Itta Bena: Where B.B. King Heard the Blues the First Time

The name Itta Bena comes from Choctaw words usually translated as 'forest camp,' and in the late summer of nineteen twenty-five, a boy was born on a cotton plantation in a nearby hamlet called Berclair who would eventually carry the sound of this patch of Delta soil to every continent on earth. Riley B. King grew up picking cotton on shares in Leflore County. He first heard the guitar in a Baptist church and then heard something different in the guitar of a street musician , a bending, aching note that seemed to go beyond what strings were supposed to do.

He left the Delta as a young man and headed to Memphis, where he talked his way onto a radio station and renamed himself Beale Street Blues Boy , soon shortened to B.B. King. What he brought with him was the sound of this ground: the slow-building tension of a Delta night, the call-and-response between voice and guitar that he developed into something so distinctive it became the template for electric blues worldwide. His guitar, which he called Lucille, answered him phrase for phrase. No one had ever played that way before.

B.B. King went on to record more than fifty albums, win fifteen Grammy Awards, and sell out arenas for half a century. When the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted him in nineteen eighty-seven, the citation acknowledged that virtually every rock guitarist of the preceding thirty years had learned something essential from him. Eric Clapton, Jimi Hendrix, Carlos Santana , they all traced a line back to Leflore County.

Itta Bena today is also home to Mississippi Valley State University, a historically Black institution founded by the state legislature in nineteen forty-six and opened in nineteen fifty. The university created a recording studio in B.B. King's name in two thousand and four, a formal acknowledgment that the most important cultural export from this small Delta town was not cotton.

King died in Las Vegas in two thousand and fifteen at the age of eighty-nine. The Blues Trail marker outside Itta Bena marks where the music began.