Blues Legend B.B. King Dies at 89

by Belle Waring on May 18, 2015

B.B. King died last Thursday. I feel he was one of the last great blues stars. But as talented as he was I have a terrible confession to make. He was so influential on white rockers such as Eric Clapton that a) they just copied him slavishly lick for lick, all the time, forever b) I have developed a back-formation feeling that unfairly prejudices me against the music of a true guitar hero.



From the NYT obit:

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a shack surrounded by dirt-poor sharecroppers and wealthy landowners.

Mr. King went out on the road and never came back after one of his first recordings reached the top of the rhythm-and-blues charts in 1951. He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim.

He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s, who remained loyal as they grew older together. His playing influenced many of the most successful rock guitarists of the era, including Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix.

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlin’s and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.

When he saw “longhaired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”

“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”

He was an amazing live performer, and kept playing right up to the end of his life. This song, “The Thrill is Gone” was his signature tune.

Now, I feel like I hate Eric Clapton, but this can’t be right because I love some Eric Clapton songs! Like who doesn’t love “White Room“? And “Bell-Bottom Blues” off Layla is actually the jam. It’s just an excellent album, really, but was over-played. But that’s because–Duane Allman no backsies.

I also like the spectacularly goofy “Anyone For Tennis.” (You need to watch that video.) It’s just like the Spinal Tap “Cakes and Tea” song. And “Let It Grow,” similar in a “you need to be stoned tho” way.

{ 34 comments }

1

Ebenezer Scrooge 05.18.15 at 10:31 am

Eric Clapton couldn’t copy B.B. King. It takes Clapton ten notes to do what King could do with one. Admittedly, Clapton has pretty fast fingers . . .

2

bill benzon 05.18.15 at 12:22 pm

Some years ago I was in a band that opened for King in upstate New York. After the show we got to meet King and chat w/ him for a minute or two. There were a lot of middle-aged ladies there to see him, in their Sunday finery, including big elaborate hats. What I remember from his show:

It was in a slow blues late in the set, the volume was down, and King was singing about misery. And boy was he miserable. To hear him you’d think he was fixin’ to die right there on stage, just dissolve into a pile of pulsating protoplasm. Then, all of a sudden, he snapped his head a quarter turn toward the audience and a big smile flashed across his face: Gotcha! Just as quickly, the smile disappeared and King continued on his progress toward pulsating protoplasm.

Also, he couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time. It was one or the other. At his best, though, he’d get people dancing in the aisles.

3

Belle Waring 05.18.15 at 12:32 pm

I know, it’s funny how he has to stop playing to sing! But he’s awesome.

4

Teachable Mo' 05.18.15 at 1:22 pm

It seems to these ears that Clapton’s chief influence was Albert King, but tracing influences in the Blues is as hopeless as Biblical exegesis.

Meanwhile here’s the father/son duo, Jimmy Raney and Doug Raney:

5

Daniel 05.18.15 at 1:28 pm

I am going to step in to defend Clapton here. Obviously “copied him lick for lick, all the time” is hyperbole (unless BB King had a psychedelia, acoustic or country-rock period I’m unaware of), but actually the influence went both ways. In fact, BB King has two signature blues cliches, both of which he invented – the “hummingbird vibrato” with the thumb removed from the back of the neck, and the minor-third-to-major-sixth interval. Clapton doesn’t really use either of them, probably because he doesn’t want to sound like a copyist. BB King was obviously massively influential on the British blues explosion, but he was by no means the biggest influence compared to Albert King and Muddy Waters.

In fact, a lot of the real purists tended to avoid him, because he didn’t perform “authenticity” enough – records like “The Thrill Is Gone” had string sections on them at a time when the export market for blues was very much against that sort of thing. There’s also a lot of audible influence from Django Reinhardt in his playing, which was obviously beyond the pale.

Clapton was an amazing magpie when it came to guitar styles, and always seemed to have a hero-of-the-week, whether it was Robert Johnson, Jimi Hendrix, JJ Cale or Duane Allman. But he was also extremely generous in giving credit and sharing his success; everyone should wish that Eric Clapton was ripping them off! And BB King himself wasn’t averse to a little bit of copyism – I remember it being noted in the 1980s that, after a tour they’d done together, the great man was sounding rather more like Stevie Ray Vaughan than you’d expect.

At the end of the day, I don’t think it can be sustained that people slavishly copied BB King. If you copy BB King note for note, then nobody would bother listening to you, because the actual phrases are often pretty simple and repetitive – I don’t think Belle’s distaste is backformed at all, those actually are pentatonic cliches being played at you over and over again in different keys. More than almost anyone else, his greatness was all in the performance – his mastery of microtones and inflections that were particular to him personally.

