B.B. King: From Cotton Fields to Beale Street

Riley B. King was born in nineteen twenty-five on a sharecropping farm in Leflore County, Mississippi. His parents separated when he was four years old. His mother died when he was nine. He was picking cotton on Delta plantations by age twelve, earning thirty-five cents per hundred pounds of cotton picked. He played guitar on the street corners of Indianola on weekends for tips because the tips were better than the cotton wages.

In nineteen forty-six, King hitchhiked to Memphis. He had ten dollars, a guitar, and a plan to find his cousin Bukka White, a blues musician who had recorded for Vocalion Records. White took him in and taught him. King began playing on Beale Street, the one corridor in Jim Crow Memphis where Black musicians, entrepreneurs, and audiences had built an economy that white Memphis could not entirely control. He played on corners, in clubs, and eventually on WDIA, the radio station that had become the first American station to program exclusively for Black audiences. He became known as the Beale Street Blues Boy, and that nickname was soon shortened to B.B.

His guitar style was built on single-note melodic lines, each note made to sustain and vibrate with a technique called vibrato. He would bend a string up to pitch and then oscillate his fretting hand to make the note sing. He said each note was his voice because he had found he could not sing and play the complex chords simultaneously, so he chose the voice and let the chord go. The result became the most widely imitated blues guitar technique in the world.

King played three hundred or more dates a year for decades, on every circuit available to Black performers in Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow America, from the chitlin circuit to Carnegie Hall. He never stopped playing in the Delta. He is buried in Indianola, near the museum built in his name, in the county where he once picked cotton at thirty-five cents per hundred pounds.