King of the Blues

The Rise and Reign of B. B. King

Daniel de Visé

• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781611854350
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611858808
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

'Without a doubt the most important artist the blues has ever produced' Eric Clapton
'No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues' President Barack Obama
' One part of me says, "Yes, of course I can play." But the other part of me says, "Well, I wish I could just do it like B.B. King."' John Lennon Riley 'Blues Boy' King (1925-2015) was born into deep poverty in Mississippi. Wrenched away from his sharecropper father, B.B. lost his mother at age ten, leaving him more or less alone. Music became his emancipation from exhausting toil in the fields. Inspired by a local minister's guitar and by the records of Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker, B.B. taught his guitar to sing in the unique solo style that, along with his relentless work ethic and humanity, became his trademark. In turn, generations of artists claimed him as inspiration, from Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton to Carlos Santana and the Edge. King of the Blues presents the vibrant life and times of a trailblazing giant. Witness to dark prejudice and lynching in his youth, B.B. performed incessantly (more than fifteen thousand concerts in ninety countries over nearly sixty years) - in some real way his means of escaping his past. His career roller-coasted between adulation and relegation, but he always rose back up. At the same time, his story reveals the many ways record companies took advantage of artists, especially those of colour. Daniel de Visé has interviewed almost every surviving member of B.B. King's inner circle - family, band members, retainers, managers and more - and their voices and memories enrich and enliven the life of this Mississippi blues titan, whom his contemporary Bobby 'Blue' Bland simply called 'the man.'

CHAPTER 1

SHARECROPPER

B.B. KING’S FATHER, ALBERT KING, was born on February 28, 1907. The King family crisscrossed Mississippi in a perennial search for farm work. Albert probably entered the world in Glaston, a pinprick of a place in southern Mississippi, one hundred miles north of the Gulf of Mexico.

Events tore Albert’s family asunder. His mother left his father and promptly died. A sister perished, as well. Infant Albert and his father migrated two hundred miles north to join their kin in Monroe County, part of the larger expanse of Hill Country, a rugged slab of northeastern Mississippi bordering Tennessee on the north and Alabama on the east. Sometime after 1910, Albert’s father exited his life, leaving Albert in the care of an older brother named Riley, who in turn deposited Albert with a sharecropper family named Love and vanished into the mists. Albert joined the Love family as an adoptive nephew. They lived in Sunflower County, part of the fabled Mississippi Delta. Flat and fertile, the Delta lay west of Hill Country along the Arkansas border, the cradle of Mississippi’s cotton industry. The Loves would carry Albert out to the fields in a tub, draped with a cotton sack to keep the mosquitoes at bay.

Nora Ella Pulley, B.B.’s mother, was probably born in 1908 in Chickasaw County, a Hill Country province named for the Indian tribe that had long dwelt there. Nora Ella was the daughter of Elnora and Jasper Pulley. Elnora’s parents, Pompey (“Pomp”) and Jane Davidson, had been born slaves.

By 1920, Nora Ella’s father was gone. She and her mother had joined the expansive household of Elnora’s new husband, another Chickasaw sharecropper, named Romeo Farr. A few years later, Elnora left Farr and took Nora Ella west to the Delta. There, probably in 1924, Nora Ella met Albert King. They were teenagers of sixteen or seventeen. When Albert called on Nora Ella, he observed the old rules of courtship, arriving at her house in shirt and tie and departing at the stroke of 9 p.m. Soon, they became a couple. By the close of 1924, Nora Ella was pregnant.

Today, the official marker for B.B. King’s birthplace sits at a remote crossroads, a mile or two south of a settlement called Berclair along gravel roads, where Leflore County Routes 305 and 513 intersect. For the birthplace of a legendary bluesman, it is a satisfying spot. Blue Lake—in truth, more stale creek than lake—sits east of the crossroads, a ribbon of stagnant water choked with logs and dotted with turtles basking in the warm Delta sun. Forest lies to the south, field to the west.

