American singer and guitarist BB King on what it takes to play the blues and why his guitar is called Lucille.
Blues legend BB King was born Riley B King on a cotton plantation outside the small town of Indianola, Mississippi in 1925.
BB King challenges the perception that the blues is sad. He cites 'Sweet Little Angel’ as an example of a blues song where the protagonist is happy. He does not believe it is necessary for a singer to feel a deep sadness to sing the blues well.
I know people that are singing and playing blues that have never been to the cotton field, they don’t even know how to pick cotton.
BB King is a firm believer that,
Music has no prejudices.
White people can sing the blues just as black people such as Charley Pride can play country and western music. He rates white blues musicians Eric Clapton, Stevie Ray Vaughan and Jeff Healy, to name but a few.
BB King recounts the tale of how his trusty Gibson guitar came to be christened Lucille. He used to play at a club in Twist, Arkansas. During winter the hall was heated by a container half-filled with burning kerosene positioned in the middle of the dance floor.
Two men got into a fight and knocked over the container, setting the hall alight. The club was evacuated but once outside BB King decided to go back into the burning building to save his guitar. The wooden building started to collapse on him and he almost lost his life in the process.
The following day BB King learned that the two men who started the fire had been fighting over a woman who worked at the nightclub named Lucille.
I never did meet her but I named my guitar Lucille to remind me never to do a thing like that again.
Since then BB King has named every guitar he owns Lucille, and his current guitar is Lucille the fifteenth.
This episode of ‘Kenny Live’ was broadcast on 8 December 1990. The presenter is Pat Kenny.
