The thrill is gone
By Randy Lewis
Los Angeles Times
B.B. King, the singer and guitarist who put the blues in a three-piece suit and took the musical genre from the barrooms and back porches of the Mississippi Delta to Carnegie Hall and the world’s toniest concert stages with a signature style emulated by generations of blues and rock musicians, has died. He was 89.
The 15-time Grammy Award winner died Thursday night in his Las Vegas home, said Angela Moore, representative for his youngest daughter, Claudette. He had struggled in recent years with diabetes.
King died peacefully in his sleep, Claudette King told The Times.
Early on, Riley B. King transcended his musical shortcomings – an inability to play guitar leads while he sang and a failure to master the use of a bottleneck or slide favored by many of his guitar-playing peers – and created a unique style that made him one of the most respected and influential blues musicians ever.
Because King couldn’t figure out how to play and sing simultaneously, he separated the two functions, laying the blueprint for the sung verse followed by the extended solo passage that would become a crucial element in blues as well as in rock music rooted in the blues. That template was exploited by subsequent generations of players, from Eric Clapton and Jimi Hendrix on through to John Mayer and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Finding that he couldn’t make his elegantly long but thick fingers work the beer bottlenecks and metal slides used by so many other blues guitarists, he discovered that he could emulate that effect by rocking the fingers of his left hand rapidly on the guitar’s frets similar to the way a classical violinist creates vibrato, establishing a ringing tremolo that became his hallmark.
That guitar, a black Gibson hollow-body instrument he named Lucille, became one of the most famous in all of popular music, as central to his public persona as his rotund physique, twink-ling eyes and wide-eyed grin that served as a counterpoint to the soul-deep ache at the heart of much of his music.
King spent decades honing the craft that helped him escape the poverty of the Deep South, where he grew up on a Mississippi plantation as the son of a sharecropper who became a teenage sharecropper himself before singing and playing his way out of the cotton fields.
He was an indefatigable performer who seldom left the concert trail for more than a few days at a time. In 1956, he played 342 shows and even in his later years kept a schedule that would test the endurance of musicians half his age.
King’s travels brought him to Youngstown many times over the decade, including an appearance at the old Idora Park ballroom in the 1970s, Powers Auditorium in 2003 and Chevrolet Centre (now Covelli Centre) in 2007.
“People thought I was truly a workaholic,” King told The Times in 2005. “But I never got the exposure in my kind of music [given to] other types of music that are exposed daily in the media. I’ve had one record that was played like other records. It was called ‘The Thrill Is Gone,’ the only one I ever had that was played on radio stations like other types of music, unless I was playing with somebody else.”
King collaborated with hundreds of musicians in most fields of pop music, culminating with his 1988 teaming with U2 on the Irish rock quartet’s single “When Love Comes to Town,” which brought him to the attention of millions of young rock fans when he was in his mid-60s.
Decades earlier, King’s flagging career was resuscitated when the Rolling Stones and other rockers of the British Invasion started singing his praises.