UNFORGETTABLE:

B.B. King could have done what most guys his age are doing nowadays: Put out an overhyped, but essentially soul-free album of duets featuring a head-scratching phalanx of with-it stars like, I don't know, Kid Rock and Jessica Simpson, then run a rut to the check-cashing place. Instead, B.B. King opened himself up creatively and, in some ways, even musically (since he's always been more known for a polished, citified sophistication) in the still-stirring winter of his justly legendary career.

One Kind Favor was like a trip to the bottom of a popping 1950s pot of country-cooked dirty rice, familiar yet complex. King opened with a song that, in anybody else's hands, playing with any other producer, might have been a sad valedictory: Here, however, Blind Lemon Jefferson's "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean" shuffled in as a quick-step admonition: B.B. King recognizes his looming mortality, and he's going to have a knee-slapping hootenanny in the meantime. "I'm not going anytime soon," he memorably welped, "but when the day comes, don't forget me."

Follow @brothersjudd