6

Vance Maverick 05.18.15 at 1:51 pm

Sure, Clapton didn’t copy King. They don’t sound alike — not sure what more argument is needed. But to Daniel’s list of things King did, I would add the combination of loud and soft phrases into larger units. This is pretty distinctive and marvelous, more like Basie or other jazz references than like blues (or rock). I can remember Otis Rush doing it sometimes in his side work with Junior Wells, but not so much as a leader.

Also, King at his best (say through mid-60s) was an excellent singer, much more interesting than Clapton or many others.

7

The Temporary Name 05.18.15 at 2:18 pm

When asked why the band was called Z.Z. Top Billy Gibbons said “B.B. King was taken.”

Gibbons doesn’t sound like B.B. King either, but he has a similar appreciation for slowing it down and making a little tonal variation seem like a note-change.

8

Belle Waring 05.18.15 at 2:53 pm

Billy Gibbons is fucking amazing. ZZ Top’s “Tejas” is in my top 25 albums of ever.
Yes, I was exaggerating and clearly Clapton wasn’t copying B.B. King as hard as all that–I have listened to the songs I linked to, which are all distinctively non B.B. King-like (there are frogs in the “Anyone For Tennis” video. Lots of frogs; you should watch it. I just feel that annoying later Clapton does seem more like pseudo-King. Bending the strings so far up, pretty high on the neck there? (Who needs a whammy bar?) I feel like there are a couple of techniques like that which are especially B.B. King.

9

jonnybutter 05.18.15 at 2:56 pm

he couldn’t sing and play guitar at the same time.

Neither can I, nor can a lot of people! If you are just strumming along like Don McLean, it’s not so hard a trick, but when you are playing the kind of vocal influenced stuff King and other blues players did, it’s quite hard to sing and play at the same time. And why would you want to anyway?

10

Daniel 05.18.15 at 3:27 pm

I feel like there are a couple of techniques like that which are especially B.B. King.

iirc they’re mainly Buddy Guy.

11

Meredith 05.18.15 at 10:33 pm

I get what you’re saying, Belle, but I wonder. I’ve read that B. B. found more favor with white audiences than black at the crucial point in his career that “made” him — he speculated that black folks then were less interested in his music because they didn’t want to be reminded of their slave past. Lead Belly also found more favor with white audiences (like my mother, who had 78’s of his — I remember them among the old Pete Seegers and such) than black. So maybe these men are just two among the black performers that many white folks get to know about and be influenced by. Or maybe our history (our as black, our as white) really is OUR history, white and black, a history playing games with us, inviting us all to keep jamming together till we get it right.

12

js. 05.18.15 at 11:26 pm

I don’t much care for Clapton either, but Cream is solid. I mean, how can anyone not like Strange Brew?

13

Vance Maverick 05.19.15 at 12:10 am

Where I wrote “Otis Rush” above, read “Buddy Guy”, sorry.

Cream was good, thanks substantially to Baker and Bruce. Especially when they improvise, you can hear Clapton lagging behind them. He was good, but not “god”.

14

Belle Waring 05.19.15 at 1:31 am

js: word. “Strange Brew” is classic. Like I say, my professed dislike of Clapton does not sit very easily with my actual love for many Clapton songs. I’ve probably just heard that fucking if I saw you in heaven song too many times.

15

Tom Hurka 05.19.15 at 1:40 am

B.B. King’s guitar style is pretty unmistakable. If you turn on the car radio and it’s in the middle of a solo of his you know immediately who it is. I’m no music theorist; I can’t do the minor-third-to-major-sixth thing like Daniel. But I always found his solos distinctively melodic. On one of albums of duets he did with other guitarists, I find his solo pretty much always blows theirs away. Not because it’s flashier or has more tricks but because it’s more musical.

Fourteen years ago I had one of my hips replaced and did my rehab exercises to his Blues on the Bayou CD, a 1998 one done just with his band and none of the strings and crap producers used to put on him in the 1960s. It was great — physiotherapists should recommend it. Last year I had the other hip done and was back rehabbing to the same sounds.

And why is it important whether he influenced this guy or wasn’t copied by that one? Surely it’s his playing considered by itself, or listened to by itself, that matters.

Oh, and Steve Goodman — remember him? wrote “The City of New Orleans” that Arlo Guthrie sang — had a very funny short song about B.B. called “I Ain’t Heard You Play No Blues.”