The plaque does not reveal the actual location of the King cabin, and perhaps that is just as well, for no trace of the dwelling remains. To reach that patch of earth, the blues pilgrim must follow the creek a bit farther south and east along Route 305 to Route 281, turn left, and cross the creek. The cabin stood there, in a lonely field. Decades later, archivists led B.B. back to the site by playing a tape recording that preserved the guttural Delta growl of Albert King, his father, recounting a series of twists and turns along those ancient roads.

B.B. would sometimes claim Berclair as his hometown, though it is barely a town, a few shacks scattered haphazardly along the railroad tracks that lead east to Greenwood and west to Indianola. At other times, he would name his birthplace as Itta Bena (pronounced “bean-a”), a real town, albeit a small one. In fact, the land where B.B. was born belonged not to a town but to a man. B.B. recalled that his parents lived and worked on the plantation of a white farmer named Jim O’Reilly.

Wednesday, September 16, 1925, dawned hot and bright, suffusing the O’Reilly plantation in a ninety-degree Delta swelter that belied autumn’s approach. Nora Ella King awoke that morning to pangs that announced her baby’s impending arrival. She alerted Albert, who set out to find his landlord. “When Mama went into labor and Daddy went looking for a midwife,” B.B. recalled, “O’Reilly helped him find the right woman.” O’Reilly attended the delivery. Albert gave the baby his landlord’s name, which also belonged to his lost brother. The birth certificate rendered it as “Rileigh,” perhaps reflecting the limited literacy of his parents. Albert trimmed the “O” because, he later joked, his son “didn’t look Irish.” The middle initial “B,” so consequential in Riley’s later life, didn’t stand for anything.

The King family lived in the Berclair cabin for four more years. The town sat on some of the highest ground in the Delta. When the Great Mississippi Flood swamped twenty-seven thousand square miles of farmland in 1927, Berclair and the Kings were spared. Neighboring towns Moorhead and Indianola and Inverness vanished beneath the muck just a few miles away.

Albert could not read or write. Nonetheless, he ascended to tractor driver, a job atop the food chain for African Americans working on Delta farms, paying fifty cents a day. Tractors plowed and tilled the land with the power of five or six of the mules they replaced. Farmers ran their tractors around the clock. Albert sometimes worked consecutive double shifts, forty-eight hours, earning two dollars for a bone-rattling two-day marathon of driving.

In 1928, Nora Ella bore a second child, a son named Curce. A year or so later, Curce died, apparently after eating glass. His death, and the sorrow that followed, was very nearly the only concrete memory Riley retained from those blurry years with his mother and father. “My mother told me that I took it pretty bad, pretty hard,” Riley later recalled, hinting ominously that he might have carelessly left shards of glass within his infant brother’s reach.

“I wish he were here,” Riley later wrote of the departed brother, recalling his thoughts at the time. “Wish I had someone to play with. I don’t understand death. Death is a cold chill, frightening beyond reason.”

Shortly after Curce’s death, in 1929 or 1930, Nora Ella packed her surviving son into the back of an old pickup truck and left Albert King. Riley recalled his father as a receding figure on the horizon, waving goodbye, “growing more and more distant until he finally disappears. It’s a gray day and the roads are bumpy and I’m not sure what’s going on, except I’ve never been on a trip like this.” As they began their journey, Nora Ella told Riley, “It’s hard for you to understand, but your daddy and I, well, we’re not living together no more.”

Nora Ella left Albert for another man. The shock of losing a child might have factored in her departure, or perhaps Albert’s drinking drove her away. By the spring of 1930, according to the census, mother and son were living in the home of George Herd, a farmer, like Albert, who worked the same cotton fields around Berclair. Once Nora Ella was gone, Albert knew better than to confront the man into whose arms she had fled. “When a woman decides she don’t want a man,” he later explained, “you let her go.”

THE BREAKUP of Riley’s family came as the nation sank into the Great Depression. The stock market had lost nearly half its value between September and November 1929. In 1930 and 1931, thousands of banks failed, and unemployment reached double digits. By 1932 and 1933, the low ebb, the Dow Jones Industrial Index had lost nine-tenths of its value, unemployment peaked at 25 percent, and two million Americans lacked homes.

