This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human. CBS Tuesday is NCIS Night with new episodes of NCIS, NCIS Origins, and NCIS Sydney. Yeah. Possible abduction of the Marines we need to move anybody as a potential target.
We're gonna do what we do and we're gonna figure out answers Whatever they're planning it's going down here MCIS MCIS night is all new is a night you've never seen CBS Tuesday, starting with 7 Central and streaming on Paramount Plus. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work.
It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast.
Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member Finra and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice.
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So you're doing something else too, like maybe scrolling home listings on Redfin, saving places you like without thinking you'll get them. Because that's what house hunting has become. But Redfin isn't built for endless browsing. It's built to help you find and own a home. Redfin agents close twice as many deals as other agents, which means when you find a place you love, you've got a real shot at getting it.
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We're of course telling the story of the chairman of the board himself. BB King. whose unique style of guitar playing and voice. Change the music industry. Forever.
Here to tell the story is Daniel Daviesay. Author of The King of the Blues. Take it away, Daniel. Let's start with the proposition that BB King is the one superstar of the blues. Arguably equally great figures in the blues.
Maybe Muddy Waters is one, maybe possibly Robert Johnson is one, although Bibi would disagree with that. But he's certainly the one superstar of the blues, and I say this because he toured like 90 countries and You know, at all these Grammys and sold massive numbers of records, he's much bigger than any other blues artist ever was. That's the starting point, but I would argue that why he matters Is not just that, not just the fact that he may have played more concerts, which is close to 20,000, than any other major musical artist ever. I don't think anybody comes close. Even that isn't why he matters.
Why he matters, I would argue, is that he developed a signature guitar sound that was transformative. for him and for the guitar and for its place in popular music. He redefined the guitar. And that sound, the guitar as a voice, passed from B.B. King to Buddy Guy to Eric Clapton.
To Jimi Hendrix, to absolutely everyone, but he's also bigger than the Blues, and people need to remember that about him. Riley King was born in 1925 to a sharecropper family in the Delta, Mississippi Delta, in a little cabin on land that was owned by a white landowner, and they worked the land, and the sharecropper system was. Yeah. really horrible economic enterprise. I mean, looking at at it now, it sounds Just a couple baby steps away from slavery, but the the white owner typically Would sort of lease the land to the sharecroppers.
The sharecroppers would raise their crops, sell the crops, and then the black sharecroppers would, in theory, would get some proceeds from the sale of those crops, but after deducting all sorts of expenses and Uh a lot of times, I I dare say most of the time. The Sheriff Carper would end the year. in debt, so it was a sort of brutal sort of cycle of perpetual debt. Yeah. His mother was, I believe, a teenager when he was born.
He only knew her up until age seven, eight, nine. I think he was nine when she died. She probably. Yeah, uh diabetes. And probably succumbed to it.
It's all a little unclear because, you know, there weren't hard records kept of a lot of this stuff. But B.B. King's mother is sort of this almost. ethereal character in his memoir. She's portrayed by him as a sweet, loving, angelic, beautiful.
creature.
So yeah, it was inconceivably wrenching for him to lose his mother. terrible loss and I would argue that through his life from that point There were two things really motivating Mr. King. One was to kind of rebuild the family that he lost with the death of his mother. You've had a big sort of hole at the center of his soul.
I think that when Mr. King entered adulthood, he felt like he was sort of alone in the world. And I think that's why he was not just willing but really wide open to embracing paternity claims from children. I don't know whose children, but I would argue probably not his children. He went to a fertility doctor and he had a test and found out that he could not father children.
the children Who say they are his children are his adoptive children. And he loved them all. Claimed them all as his own, but I don't think they were his biological children. I think that he loved having this big family. You know, too.
The other impulse was to sort of impress his father because his father was this tireless workaholic who famously said. It's a rhetorical question. How can a man work too much? There was no such thing. Mr.
King, I would argue, B.B. King spent his whole adult life trying to prove to his father that he could be as hard-working. Yeah, as Albert King. His father was a fairly prosperous. tractor driver.
The tractor driver was a really, really Elevated position in the sort of system of sharecropping. The tractor drivers were few, they operated very expensive machinery. If I told you how much he earned, it wouldn't sound very impressive because this is in $1935. But Albert King, Bibi's father, earned enough from tractor driving. That he supported a wife and her extended family.
