B.B. King and Lucille, The King of Blues and His Queen
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We know that music is a sequence of notes which, one after the other, form a melody. It can be catchy cacophonic, pleasant, relaxing or aggressive, but melody comes out of the notes making songs, arias, ballads, instrumental pieces and more; the first step, anyway, is to be made in a music instruments shop, as it happened to Riley B. King, better known as B.B. King, the Blues Boy King.
He was born in 1925, and when he was a child he worked in the fields of Mississippi picking cotton with his mother and his grandmother, but he had a passion for music which he started singing the Gospel in the church. Then his passion for guitars arrived: when he was 12 he bought his first guitar, and his technique improved when, in 1943, he decided to move to Tennessee, in Memphis: there his cousin Bukka White, who played the guitar in the country blues, helped him.
Then, with guitar and microphone, he started playing in the radio and recording his voice and guitar, which he started to improve with the typical effects of the instrument. Always with his guitar, B.B. King started to climb his ladder to success and nowadays, at the age of 85, he is still at the top: he’s a giant of blues, and with his guitar he rides the world to make people listen to his music.
His beloved Lucille is a Gibson ES-335, even though Gibson now called this model Lucille, after the Maestro of Blues: it’s a semi-acoustic guitar able to follow him, who is considered the greatest living bluesman, in his inventions and musical prodigies. The creation of the vibrato technique is attributed to him; in the guitar you obtain it by crossing the strings, nearing the one to which you are giving the effect to the string next to it; this effect has been named “hummingbird”.
The reason why B.B. King names Lucille all his guitars dates back to a winter night in 1949, when he was playing in a dance hall in Arkansas. It was cold, and it was a common use to burn a barrel of kerosene to heat the place. Two men, though, began to fight, the barrel fell down and the burning kerosene poured on the floor, burning the place.
Of course, everyone run out, but the young B.B. King entered back in the dance hall to save his guitar. The following day he learned that the fight started for a woman named Lucille, and he decided to give that name to his guitar (and to all his guitars after that) as a reminder not to make a thing like that anymore.
B.B. King, who just turned 85, still plays the blues he got. We can do nothing but thank him for all the blues he gave and still gives us…clap your hands for the King of Blues!
About the Author
This article was written by Lia Contesso, with support from strumenti musicali chitarre.
For any information please visit corde chitarra, or visit chitarre bassi
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Gibson Maestro.