No one, perhaps, suffered more in the Depression than the people of Mississippi. Two-thirds of Mississippians were sharecroppers or tenant farmers whose livelihood depended on the price of cotton, which plummeted from twenty cents a pound in 1929 to less than five cents in 1932. Overall farm income collapsed from $191 million to $41 million in that span.

“I didn’t know about no stock market crash or Depression,” Riley recalled. “Our world was small.” He and his mother lived in a remote farming village, one whose citizens were barely scraping by when the downturn hit. Riley and his neighbors didn’t generally own bank accounts, let alone stocks. They had little to lose.

Nora Ella remained with George Herd for a year or two, providing Riley some semblance of a stable family life. The Herd cabin sat within the village of Berclair, along the railroad tracks. Riley would remember the sound of the train whistle and the sight of the conductor waving as the trains rumbled past. Riley might have taken his first classes at the Leflore County Training School, the designated “colored” campus for African Americans in Itta Bena and environs.

One day in 1931, an illustrious visitor stopped by George Herd’s cabin. His name was Booker T. Washington “Bukka” White. He was a Delta-blues master, and he was Riley’s cousin.

Bukka White was born around 1904 in Chickasaw County, the cradle of Riley’s grandparents. Bukka’s mother, Lula, was a sister of Elnora, Riley’s grandmother. By 1910, Bukka was living with Elnora’s kin in Hill Country. He learned the guitar from his father, who was an amateur performer. Bukka also learned the “slide,” a cylinder of metal or pop-bottle glass that Delta bluesmen used to animate their guitars. Around age thirteen, Bukka was jumping on and off a freight train with some friends when it suddenly accelerated, carrying him clear to St. Louis. Bukka found work there in a roadhouse, sweeping floors and playing blues. He married at sixteen. Three years later, his wife died of a burst appendix.

Bukka traveled to the provincial music capital of Memphis in 1930, around age twenty-five, and recorded fourteen tracks for the Victor imprint, whose producers were exploiting a national blues craze. But the deepening Depression dampened the label’s enthusiasm, and only four sides saw official release. Still, by the time he met Riley in 1931, Bukka was an accomplished bluesman.

Bukka arrived in town for a gig at neighboring Itta Bena. He recalled Berclair as “a little, one-store town at the end of a road”: “My Auntie Nora was living there, and Riley was about six. So I was sitting talking to my auntie, and I looked over in the corner and seen that boy looking at my guitar, and he looked so pitiful to me, just sitting there so quiet.” Riley gazed at Bukka’s red Stella acoustic. A voice in Bukka’s head told him, “Get that boy a guitar.” He handed the Stella to Riley. The boy replied with a barely audible “Thank you.” Then he sat and gazed at the instrument.

At least three people would later claim to have given Riley his first guitar. If Bukka’s story is true, then Riley had his own guitar by age six. But Riley recalled no such gift. Perhaps Bukka only allowed his young cousin to pluck a few strings on the instrument before taking it back. In any case, Riley would not make a serious study of the guitar for a few more years.

After that, Bukka visited Riley a couple of times a year, “looking like a million bucks,” Riley recalled. “Razor-sharp. Big hat, clean shirt, pressed pants, shiny shoes. He smelled of the big city and glamorous times.” Bukka had a round face framing warm eyes and wide-spaced teeth, revealed when his face cleaved into a brilliant smile. A born storyteller, Bukka reeled off tales of Arkansas roadhouses and Chicago skyscrapers. He would serenade Riley, coaxing sweet sounds from his guitar with his slide. “His vibrato gave me goose bumps,” Riley recalled.

Not all of Riley’s kin brought joy into his life. He shuddered at the memory of visiting the “old folk” of his grandmother’s clan, who spun tales of headless bodies in open coffins as Riley lay in bed, shivering with fear in the next room. “The dark became a tomb,” he recalled. For the rest of his life, Riley slept with a light on.

