Blues Boy

Nobody performs the blues like B. B. King --except, perhaps, Lucille. Resplendent in an iridescent raspberry-red suit, King clutches his fists up beside his temples as his voice shifts from a plangent baritone to a falsetto wail: "Worry, worry, worry-- worry's all I can do."

Glittering in red, gold and mother-of-pearl, Lucille answers in a wordless, keening obbligato. King rides the beat with his whole body, nudging it with his knee, slashing across it with his voice. Lucille skitters in and around it, then swoops up to hover on long, suspended blue notes that make King grimace with pleasure. King is all surging masculine power. Lucille is all sinuous womanly grace. If listeners are more moved by her than by him, King does not mind. Lucille is "the one girl I can depend on"--his electric guitar.

Between them, King and Lucille are producing some of the most potent, polished blues the nation has ever heard. It has taken white audiences 20 years to discover them. Until early in 1968, King was locked into a dreary circuit of one-nighters--sometimes more than 300 a year--in big-city ghetto clubs and back-country roadhouses and shacks. Unlike such performers as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, he was not flamboyant or commercial enough to cash in on the rock-'n'-roll explosion of the 1950s. Unlike such country stylists as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, he was not primitive enough to be taken up in the folk revival of the early 1960s.

Touchstone of Grit. Then came the recent wave of white, blues-oriented rock. King's guitar style suddenly started echoing through the playing of gifted youngsters like Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Larry Coryell, who singled him out as a touchstone of musical sincerity and grit. Two years ago, King made his debut at San Francisco's temple of rock, the Fillmore Auditorium. In the past year, he has made his first European tour and started getting college concert dates. And he has just finished his first extended Manhattan-nightclub booking, a week at the Village Gate. The booking involved another new phenomenon for him: standing ovations from a predominantly white audience.

I've been a good man, although I'm a poor man--understand?

"People are starting to go with me," says King, 43. "I think it's because they know I'm not kidding out there. Blues is a message, and they're getting it." The message comes through in long, twisting melodic lines and canny phrasing that betray King's relatively sophisticated influences: Count Basie's longtime vocalist Jimmy Rushing, Jazz Guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. But his emotional essence is the pain, stoicism and earthy humor of an ancient heritage:

Some day, baby, when the blindman calls my name,

You won't be able to hurt on me no more, woman,

'Cause my heart won't feel no more pain.

Point of Honor. A native of the Mississippi Delta, King left school after the ninth grade to work as a farm laborer. He learned to play the guitar from an uncle who was a Baptist minister, sang in gospel groups, performed for coins on the street corners of dusty Southern towns. In 1948, he moved to Memphis and started out as a disk jockey and singer, billing himself as the "Beale St. Blues Boy." That was soon shortened to Blues Boy, finally to B. B. (his real first name is Riley).

Despite temptations to slick up his style for commercial appeal, King has made it a point of honor to remain an uncompromising blues boy. "I'm me," he says. "Blues is what I do best. If Frank Sinatra can be tops in his field, Nat Cole in his, Bach and Beethoven in theirs, why can't I be great, and known for it, in blues?" Today the answer seems to be: he can.

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