I think six or seven people were living under Albert King's roof.
So Albert King was kind of an alpha male among sort of black agrarian workers of that era. And so Riley King as a child Would have worked the farm. I think he has it today. They had a term like can to can. I'm not saying that with the right accent, but basically from.
The moment the sun Popped up over the horizon, you'd go to work, and then you'd work until you couldn't see anything anymore, right? And he would sleep in. rickety cabins with no you know, water, electricity. It was absolutely pitch dark. All night.
In fact, so much so that in later life, Mr. King was kind of terrified of the dark. He always had to have a light on somewhere near him. He slept because it was so probably frightening being in utter darkness. And so.
I dare say that by the time B. B. King sort of is entering adulthood, And he's in Inginola and he's working, picking cotton. He probably would have aspired to become a tractor.
Well, he said so, he aspired to become a tractor driver himself because he knew that job. Sat at the top of the heap. The only person B.B. King knew who earned more than a tractor driver was a guy named Booker Baggett, who was the foreman under the white landowner. On the farm where Bibi lived and worked.
If this makes sense, the foreman was sort of the, you know, the top employee overseeing all of the tractor drivers and farmers. Typically that was a job given to a white person. But this particular landowner Was relatively progressive in his thinking, and so he gave the job to a black man. And this caused havoc when Booker, the black foreman, would go into town in Indianola. The white storekeepers often didn't want to talk to him or deal with him, but they couldn't believe that a black man was the foreman.
Booker would have to go get the actual landowner and send him in to say, Yes, this man is my foreman. That would have been the absolute apex of B.B. King's aspirations when he was an 18-year-old, 20-year-old young man. When we come back, more of the story of the chairman of the board, B.B. King, here on Our American Stories.
Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we're bringing inspiring stories from across this great country. Stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can't do this show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they're not free to make.
If you love what you hear, go to ouramericanstories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to ouramericanstories.com and give. CBS Tuesday is NCIS Night with new episodes of NCIS, NCIS Origins, and NCIS Sydney. Yeah.
Possible abduction of the Marines we need to move anybody's potential target. We're gonna do what we do and we're gonna figure out answers Whatever they're planning it's going down here MCIS MCIS night is all new is a night you've never seen CBS Tuesday, starting with 7 Central and streaming on Paramount Plus. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI. It all starts with your prompt.
From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's. Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio.
That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool.
Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. Mm. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa? Wash away your worries with Anibay.
Anibay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right, sofas start at just $699. Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing. The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime.
Shop washablefas.com for up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back. Upgrade now at washablesofas.com.
Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Flag football is exploding and iFlag is leading the way. As the Guinness World Record Holder, iFlag hosts premier flag football tournaments nationwide for boys, girls, high school girls, and adults. From first-time players to elite competitors, iFlag delivers top-level competition, unforgettable experiences, and a community built around the game. Ready to be part of it?
Join the movement. Find your tournament and learn more at iflag.org. That's iflag.org. And we return to our American stories and our story on Bluesman BB King. Telling the story is author Daniel Davis, author of the fantastic book, King of the Blues.
Available at Amazon are all the usual suspects. When we last left off, Daniel was telling us about B.B. King's childhood. You heard about his father's work ethic. But his mother well, her death, her early death, had a profound effect.
I'm B.B. King. Let's pick up where we last left off. with Daniel DeVissé. Schooling, and B.B.
King got schooling, schooling happened only. Once all the farming was done for the seasonal cycle.
So it wasn't probably. A full year of schooling, it probably wasn't from September 1st until you know May 30th. But he got schooling. I think Luther Henson was his only teacher. Luther Henson was a.
incredibly important role model. For young Riley King, B.B. King. Luther Henson operated essentially a one-room schoolhouse in Kilmichael, Mississippi, with black children of all different ages. Taught all of the students.
I believe his father had been a slave and had been freed. And Luther Henson taught his black students Out of black newspapers, African-American newspapers from different parts of the country, he would find those papers and show. the students heroes, you know, important African-American people. Who the black students were not going to read about, most likely, in the white newspapers. The white newspapers mostly covered black America when black Americans were accused of crimes.
