B.B. King Legacy

This video is one of a rich collection, combining interviews with B.B. King and a video concert in B.B.'s honor, titled "Blues Is King," plus photographs online at www.bluesisking.com. The concert took place in 2007 at Lowell Hall, Harvard University. It featured the band 2120 South Michigan Avenue, Sunny Crownover, Bruce Bears, Curtis Jerome Haynes, Monster Mike Welch, Sweet Willie "D", and J. Geils. B.B. King died May 14, 2015. J. Geils died April 11, 2017. The musical world mourns their passing.

J. Geils comments (2007), Harvard University:

If you consider what most people say, that blues is the foundation of Jazz, and Jazz is America's contribution to musical culture, I would rate it number one. I mean, there is nothing else that come close. I would like to think that I earned my reputation as a blues man. It takes a while. All we did was learn from records, which is a great tradition. Sonny Rollins says he listened to Lester Young record. Muddy clearly listened to Robert Johnson records. But amazingly enough shortly after we had formed the band and moved to Boston for the summer of 1967 we met up with Buddy Guy and Junior Wells and jammed with them at the Unicorn Coffee House until 2 or 3 in the morning, much different than listening to records. And we were terrible.... I first heard B.B. King on record in 1966 when I was at a very short stay at Worcester Polytech Institute. [Magic] Dick and I were deep into Chicago blues, Little Walter, Sonny Boy, Muddy Waters. I suspect it was "Live At The Regal" and it was like WOW, that's a lot more advanced, both musically and souling-wise than Buddy and Junior Wells and Howlin' Wolf. I was a big jazz fan, my father was a big jazz fan. That's all I heard as a kid growing up.

In the spring of '67 we read that B.B. was playing at "Cafe A Go Go" in Greenwich Village, New York, so Dick and me and our piano player, who had a car, drove from Worcester to New Your City to see him and got in. We're sitting there and we're psyched. Sonny Freeman and the band come on, organ, drums with Sonny, a couple of horns. They have to do 2 or 3 tunes. Then Sonny gets on the mic and says "Now ladies and gentlemen, the King of the Blues, B.B. King" and they kick into to "Everyday I Have the Blues," The horns come in and B goes [guitar lick] and I fell off my chair. That was my first real introduction to B.B. King. I said "Holy, Christ, THAT, I gotta learn how to do that." Within a month I drove to New Jersey, sold my guitar, got about 700 bucks, took a bus to New York, bought a red 345, used, because I couldn't afford the 355 he was playing. I should have bought a Fender amp but I bought an Ampeg. I still have that guitar today. For the next many, many months, maybe years, it was that guitar and listening to "Live At the Regal" and "Blues Is King" What was great when we saw him in the spring of '67 it was the same band that had recorded "Blues Is King" at a club in Chicago in November of '66. It was the real deal. I was right in on the end of that era that was spectacular. The outtakes have been reissued. "Sweet Sixteen" with the whole intro, oh, man, it's to die for.

He's one of the handful of major American music innovators. I prefer not to make a division between jazz and blues. We're talking about American improvised music. Whether you call it jazz or blues or whatever, and everyone agrees with this from Nat Hentoff to Gunther Schuler, they all agree, there's a handful of American Music Innovators. Number 1 is Louis Armstrong, then depending on your point of view, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, maybe Charlie Christian, but B.B. King is still alive and he's one of those handful innovators because he invented a whole new way to play the guitar. Now his singing was and is great, but he wasn't doing anything earth breaking in that area because it had already been invented by Louis Armstrong and Billie Holiday, earlier blues singers, but his guitar playing he took from Charlie Christian who was the first electric guitar player of note and T-Bone Walker and he formulated a technique that everybody uses today and that's what makes him an innovator in the same way that Armstrong was in his time and Charlie Parker was in his time.

"Monster" Mike Welch comments:

The interesting thing about B.B. King is that B.B. has had at least three or four distinct styles over the course of his career. And you can hear it developing. A lot of young guitar players don't understand the kind of guitar player B.B. is, they don't understand the wealth of knowledge he has and the amount that he can pull out at any given moment because he has streamlined his playing into this very direct, simple, very few notes approach. Everything he plays has that story telling, everything he sings is so connected to story and the mood of what he's trying to get across. I never feel like I've heard B.B. display his technique. Sometimes he'll throw a little something in there just to show off a bit, because he seems to have some pride but everything seems to be about making sure that people feel what he's saying, that people understand the story he's telling.

B.B.'s innovation was the use of bending the strings and using the vibrato that B.B.'s perfected over the years, which is really his signature thing, to mimic either a singer, or slide guitar or horn... To me one of the big differences, one of the things B.B. contributed as a singer and a guitar player is a lot of the single-note blues guitar players before him were conversational. T-Bone Walker was very conversational or rhythmic in nature. He'll play like a dancer sometimes, whereas B.B. goes for those big dramatic notes and those octave leaps and it's like a gospel singer, like a gospel preacher. [He] uses the whole neck, not afraid to play the highest notes on the guitar to make your point, playing fewer notes but using the effect of bending the strings and hitting the strings hard, raking the pick across the strings to give it this very vocal, human quality. When B.B. plays it doesn't sound like a pick and fingers on strings on frets on wood, it ends up sounding like his voice. I don't listen to B.B. and hear the technique and the instrument although I'm always curious about that and I've studied it a lot. What I hear is the same voice he sings with.

...B.B. King's greatest hit was his whole persona. It wasn't any individual song...it was the atmosphere of a B.B. King show and the way he plays and sings."

Charles Sawyer comments:

The force of his personality invests all of the music he makes. His performances always bring this across. He hasn't had the kind of smash hit record, he hasn't had the kind of airplay that most artists use to gain their fame. B.B. King won his audience retail, by playing in front of them, playing 300 plus dates a year and meeting people after, before and during his performances and [inaudible] personally. And I must say that all of your study of B.B. sure has payed off."