still calls "Mr. Flake" - was decent enough to advance him $15 to buy a cherry-red Stella guitar when he was 12.

A brief, unhappy reunion with his father - who had remarried - led Mr. King to strike out on his own at 13. He moved to Indianola, picked cotton and worked as a tractor driver on another large farm. He consumed himself with music, joining a group of gospel singers and listening to bluesmen like Tampa Red and Big Boy Crudup on the radio. He began playing gospel and blues on his guitar on Saturday nights on street corners in Indianola, hoping to pick up spare change. It was here he learned that the money was in the blues.

Unable to afford his own guitar at first, he put nails in a wall and then tied strings between them and, if I'm not mistaken, was one of seemingly hundreds of great Southern musicians to buy his first guitar through the Sears catalogue. Having him around and performing still is like getting to see Babe Ruth play baseball. Posted by Orrin Judd at April 7, 2003 8:15 PM