And so Luther Henson taught the students, including B.B. King, You need to get an education. This is something the white people will never take away from you. He taught them. That not every white person is racist, that there are obviously many, many horrible white people.
Who are going to try to kill you, or at least greatly, greatly hamper your attempts to be free and prosperous, but that have hope because there are good people out there, white and black. and certainly BB King. Absorbed the lesson because he became BB King became a very, very upbeat. Endlessly patient man. I mean, he endured.
Innumerable, innumerable slights and acts of racism, large and small, over the course of his career, and had a amazingly. tolerant and forgiving and patient. approach to it all. I mean working on the Chitlin circuit Was itself kind of one massive slight. The Chitland Circuit was part of a segregated, walled-off music industry.
Where white and black artists and fans Basically, they worshipped in different churches, so to speak.
So, all of the places where B.B. King was allowed to perform in the 1950s and into the 1960s were segregated black. Venues and they were wonderful places, and he had amazing, loyal, knowledgeable fans. But the industry itself sort of blocked him. from doing anything else outside of that.
that system, that circuit. This is why, you know, Ray Charles, Fats Domino. Other artists went into mainstream so-called record labels and broke out of the Chitlin circuit and scored hits, massive hits, on the pop charts to break out of the segregated industry. As far as just sort of day-to-day racial antipathy, it was constant. You know, many were the times when Mr.
King and his all-black band would arrive at a hotel. with Sid Seidenberg his white manager. And the hotelier would ask Mr. Seidenberg to come in the front door. and the black musicians would be directed around the side or to the back.
And Sid would say, hell no, I'm not doing that. If they're going around the back, I'm going around the back. B.B. King had a bus that he called Big Red that traveled up and down the Chitlin Circuit. When they would stop for gas, there was a perpetual battle, at least in the South, to get service and to get food.
Typically, his roadie would have to go and sort of negotiate and say, Well, I'll buy 100 gallons of gas from you, but you've got to sell us some food because otherwise they would not.
So if the band wanted to eat, They had to sort of parlay. It's like, I will fill my tank and give you our money, but you've got to. be willing to serve us. And then they would wind up having to eat and often sleep in the buses. Anyone who's at all familiar with Jim Crow America knows that black artists mostly stayed in segregated hotels.
So When B.B. King went to Houston, he would stay at the segregated black hotel in Houston.
Now, the upshot was he'd often be staying in the same hotel with, you know, Charlie Parker. which was kinda cool and he got to meet the greatest musical artists of the prior generation, but it was still segregation. Success has many parents. There are at least three separate accounts of Riley King getting his first guitar. The earliest is that Booker White who was a cousin, uh I think a first cousin of B.B.
King's grandmother, I'm probably saying that wrong, but was a relation of B.B. King. Booker White shows up. As a successful slide guitarist, Shows up to Riley King's house where he lives with his mother. And this is around 1930 in Burke Clare, Mississippi.
You can find it, you can go there. It's like three or four little dwellings on a railroad track. I've been there. Booker brings his guitar and According to whose account you believe, maybe just shows it to Riley, says, here's my guitar, son, you know, check it out. Or maybe he actually gives it to him.
It's ambiguous. The people who interviewed Booker White You know, got this story out of him, but it was a little bit unclear whether he just lent him the guitar or actually gave him a guitar. In any event, A few years later, Riley King is in Kilmichael, just out of the hill country in Mississippi. With his extended family and an uncle. Kind of a little bit of a mean uncle, and supposedly this uncle gave Riley a guitar.
Mm-hmm. It was not too uncommon for black men and women in Mississippi in the 1930s to have a harmonica, maybe a guitar. Much wealthier families, like the family of Ike Turner, had pianos, but Less well-off families often had guitars.
So it's certainly plausible that this uncle gave B.B. King, Riley King, a guitar maybe around age seven, age eight. Yeah. BB King himself. said that his first guitar was something that he bought with his own money.
and he bought it with wages he'd earned as a sharecropper. from a white young man. and I think it was $15. That story sounds the most credible to me because BB King himself told it. It's possible that he had possessed a guitar in earlier life, but I don't know what.
use a six or seven year old boy I mean Even with B.B. King's incredible gifts, I don't know that he would have made much use of a guitar at age five or six or seven. But by the time he's 12 and 13, he clearly made use of Akatar. B.B. King had a circle of churches that he went to with his kin around Kilmichael.