16

Tabasco 05.19.15 at 1:46 am

King was, possibly, arguably, not the most enlightened man when it came to relations between the genders. From Paying the Cost to be the Boss

As long as I’m workin’, baby
And payin’ all the bills
I don’t want no mouth from you
About the way I’m supposed to live

You must be crazy, woman
Just gotta be out of your mind
As long as I’m footin’ the bill
I’m paying the cost to be the boss

17

js. 05.19.15 at 2:00 am

I’m with Vance Maverick in thinking that the goodness of Cream has a lot to do with Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce. And also the general goodness of the late ’60s. The horror show that is the “heaven song” aside, I don’t think I like anything Clapton did after, I don’t know, 1972. The other reason I don’t like Clapton though is that I find the whole “guitar god” discourse unbelievably annoying, and even find arguments about “virtuosity” basically off-putting (which, I think, an early love of hip hop and punk rock will tend to do). All of which by way of conceding that there are some very good Clapton songs from the ’60s and early ’70s.

18

Krogerfoot 05.19.15 at 2:38 am

@ 16: Wait, you’re saying that a blues singer wrote (?) and sang a song complaining about his woman? That’s an airtight case you’ve made for first-degree misogyny there.

I wanted to chime in about King’s singing; it really is often overlooked what a great voice he had. One of those manly roars that obscures how high he’s singing, until you I’ll-advisedly try to sing along.

19

Harold 05.19.15 at 3:42 am

Black artists played for white audiences because that was where the money was. They played for black audiences, too, of course. “Mastery of microtones and inflections” is what makes music musical. I often feel that when young urban singers began to copy blues and other traditional styles, they took only rough, sometimes cartoonish outlines because they and their audiences couldn’t really really hear and absorb all of what was going on in the original.

20

CDT 05.19.15 at 3:51 am

Actually, both vocally and in terms of guitar work, I’d say Clapton copies Otis Rush most of all.

21

Kym 05.19.15 at 4:14 am

I’m with those that see Clapton’s main (audible) influence as Buddy Guy. There are bits of other players in there, too, but I find his style to be quite distinctive and recognisable, at least when he was playing mostly blues based music.

From a guitar player’s perspective, I feel that he was ‘better’ than most of the old bluesmen he venerated publicly. Consistent, generally in tune (including the extreme bends), great tone and effective at building a narrative type solo. A lot of the guys that invented personal guitar licks recycled them without much thought of how they connected. The ‘Bluesbreakers’ album still stands up as one of the best electric blues guitar albums ever made.

I’m sorry that BB King is gone, and used to try to see him whenever he came through town, but that major scale blues sound has never been one of my favourites, and his concerts could be a bit offputting and Las Vegas like (appropriately enough).

By the way, if you really want to hear great blues guitar with a perfect mix of technique and emotion I would suggest listening to Peter Green in Fleetwood Mac days.

22

Alan Bostick 05.19.15 at 2:38 pm

No one has mentioned B.B. King’s particular innovation for blues guitar: lots of bending and vibrato through the pushing and stretching of the guitar strings with his fingers on the fretboard. Everybody does it now; but it was King who developed and elaborated the style, as an attempt to reproduce the wails and glissandos of a bottleneck slide with just the fingers on the neck.

King learned a lot about blues guitar from his mother’s cousin, Bukka White, an old-school Delta bluesman noted for his use of a slide on a National steel guitar.

Many, including King himself, claim that Live at the Regal was his best album; but my own opinion is that Live at Cook County Jail, which features pretty much the same material, is more engaging and emotionally powerful.

23

Bill Benzon 05.19.15 at 6:12 pm

On King’s audience, I just had a quick chat with Charlie Urban Blues Keil who tells me that when he saw (and talked to) King in 1963 at the Regal Theater in Chicago, the audience was “as black as any audience I’ve ever seen.” The Fillmore West gig when he broke through to a white audience was in 68 or 69 so I figure it was in between those two date that the black audience more or less abandoned him. When I opened for him it would have been the mid-to-late 1980s. The audience was certainly mostly white, but the people back stage to see him after the concert where mostly black and middle-aged.

Keep in mind that the white population of the country is considerably larger than the black population. Even if the percentage of whites interested in the blues is smaller than the percenatage of blacks, the absolute number could be quite a bit larger. I’ve seen some National Endowment for the Arts figures about the jazz audience (late 1990s) and there the number of whites is considerably larger than the number of blacks, but the percentage of whites is lower than that of blacks. I’d guess that that’s been true for jazz at least since WWII if not going back to the 1920s or 1930s.

As for “authenticity” (@Daniel #5), there are various notions of that. When Keil wrote Urban Blues he was working against the (mostly white) idea that the true blues was acoustic and rural (and it didn’t hurt if the musician was old, crippled, and missing some teeth). A big part of his motivation for doing that book was to argue that these musicians who played electrified instruments and wore suits were playing authentic blues.

24

Jon 05.19.15 at 7:50 pm

Always had a spot for his early stuff….blues got boring when it became something you sat and stroked your chin to (or got stoned). I blame limey white boys for that…..we never could dance.

