Daniel de Vise - King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B. B. King

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KING OF THE BLUES

THE RISE AND REIGN OF B.B. KING

DANIEL

DE VIS

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright 2021 by Daniel de Vis

Map by Martin Lubikowski, ML Design, London

Jacket design: Kelly Winton

Jacket photograph John Shearer/Getty Images

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FIRST EDITION

Published simultaneously in Canada

First Grove Atlantic edition: October 2021

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-5805-5

eISBN 978-0-8021-5807-9

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

To Mom

BACK INSIDE A JAIL WAS ONE PLACE B.B. King thought he would never go. He had spent only a single night in a cell, after a white cop flagged him down on a Mississippi highway for doing eighty in a sixty-mile-per-hour zone. That was in 1950. B.B. was then a struggling musician and underpaid radio performer in his twenties, still picking cotton to make ends meet, racing to a gig in a borrowed car. The fine was ninety dollars. B.B. didnt have it, and the imperious cop knew it.

Two decades later, on September 10, 1970, B.B. stood on the cusp of his forty-fifth birthday. In those forty-five years, Riley B. King had risen from penniless sharecropper to sidewalk busker to Memphis deejay to chart-topping singer to King of the Blues. Guitar heroics defined popular music in 1970, and B.B. King was the first guitar hero.

B.B.s story was the story of the Great Migration, the northward journey that delivered millions of African Americans from southern plantations into the urban North. B.B. had hitchhiked out of Mississippi, found fame in Memphis, and then set out across the nation in a bus called Big Red. After two decades on the fabled Black chitlin circuit, B.B. had crossed over, capping his symbolic breakthrough with a triumphant performance for a throng of white hippies at San Franciscos pot-scented Fillmore Auditorium in 1967. After that, B.B.s audience had changed color. He played mostly for whites now.

But this gig was different: a show inside Chicagos infamous Cook County Jail, conceived by an African American warden to entertain 2,400 inmates, most of them African Americans. B.B. rejoiced at performing for Black people again.

B.B. and his band entered the jail around eleven that morning. Stony-faced guards patted them down and escorted them through heavy steel doors, which closed with a sickening clang. The group proceeded down endless, windowless tunnels, past offices and cells and the jails electric chair, to a mess hall, followed everywhere by eyes and rock-hard. A beefy guard shadowed the bluesman, his eyes searching for the flashing blade of a shank. Most of the men were young enough to be B.B.s children. One by one, they shared stories of languishing inside cells for months without end, awaiting trial, unable to post bail, powerless to leave.

After a tasteless meal, guards led the band outside to a bleak and gusty courtyard. The entourage headed toward a small stage, a raised platform where condemned men had once been hanged. A stubborn wind tore sheet music from the musicians stands and whisked it over the forbidding thirty-foot stone walls. But a warm autumn sun shone on the yard, and the air was a perfect seventy degrees. The weather had held, and that was good, for organizers had committed to a concert on this day. B.B. was playing for free, but his label had spent $10,000 on transportation, salaries, and equipment to record the performance for eventual release as a live album.

The musicians warmed up, played a sound check, and jammed with men from the jailhouse band as the audience filed out to the yard. Two hundred female inmates sat in folding chairs at stage left. More than two thousand men sprawled out in roped-off sections of grass. The men on death row remained locked in their cells, listening through opened windows.

The concert began at 1 p.m. Hello out there, a female jail official announced. She introduced the white sheriff and a prominent white judge to the jump-suited crowd, setting off a chorus of violent boos that echoed across the yard. Fifty guards with thick batons and .50-caliber semiautomatic rifles roamed the perimeter and perched atop towers. Concerts didnt get much more real. Sensing tension in the air, the announcer hurried things along, beckoning, Would you please come forth, Mr. King? And then B.B. climbed atop the old gallows, clad in an olive-green plaid suit. A gunshot blast from Sonny Freemans snare drum announced the first song: Every Day I Have the Blues. The six-piece band raced forward, shuffling in matching powder-blue suits, propelled by Freemans galloping swing beat. B.B. spun the volume knob to awaken Lucille, his sinuous, symmetrical Gibson guitar. He played his first notes, climbing up to a blue third, bending the string with his powerful fingers to rise from D flat to D natural, then dancing back down and ending the solo phrase on a sustained note. B.B. flailed his left wrist up and down to create the shimmering vibrato that was his trademark. B.B. felt that he and Lucille spoke with the same voice, one picking up where the other left off. A few bars later, it was B.B.s turn. Evry day, evry day I have the blues, he sang, a rich, booming baritone that formed way back in his clenched throat. Two minutes later, the song was over, and the yard erupted in applause and cheers. This audience, surely, could relate to the blues.

Now the band slid into B.B.s signature song, How Blue Can You Get. Lucille unleashed an aural fireworks display that recounted the history of urban blues, much of it written by B.B. on his guitar: soaring bends, rapid-fire staccato bursts, and sustained, tremulous tones. And then B.B. sang: Ive been downhearted, baby, ever since the day we met, he growled, reminding his audience that he was not just the worlds greatest blues guitarist but also an archetypal rhythm-and-blues singer. B.B. sang, and Lucille cried, and the crowd talked and cried and shouted back. As B.B. slowed into a campy, feminine reading of the songs climactic bridge, the audience clamor threatened to overwhelm the band, a release of pure, electric energy that B.B. breathed in like oxygen.