One of these churches was overseen by a, by all accounts, a fiery preacher by the name of Archie Fair. And Archie Fair becomes another really important role model for young Riley King. Archie Fair is a guitar-slinging preacher. He preaches and he sings and he plays guitar. And I don't think that Kilmichael was wired for electricity, so he might have had a battery-powered amplifier.
I'm not really sure how that would have happened, but somehow or other, Archie Fair entertained his flock with a guitar. And Riley King was absolutely and utterly smitten by Archie Fair, fell in love with everything about his preacher performance. And decided then and there he wanted to become a guitar-playing preacher himself.
So, Riley King, when he first gets into music, he gets into sacred music. He joins, he forms, I would say he probably started it, he forms a sort of couple of gospel combos. And he goes around and plays with them at churches. And he even gets onto the radio, I think in Greenwood. It was either Greenwood or Greenville.
I always get those two cities confused, but one of those two. cities had a radio station, uh W GRM or something like that. And Riley King and his gospel combo go on the air a number of times singing a multi-part. Gospel harmonies. And that was a thing, and even in the 1930s, despite the segregation on the radio, black gospel combos were allowed, permitted to play on white radio on stations like WGRM.
So that might have been his fate. It might have been that B.B. King would have gone on to national fame. with the uh Famous St. John's Gospel Singers, I think that was the name of the outfit.
The other guys in the combo, though, didn't really have the same ambitions and they didn't want to leave. enginola so uh that kind of dried up. And you're listening to author Daniel Davisay tell the story of B.B. King. the king of the blues, and the chairman.
of the board. And B.B. King, as you heard, endured many racial slights. We heard the same story about Duke Ellington. that Terry Tichuk told.
when we come back. More of the remarkable life story of Riley King, aka BB King. Here on Our American Stories. CBS Tuesday is NCIS Night with new episodes of NCIS, NCIS Origins, and NCIS Sydney. Possible abduction of the Marines.
We need to move. Anybody is a potential target? We're gonna do what we do and we're gonna figure out answers. Whatever they're planning, it's going down here. MCIS!
MCIS night is all new. It's a night you've never seen. CBS Tuesday, starting 87 Central and streaming on Paramount Plus. Support for the show comes from Public, the investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can build a multi-asset portfolio of stocks, bonds, options, crypto, and now generated assets, which allow you to turn any idea into an investable index with AI.
It all starts with your prompt. From renewable energy companies with high-free cash flow to semiconductor suppliers growing revenue over 20% year over year, you can literally type any prompt and put the AI to work. It screens thousands of stocks, builds a one-of-a-kind index, and lets you backtest it against the SP 500. Then you can invest in a few clicks. Generated assets are like ETFs with infinite possibilities, completely customizable and based on your thesis, not someone else's.
Go to public.com/slash podcast and earn an uncapped 1% bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com/slash podcast. Paid for by Public Investing. Brokerage Services by Open to the Public Investing Inc., member FINRA and SIPC. Advisory Services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC Registered Advisor.
Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. Complete disclosures available at public.com/slash disclosures. Mm. Tired of spills and stains on your sofa?
Wash away your worries with Anibay. AniBay is the only machine-washable sofa inside and out where designer quality meets budget-friendly prices. That's right, sofas start at just $699. Enjoy a no-risk experience with pet-friendly, stain-resistant, and changeable slip covers made with performance fabric. Experience cloud-like comfort with high-resilience foam that's hypoallergenic and never needs fluffing.
The sturdy steel frame ensures longevity, and the modular pieces can be rearranged anytime. Shop washable sofas.com for up to 60% off site-wide, backed by a 30-day satisfaction guarantee. If you're not absolutely in love, send it back for a full refund. No return shipping or restocking fees. Every penny back.
Upgrade now at washablesofas.com. Offers are subject to change and certain restrictions may apply. Flag football is exploding and iFlag is leading the way. As the Guinness World Record Holder, iFlag hosts premier flag football tournaments nationwide for boys, girls, high school girls, and adults. From first-time players to elite competitors, iFlag delivers top-level competition, unforgettable experiences, and a community built around the game.