25

maidhc 05.19.15 at 10:37 pm

In 1965, being a white kid who owned B.B. King records was like being a member of a secret society. By 1968 the secret was out. It was the new crop of white guitar players who spread the word, people like Mike Bloomfield and, yes, Eric Clapton.

I don’t think that B.B. was Clapton’s primary influence though. I hear more Buddy Guy, Albert King, Freddy King (early in his career Clapton recorded “Hide Away” pretty much note for note).

Sad that B.B. is gone. I’m glad I got to see him live, and he’s left us with plenty of good recordings to remember him.

26

Belle Waring 05.20.15 at 5:08 am

22: no one except…me?

27

dr ngo 05.20.15 at 5:18 am

It’s not all about you, Belle. ;}

28

dsquared 05.20.15 at 5:53 am

#22 he definitely didn’t invent that technique! Remember he was only twenty years older than Eric Clapton. String bending is at least forty years older.

I have to be prepared to yaddayadda “Tears in heaven” – I don’t like it at all, but Christ, what must he gave been feeling at the time. There is no excuse, though, for the acoustic version of “Layla”, which EC is =still* playing live, and is the main reason I’m boycotting him. Mind you, I can never really stand Duane Allman, whose crimes against taste are manifold – the CD version of the Derek & The Dominoes album makes it clear how much awful squeaky bollocks he was responsible for

29

Tim Mason 05.20.15 at 12:19 pm

@Krogerfoot Anyone who has seen BB King and Bobby Bland waving their fists in the air and joking about how they keep their women in line will want to think at least a little bit about misogyny. All good fun, of course.

King was a hedgehog, Clapton a fox.

30

David J. Littleboy 05.20.15 at 3:03 pm

Count me in on the folk who don’t hear BB in Eric. Clapton was more into Freddie King sorts of things (in the Mayall days). By the time King was noticed by white audiences, he was doing his own version of the blues; a bit more variety in the chord changes, shorter phrases in solos. And the most amazingly wonderful guitar sound in those solos.

Tim Mason @99: “misogony”

That’s a major problem with blues and rock lyrics. A lot of them are seriously gross. I’m more willing to ignore that in blues than in rock, though*.

But it’s all BB King’s fault that I’ve been desperately trying to figure out jazz, not blues, guitar the last few years. King toured Japan with a big band with Kenny Burrell on guitar (in 1989). Burrell took a solo, and it was a revelation: it’s jazz, not blues, that I wanted to be doing. It took me a while to actually start doing that, and the first try fizzled (work was still busy), but I’m making a bit more progress now with a teacher who I picked out because the schedule he teaches (on 90 minute lesson a month) works for me, but he turns out to be a monster Kenny Burrell** fan.

*: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBdkO0LFpWc
**: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1ipftv39YU

31

CDT 05.20.15 at 10:55 pm

Rather than debate who most influenced the formerly great if derivative Clapton, I’d suggest everyone in this thread buy Otis Rush’s Cobra Sessions and Magic Sam’s West Side Soul. Or, at a minimum download “Double Trouble” and “That’a All I Need.” You and the world be better off. I hereby promise to buy at full price either CD or vinyl from any dissatisfied CT reader. Then we can continue this debate.

32

JPL 05.21.15 at 8:55 am

The linked site in Daniel’s comment (@5) has a video of a BB King performance of beautiful subtlety where he’s exploring the sonic continuum between the notes, much appreciated by the jazz- oriented audience.

Here’s something I like to put on when listening to current pop music of the kind you hear on the radio has left me dispirited and despairing of the future of pop music — just to remember the difference! (Jimmy McGriff is on organ.)

33

JPL 05.21.15 at 9:13 am

Here’s a video of Albert Collins live at Montreux in ’92. (There’s also a video on there of a Montreux concert in 1979 that would be good to check out.) He was probably not an influence on Eric Clapton, but I’m sure a lot of other rock guitarists have admired his playing, Hendrix, for example.

Jon — take a listen! This is not chin- stroking music!

34

Henry (not the famous one) 05.22.15 at 1:53 pm

I was never a Clapton devotee, being a narrow-minded blues fan who rejected Cream as “rock.” But if I had been, I would have stopped listening to him, talking about him or doing anything other than pissing on him after hearing about these comments he made in Birmingham in the 1970s:

Stop Britain from becoming a black colony. Get the foreigners out. Get the wogs out. Get the coons out. Keep Britain white. I used to be into dope, now I’m into racism. It’s much heavier, man. Fucking wogs, man. Fucking Saudis taking over London. Bastard wogs. Britain is becoming overcrowded and Enoch will stop it and send them all back.

http://dangerousminds.net/comments/eric_claptons_disgusting_racist_tirade#eAejJhI1gZZE6D52.99. He has never apologized for these comments AFAIK. And an apology nearly forty years later doesn’t cut it anyway.

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