The Commercial Appeal - Go Memphis
B.B. King’s life makes for compelling story in new book ‘King of the Blues’
When Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Daniel de Visé began contemplating a biography of B.B. King — one of the most iconic figures in American music — he was shocked at what he discovered.
“I was stunned when I realized a major bio on him hadn’t come out since 1980, when Charlie Sawyer published his book on B.B. And B.B.’S own memoirs were almost 25 years old. It felt like there was an opportunity there to tell a big story. I love books that take a huge important person and explain why they are so well known,” says de Visé who will discuss his new book, “King of the Blues: The Rise and Reign of B.B. King,” during a free event at Memphis Listening Lab on Saturday.
For de Visé, each of his books have come with a personal connection. His first biography, “Andy and Don” — a dual portrait of the professional and personal relationship between Andy Griffith and Don Knotts — was a matter of family, as de Visé is Knotts’ brother-inlaw. His next book, “The Comeback” — about cycling legend Greg Lemond, was inspired by de Visé’s father, a native of Belgium who was a major cycling enthusiast.
He ultimately came to write King’s story through his love of the blues. Raised in Chicago, he grew up seeing the city’s great bluesmen in concert as a teenager and studied music before becoming a successful newspaper journalist.
“I was always a kind of frustrated music writer. I knew wanted to write some kind of music book. And, for me, B.B. was the ultimate topic. I think he’s the only true blues superstar,” says de Visé. “When you look at his career, he played something like 17,000 gigs in 90 different countries… it’s incredible. I mean, we sold the foreign rights to this book in places like Estonia. That tells you the reach he had.”
de Visé began work on the King book
in 2018 — three years after King’s May 2015 passing — and started his research in the Delta, Memphis and the MidSouth where the musician’s early roots lay.
Memphis was ‘the big city’ to B.B. King
Riley B. King was born Sept. 16, 1925, in Berclair, Mississippi, between Itta Bena and Indianola. The great-grandson of a slave, his childhood was filled with heartbreak, as he lost most of his family by the time he was a teen. Blues music — through the records of Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson and via his cousin, the slide guitar master Bukka White — had a profound effect on the young King who, between work at the local cotton plantation, would spend Saturday afternoons picking and playing on the street corners of Indianola.
By the late ’40s King had moved to the Bluff City, where he soaked up the city’s
hothouse musical atmosphere. “It was the big city to him,” says de Visé. “He made two pilgrimages to Memphis. The first one was aborted, as he wasn’t able to get the foothold he wanted. So he returned to Indianola and returned to life there. But he eventually came back to Memphis for good in 1949.”
Before long, he went knocking on the
doors of Memphis’ Black-oriented radio station WDIA, where he made his name as a performer and radio personality. King would rise through the regional entertainment ranks, recording at Sam Phillips’ fledgling Memphis Recording Service, and releasing his first sides for the Modern and R.P.M. labels. He scored his first hit record, the chart-topping R&B number “3 O’clock Blues, in 1952.
“B.B. was a citizen of the world,” says de Visé, “but Memphis was massively important to his history. It was the center of his universe, as much as Chicago was the center of Muddy Waters’ or Howlin’ Wolf ’s universe.”
One of the most interesting aspects of “King of the Blues” is how it recognizes and contextualizes the fact that King was heralded more, at least initially, as a vocalist than a guitar player.
“Throughout B.B.’S early career as an entertainer, in the Black R&B genre, he was almost never celebrated for his guitar work, he was known as ‘the greatest blues singer,’ over and over again in hundreds of clippings. His fans, the African American press, almost took it for granted that he played guitar,” says de Visé. “It’s hard to get your head around that now because there was so much adulation for his guitar work later on. But all the way up to (1964’s famed) ‘Live at the Regal’ album he’s introduced as ‘ladies and gentlemen… the world’s greatest blues singer.’”
It would, however, be King’s innovations as a guitarist that stand as his greatest legacy.
“Historically speaking, B.B King created a role for the guitar, for the electric guitar, at the absolute center of popular music,” says de Visé. “I think it’s because of B.B. that you have these successive generations of guitar heroes. Guitar was a backbench instrument in 1949 when B.B. recorded his first sides. There weren’t very many people playing guitars and leading combos. The R&B charts were filled with singers, and singers who played piano or saxophone. The guitar was not at the front and center of R&B music then.
“B.B. took this lineage of people who had developed a solo guitar style — starting with Lonnie Johnson and Charlie Christian and T-bone Walker — and his big innovation was the idea of the guitar being an extension of his voice, his own singing voice. That set him apart from all the others. He took the vibrato of classical violin and added in the cry of the Hawaiian steel guitar, the plaintive sound of early country and the exhortations of Bob Wills’ band, and he created this vocal style of solo guitar.”
His work would come to resonate profoundly in Britain, where a generation of budding rock guitarists — from Eric Clapton to Jeff Beck to Jimmy Page — felt his impact in the 1960s. “All these guitar players started listening to him,” says de Visé, “and a decade and a half later he was repurposed as a guitar hero.”
‘King of the Blues’ dives into personal life, musical success
Beyond the creative aspects, “King of the Blues” offers a deep investigation into King’s personal life and history as well, and de Visé provides a wealth of new revelations. One claim in the book — which King’s estate has pushed back against — is that none of King’s 15 children were his. de Visé’s research suggests that an accident as a boy left King unable to have children of his own, though he would eventually accept numerous paternity claims and support a contingent of sons and daughters.
“The way I see it is that B.B. lost his own family when he was young. He was an only child, his brother died in infancy. His mother left his father when he was 5. Then his mother died when he was 10. His grandmother died when he was 14. His family just vanished and evaporated. So I think he spent the rest of his life trying to build a family,” says de Visé.
“It’s really lovely and actually quite poignant that he built and supported this family and he didn’t care whether they were his children or not. He embraced every single paternity claim without question… until he didn’t. There was a point that he stopped and said the family’s full, we’re done. The fact that they probably weren’t his biological children is fascinating. I think he just loved and cherished the idea of having a family.”
The book also looks at how King became the blues’ biggest star and how he managed to remain a relevant musical figure for seven decades.
Starting in the late-’60s with his crossover to the white rock market, and his biggest chart triumph with 1969’s Top 20 hit and Grammy-winning single “The Thrill Is Gone,” King would become a kind of ambassador for the genre, exposing the music to its biggest audiences through his appearances on television, in film and on the road. He continued to tour tirelessly until the end of his life, spending an average of 250 nights on the road most years.
“Every decade brought a kind of renewal for him,” says de Visé. “In the late ‘60s he began playing places like the Fillmore, for white pop fans, and then he toured with the Rolling Stones in 1969. By the end of the 1970s, he had his first big comeback LPS as a record maker, working with producer Stewart Levine and the Crusaders, and then by end of the ‘80s he was working with U2, who worshipped him. He was able to be rein
B.B. King: ‘Greatest blues singer’ to ‘guitar hero’