Ready to be part of it? Join the movement. Find your tournament and learn more at iflag.org. That's iflag.org. And we return to our American stories and our story on bluesman B.B.
King. Telling the story is Daniel Davisay, author of the fantastic book King of the Blues. Again, it's available on Amazon and all the usual suspects. When we last left off, B.B. King had formed a gospel group after being inspired by a guitar-slinging preacher in Kilmichael, Mississippi.
But unfortunately for BB King, or perhaps fortunately for blues fans, That didn't pan out. Let's get back to the story. Here again is Daniel.
So I take you back to Inginola. really strapping Cotton pickers in Indianola could earn real money, and Mr. King was capable of earning pretty good pay picking cotton. And then, once he got to be a tractor driver, just like his father, he earned even better pay. But then, here's what happened.
Riley King went out. And he busked on the street corners in Inginola. If you go to Inginola, you can find the street corner where he busked. There's a, you know, like a plaque there. And he would first play gospel songs and people would, you know, sort of pat him on the shoulder for doing that.
But then he he finally started playing blues songs and he learned that the blues songs could be monetized. People started throwing actual money into his guitar case or that. And He got so good at the bus skim that he was earning better money, frankly, than he was earning from tractor driving.
So, this was a simple mercenary proposition. I mean, that's why he went into music. And that's also why he left gospel, because gospel music didn't pay, and Blues music did.
So he decides to go alone to Memphis. What triggers his departure is that he's out driving his tractor. And he's probably tired. It's been a long day. He's steering the tractor back into the sort of shed.
And I guess it kind of Bucks because he hadn't put it out of gear or in gear or hadn't secured it the way he was supposed to secure it. And so it lurches. And the manifold or something breaks off of it. I can't picture this as being kind of like an exhaust. and that's like a $500 repair.
And apparently he panicked. you know I'm getting out of here. But I have to say, for the sake of his uh It's currency that he returned and he paid that bill in full. He probably spent two full years at Probably 20 bucks a month or something. Repaying that debt to his landowner.
But he hitchhikes to Memphis, and this is around 1946. And finds his cousin Booker White and takes up residence with him in his apartment. and basically sort of mentors under him and goes to house parties. and watches Booker White entertain audiences on the slide guitar and sort of starts to learn more and more of a repertoire of what was then kind of popular blues and rhythm and blues songs. But he realizes that he's not good enough to make it really in Memphis, so he treats back to Inginola.
And he returns to Memphis two years later as a more practiced, more polished blues guitarist. And very quickly in a matter of days, talks his way into his own radio show, It's a startup station called WDIA and it's historically the very first station with all black talent. It's owned and run by white people, but they decide to have all black performers. The first rainy day that Riley King walks into the offices of WDIA, he walks in as Riley King and he walks out as B.B. King.
Let me explain that. He sat down with the station manager and the station manager, you know, kind of said, okay, well, we'll put you on the air. And oh, good, here, you sang this song and it sounded pretty, you know, he sang a Louis Jordan song. It sounds great. We'll put you on, you know, next Tuesday or whatever.
And we need to give you a catchy name, so let's call you BB. this white station manager came up with the uh the BB Initials, and it was just, you know, catchy.
Something like the kernel would have done for Elvis. And it was not shortened from Blues Boy or from anything else. That's a myth. He took to the radio at the beginning as B.B. King, as a first performer who would come on for maybe 15 minutes.
And then he'd advertise whatever gig he was playing that night in West Memphis. And then he gets an actual disc jockey job on WDIA.
So from that point on, He is DJing, he's spinning songs. acquiring a massive knowledge of rhythm and blues. And he records his very first sides in the summer of 1949 for a Bullet Records out of Nashville. Nobody listening to this has probably ever heard them. They're not very good, frankly, because B.
B. King at the beginning didn't really keep time because he was a solo artist. You put him with a band and he didn't know when the measure ended. But Over the sort of summer into the winter, 1949 into 1950, B.B. King put in, you know, the thousand hours of practice.
sounds really damn good. And what's more, Over that. winter he had d he had developed his own signature sound which he called the butterfly. The best way I can think of to explain it is Nigel Tucknell. you know, from Spinal Tap.