Some of the elders might have been Riley’s neighbors. Sharecropper clans often traveled en masse from one settlement to the next as word spread of fresh opportunities to eke out a living. One distant relative recalled Riley living with members of Nora Ella’s extended family in Berclair around 1931, during her time with George Herd. Riley might have passed back and forth between his mother and her kin. That pattern would shape the next decade of his life.

Riley had a playmate in Berclair. Her name was Peaches, she was seven, and she taught six-year-old Riley the rudiments of lovemaking.

“We climb into my mom’s bed,” Riley recalled, “take off our clothes, and Peaches shows me what she learned by watching her folks.”

Once, Nora Ella caught Riley and Peaches in the act. She pulled him off her, hurled him across the room, and beat him. She didn’t touch Peaches. Riley asked her why. “ ’Cause you know better than to do a thing like that,” she replied.

IN 1931 OR 1932, Nora Ella left George Herd. Her declining health might have driven them apart. Riley’s mother probably suffered from untreated diabetes. Though still in her early twenties, Nora Ella was losing her eyesight. Perhaps Herd decided his new wife was no longer pulling her weight, a harsh but necessary consideration in the cruel economy of sharecropping. So Nora Ella and her son journeyed one hundred miles east, leaving the Delta to join Nora’s mother, Elnora, in Hill Country.

By 1932, Elnora Farr was back in Chickasaw County, her Mississippi birthplace, living alone and working as a sharecropper on farmland near the tiny county seat of Houston. Elnora was entering her forties. The men in her life, Jasper Pulley and Romeo Farr, were long gone. She would not remarry.

Elnora had three children, all in their early twenties, migrating back and forth between Hill Country and the Delta in search of an elusive living wage. In the early 1930s, all three were living in Chickasaw County: William Pulley, Nora Ella’s older brother, stern patriarch of the Pulley clan; Nora Ella herself; and Jack Bennett and his wife, Nevada, Nora Ella’s younger sister.

Riley seems never to have told anyone he lived in Chickasaw County. Perhaps those memories merged with subsequent memories from other places into a blurry Mississippi Hill Country montage. But census data and relatives’ accounts put Riley in Chickasaw for roughly three years, from about 1932 until 1935, along with his mother and grandmother and much of their extended family.

“When Albert and Nora separated, she took her baby and went to Houston, Mississippi, to stay with her mama,” recalled Lessie Fair, a distant relative who would enter Riley’s life a few years later. “Her mama and her and all of the rest of them was in Houston.”

Riley’s exact address during his Chickasaw years, from about age seven to ten, is hard to pinpoint. Charles Sawyer, his first biographer, believed Riley spent those years with his grandmother Elnora. Others remembered him living with his Uncle William. Uncle Jack would claim Riley as a dependent on the census. Riley himself recalled living with his mother.

Nora Ella was a loving mother, however fleeting her presence in Riley’s life. He adored her. “She has a radiant face, luminous brown skin, and a shapely body,” Riley recalled, later in life. “It’s raining, and her hair is glistening wet. She hands me a towel and asks me to dry her off.”

The scenes of Riley and his mother that would later populate Riley’s memoir read like soft-focus flashbacks from a movie. In one vignette, Nora Ella sat Riley down in their cabin and taught him to braid her hair, which fell to her should...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Sharecropper
• Chapter 2 On the Run
• Chapter 3 Indianola Mississippi Seeds
• Chapter 4 The Blues
• Chapter 5 Memphis
• Chapter 6 The Blues Boy
• Chapter 7 Lucille
• Chapter 8 On the Road
• Chapter 9 Big Red
• Chapter 10 Fallow
• Chapter 11 Regal
• Chapter 12 Revival
• Chapter 13 Fillmore
• Chapter 14 Mythology
• Chapter 15 Live and Well
• Chapter 16 Back in the Alley
• Chapter 17 Moscow on the Mississippi
• Chapter 18 Homecoming
• Chapter 19 Lovetown
• Chapter 20 Riding with the King
• Chapter 21 A Golden Chain
• Epilogue
• Lyrics Referenced
• Discography
• The King’s Court
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Index
• Picture Sections