Elder statesman

If B.B. King ever found time to read poems, there’s a good chance that Paul Vesey’s dramatic monologue cum Satchel Paige tribute “To Satch” would be among his favorites.

“Sometimes I feel like I will never stop,” it begins, “Just go on forever. …”

King died on May 14, four months and two days shy of his 90th birthday. Although he had been in recent decline, there must’ve been many times during his nearly 70-year career he felt like Vesey’s Paige.

Born into poverty on a Mississippi plantation shortly before the Great Depression, King came by his work ethic early. Music entered the picture when he discovered playing at churches paid better than driving a tractor. But the blues paid even better. By the time that he was 22, he’d become a Memphis radio-station and blues-club regular.

He didn’t record his first album until he was 30. But he’d already recorded over two dozen singles, four of which became R&B-chart number ones, and his experience showed. While Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf were keeping the blues raw and rural, King was adroitly augmenting his unabashedly urban sound with tightly arranged saxes. And he sang like a buoyant cross between Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner.

In short, if Duke Ellington’s “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing” was correct, King’s exuberant early LPs meant a great deal. Fans who listened closely noticed he never sang and played his guitar simultaneously, preferring instead a call-and-response effect that would become his trademark.

Success followed upon success, and by 1963 he was recording for ABC-Paramount. The concluding track of his 1969 album Completely Well was a brooding, 5½-minute reading of a Roy Hawkins–Rick Darnell song about love gone bad called “The Thrill Is Gone.” Edited down to three minutes and 55 seconds, it became a blockbuster hit and made King the globetrotting blues equivalent of Louis Armstrong. In 1971 alone, he recorded live albums before enraptured crowds in Japan and Chicago and an all-star-studded studio album in London.

His voice deepened and roughened. Commercially speaking, he struggled during the ensuing decades as pop tastes shifted. Between his last Top 40 hit (“I Like to Live the Love”) in 1974 and his double-platinum collaboration with Eric Clapton (Riding with the King) in 2000, his was often the lot of the respected but passé elder statesman.

Yet his recordings and approximately 250 annual live performances (often cited as the reason his two marriages failed) remained reasonably consistent.

Occasionally, they were as inspired as anything that he had ever done. His performance with U2 on the rock ’n’ roll gospel song “When Love Comes to Town” lit up the 1988 U2 documentary Rattle and Hum. And his final studio album, the uncharacteristically stripped-down One Kind Favor (recorded when King was 82 and produced by T-Bone Burnett), won a “Best Traditional Blues Album” Grammy—his seventh—in 2009.

Although his music’s sheer quantity was overwhelming, highlights emerged, particularly the 1965 album Live at the Regal and the 1968 compilation His Best: The Electric B.B. King.

Had King stopped with those—even, in other words, had he never gone on to record “The Thrill Is Gone”—his place among American pop-music greats would have been secure.