That kind of You know, don't touch it, you know, don't even look at it, you know. Spinal tap. Anyway, B.B. King developed this signature sound, and I would argue that he was the first prominent guitarist. To really make a solo guitar sound like a human voice, this is his signal accomplishment.
This is the most important thing, probably, in all of what B.B. King did, in all of his career. All of his forebears, the earlier the Lonnie Johnsons, the Charlie Christians, even the T-Bone Walkers. They used some vibrato. But they really employed the solo guitar more like a horn.
It didn't really sound like a voice.
So He's this wonderful guitar player with this unique amazing breakthrough guitar sound, so by 1950 he's leading a terrific band. And B.B. King's first really good band has a two-guitar attack, which would have been a rarity in rhythm and blues of that era or in any of popular music. The guitar. And this is what you have to wrap your brain around.
The guitar was a back bench instrument. in popular music of the 1940s and into the 1950s. There weren't band leaders who played guitar. Most bands that were on the rhythm and blues charts were led by singers who might also play piano or might also play a horn. Not the guitar.
There were no certainly guitar heroes. in a sense, BB King. belatedly became one of the first, if not the first.
So, for BB King to have a band that had a front line of two guitars was. kind of an amazing thing. And he hired an extremely versatile Second guitarist. Robert Lockwood, or Robert Jr. Lockwood, the junior is because he was supposedly like.
you know, like a a a junior uh Robert Johnson. And Robert Lockwood is this just incredible guitarist who becomes basically the rhythm guitarist whose rhythm work allows B.B. King. to solo.
So B.B. King in this band with two guitars is liberated. Liberated to do only solo work on the guitar and not really to play rhythm. And so thus he becomes this kind of front and center lead guitar guy. And there were very few such characters anywhere in popular music, I would argue, in 1950.
That's a huge breakthrough. And he starts making a name for himself, he starts charting. He charts his first number one hit with 3 o'clock blues. And that. put him into play as a Chitlin circuit performer.
So then he is then empowered to go up and down the Chitlin circuit all through the 1950s. And Here's something that'll surprise you. Very few of the people who would have gone to see B.B. King on the Chitlin circuit in the 1950s. thought of him as any kind of great shakes as a guitarist.
B.B. King in the 1950s, as a black star superstar, was regarded first and foremost as a singer. He was considered to be sort of the preeminent. kind of pure blues singer. His guitar playing was an afterthought.
It was barely mentioned in any of the articles about him in the ads. He'd be holding the guitar, but nobody really cared about it. It's very hard to reconstruct this now because we're thinking of him as a guitar hero, but that wasn't how he was regarded by his black fans in the 1950s into the 60s. In fact, If you listen closely to B.B. King Live at the Regal, Even if you listen closely to the B.B.
King at Cook County Jail, which is from, I think, 1970. How is Bibi introduced? the world's greatest blues singer. There's no mention made of his guitar playing. Good morning.
When we come back, more of the story of B.B. King, the chairman of the board, the king of the blues. More about his unique contributions. The music and to the rich American artistic tapestry here. on our American stories.
CBS Tuesday is NCIS Night with new episodes of NCIS, NCIS Origins, and NCIS Sydney. Possible abduction of the Marines. We need to move. Anybody has a potential target? We're going to do what we do and we're going to figure out answers.
Whatever they're planning, it's going down here. NCIS! NCIS Night is all new. It's a night you've never seen. CBS Tuesday, starting 87 Central and streaming on Paramount Plus.
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That's iflag.org. And we return to our American stories and the final portion of our story on Bluesman B.B. King. Telling this story is Arthur Daniel DeVissé, author of the fantastic book. King of the Blues.
Let's return to the story. Here again is Daniel.
Um So it is into the 1960s. B.B. King is at that point a journeyman, blues artist. Great stuff. He's sold a ton of records.
He's made a lot of money. Chewed through dozens and dozens of musicians. Chewed through, he was a benevolent band leader, but they came and they went. It was a very punishing life. And Here's what happens.
Yeah. There's two huge distinctions between musicians in America and musicians in Britain right about 1964-65. In America, We were in the midst of this kind of folk revival, you know, which gave us Dylan and Jean-Baez. and there was armies of white folk guitar guys. And all those people would eventually go and see Hard Days Night.
And they all kind of en masse bought electric guitars and learned how to play like the Beatles. And You know the rest of that story. In Britain, Going into the 1960s, different things were happening. They'd come out of a sort of a ragtimey sort of jazz, trad jazz movement. There had been this skiffle thing, which is sort of like jug band music.
And all of the great guitar heroes from Britain had all been in skiffle bands, which is kind of funny. And then they progressed into a blues revival. And America was not having a blues revival, but Britain was. And so by the early 60s, you have a bunch of guitarists, drummers, and singers who are pretty damn good. Who are playing in blues ensembles.
And all these records were coming in. I picture them arriving in places like Liverpool, you know, being shipped in. And His records end up in England.
some of his singles. Crossed over, and I think it was a single called Rock Me Baby around 1964 that sold pretty well in England.
Now white listeners in England were not nearly so blinded by race. As were white listeners in the States. And so, while most white people by 1964-65 had not heard and did not hear Live at the Regal, a whole bunch of white guitarists and singers. in Britain, including Mick Jagger and you know Eric Clapton. Heard Rock Me Baby, and they said, Well, this guy's amazing.
Clapton was a great musicologist, and when Clapton figured out that B.B. King had originated. The guitar sound that was clapped in sound He never looked back. He became a a sort of besotted B.B. King fan for the rest of his life.
So BB King spawned a whole army of white British Tatar guys. who then came over in the British invasion and sort of taught us all a lesson about black blues music. And I mentioned there were two distinctions. That's the one: there was a blues revival happening in Britain.
So there was a hunger for black blues music. which they revered, I mean. And we did not. You know, in America, we didn't even know about it. The second distinction is there was way less.
There wasn't none, but there was way less institutionalized sort of racism in the music business in Britain. In Britain, it was not. remotely unheard of to have a great Treasured black artists perform in a quote-unquote white club. That was fine in England. It was not fine in the United States.
So there wasn't this sort of These racial blinders. And so it is that in the second half of the 1960s, bit by bit, measure by measure, white guitarists. Fans, bands, singers, performers start learning and embracing the music of B.B. King, the black blues star.
So once you get Into these kinds of pop bands in America in the second half of the 60s, like the Jefferson Airplane. The Birds, the Grateful Dead. All of those artists, not every last one, but for the most part, they were recovering folkies. Who had gone to the theater and seen A Hard Day's Night and decided to perform rock and roll bands? And then only later, Under the influence of Clapton Beck Page.
Only later do they even get into sort of the blues sounds. And by about 1967, he's finally allowed to perform for these huge white audiences who knew his music by then because, you know, Keith Richards had played it for them. I'm not aware of a single white guitarist in America who knew anything about what he was doing. I'm sure there must have been some. But the first that I hear with my own ears, somebody plays.
Playing like B.B. King, who's white in America, it's got to be. Bloomfield and the Butterfield Blues Banner, that's not until about 1965-66. He did this all kind of in a vacuum for the better part of a decade and a half.
So he was, I think, very much ready. I mean, he was, goodness, he was. How old was he in 1967? He was in entering his 40s. He was ready.
He was ready to break through a circle. He did not. Want to settle for being in the Chitlin circuit, you know, Bibi was probably still felt like he was living hand to mouth, so he absolutely wanted to become. A star for all of America, not just for Black America, he wanted to do what Ray Charles had done. He wanted to break through.
There's a sort of sequence of events that puts B.B. King over the top toward the end of the 1960s. The very first shot fired off was this coming out gig at the Fillmore in February 67, which is this legendary performance where. White America sort of discovers him. Yeah.
Now he's known as a guitarist. They know he's a great singer, but the guitar work suddenly is front and center. Mike Bloomfield. and Elvin Bishop from the Butterfield Band. They went to a Graham, the guy who ran the film war and said Bill Graham, you've got to hire this guy.
You've got to have B.B. King, man. And so Bill Graham hires him to perform in February 1967.
Now, Beebe shows up at the Fillmore, and he knows it as a Chitlin Circuit Palace. It had been a Chitlin Circuit venue. He had played there for black audiences. But I don't know if His manager, whoever his manager was, maybe hadn't told him. By the way, the whole audience is gonna be white.
So he goes up the stairs, and there's all these hippies and all this aromatic smoke in the air. And he's like, I'm not sure I'm in the right place here. And he finds Bill Graham and says, no, no, B.B., this is it. You're at the right place.
So Bill Graham introduces him: Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the chairman of the board, Mr. B.B. King. And they just clap and clap and clap. And Bibi has tears streaming down his face because he suddenly realizes, holy sh, I've got an audience, you know, a white audience.
All of a sudden, young Americans of every stripe know who I am. And that's why it's such a momentous occasion, this kind of breakthrough gig. And it's as silly as that that he literally showed up thinking that he was playing at the Chitlin Circuit Palace.
So after that, things got. moved very quickly. Mm-hmm. I'm not sure if I remember how B.B. King wound up on the Stones tour in 1969, but my sense of it is that the Stones wanted to have.
The best Black artists as their opening act because you know the Stones were a discerning gang, they thought they were the best rock and roll band, and I, you know, you can imagine. How Keith and Mick would have thought about this.
Well, we want, let's see, who's the best blues guy? Ah, B.B. King. You know, who's the best RB soul band? Oh, that'd be Icantina.
So they hired Icantina and B.B. King to open for them in their 69 tour. And that's an enormous, enormous event for B.B. King because it exposes him to, you know. probably a million or two million fans.
lots of write-ups in all the best music publications all over the country. And then by the turn of the 1970s, he's got a much, much higher profile than he had, gosh, three years earlier when he was barely known to white America. All the way up to his death. BB King. love nothing more, I would say, than to return to uh Club Ebony in Inginola, which was the old roadhouse in the black neighborhood.
I I I've been there. It's it's a lovely place. and it made him so happy to perform. For black people again, This is part of The deeper part of his character that doesn't come out so much in the many interviews he did because he sort of hid a lot of this, but I think he was heartbroken to not play for black people more often than he did, and he loved. Nothing more than to return to Inginola for these homecoming events and play for you know, lower income audiences who loved him for free.
or for very little money, you know, at places like Club Ebony. There's an anecdote in my book where Tony Coleman, who was this very funny drummer who played with Mr. King. Was cracking up the band talking about look at this place with grass growing through the floor and Club Ebony, give me a break. You know, he's kind of making them all laugh, talking about how this hasty joint they're going to play at.
And Mr. King turns to him and says something like, Mr. Coleman, you know what? I don't want you to forget that, you know, every time I come here, you know, That these are my people, and this is why we're doing this, and nothing's more important than coming back and. you know, seeing my roots in it.
And Tony felt terrible after this because he'd been making jokes about playing at this juke joint in Inginola, but For Mr. King, it meant everything. And a terrific job on the storytelling, editing, and production by our own Monty Montgomery. And a special thanks to author Daniel Davies Say. His book King of the Blues.
It's available on Amazon.com and all the usual suspects. Pick it up. You won't put it down. And what a story Daniel told, particularly about how the blues revival in Great Britain Resuscitated blues music in America. It took young guitar players like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page, and Keith Richards, and Jeff Beck.
to come and introduce white audiences. to this traditional folk black music, which of course was and is the blues. and absolutely an American story. BB King story here. on our American stories.
This is Julian Edelman from Games with Names. I want to take a second to talk about something that's personal to me. I've had the privilege of working closely with Robert Kraft for a long time. And one thing I've always respected is how seriously he takes up standing up to hate. As a Jewish athlete my identity is something I am proud of.
But I also know what it feels like to be singled out for it. That's why this new commercial for the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate that aired during the big game really hit home. It's about showing up for someone when they're targeted, even if you don't have the perfect words. And sometimes standing next to someone is enough. And you can show support by sharing the Blue Square.
CBS Tuesday is NCIS Night with new episodes of NCIS, NCIS Origins, and NCIS Sydney. Yeah. Possible abduction of the Marines. We need to move. Anybody is a potential target?
We're gonna do what we do and we're gonna figure out answers. Whatever they're planning, it's going down here. MCIS! MCIS night is all new. It's a night you've never seen.
CBS Tuesday, starting with 7 Central and streaming on Paramount Plus. Uh Life gets messy. Spills, stains, head accidents, and kid chaos. But with Anibay, cleaning up is easy. Our sofas are fully machine washable, inside and out, so you never have to stress about messes again.
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Mm-hmm.
