50 Fun Facts About B.B. King

What was B.B. King's real first name?

Riley B. King busked on Mississippi street corners as a teenager and found that gospel songs earned him praise while blues earned tips, which, he liked to say, was why he became a blues singer.

What name did B.B. King give his guitars?

Lucille was the woman two men were brawling over when they set a dance hall ablaze; King ran back in for his $30 guitar, then named it after her as a reminder never to do anything so foolish again.

The dance-hall fight that named B.B. King's guitar broke out in Twist, near his Memphis base, in which state?

Arkansas: the hall in Twist burned, and only the next day did King learn what the two men had been fighting over. He never met the woman whose name went on his guitars.

At which rock ballroom did a crowd of hippies give B.B. King a standing ovation before he had played a note?

The Fillmore's queue of long-haired white fans made King think he had been booked into the wrong place; when promoter Bill Graham introduced him, everybody stood, and he cried.

B.B. King's stage name was shortened from what radio nickname?

Beale Street Blues Boy was the on-air name he took as a Memphis disc jockey, a job he wanted mainly to advertise his club dates; it was soon trimmed to Blues Boy, then to B.B.

Which future star was a regular teenage listener to B.B. King's radio station WDIA?

Elvis Presley tuned in for the blues and spirituals it played: WDIA was the first station in the country programmed entirely for Black listeners, and his own debut single was a cover of the bluesman Arthur Crudup.

Which bluesman is counted with B.B. King and Freddie King as one of the 'Three Kings of the Blues Guitar'?

Albert King was no relation: born Albert Nelson, he took the surname once B.B. was a star and was even billed as 'B.B. King's brother'. Freddie King was unrelated too.

Where did B.B. King play 342 one-night stands in 1956?

The Chitlin' Circuit grew up because segregation shut Black performers out of most white-owned venues; King worked its juke joints and dance halls for years before rock crowds found him.

B.B. King was born on a cotton plantation near which small Mississippi Delta town?

Itta Bena was the nearest town to the sharecroppers' cabin where he was born, but he was not a Delta boy for long: when his parents split, his mother took him east to the hill country.

B.B. King is buried beside the museum that bears his name in which Mississippi town he called home?

Indianola is where the teenage King busked for tips on Church Street; the brick cotton gin where he once laboured now forms part of his museum.

Who showed the young B.B. King his first three guitar chords?

His local preacher, the Reverend Archie Fair, played guitar while leading services and let the boy try it on a visit; King's own first guitar then cost him $15, a whole month's wages.

Which Delta blues radio show, launched on KFFA in 1941, made the young B.B. King want to be a radio musician?

King Biscuit Time went out at midday, so the teenage King could catch it on his lunch break in the fields; from then on he knew he wanted to be a musician on the air.

The US Army released B.B. King during World War II because which civilian skill of his was ruled essential?

Tractor driving got him released straight after boot camp: the Army ruled him essential to the war economy and sent him back to a Delta plantation that grew cotton under military contract.

Which bluesman, his cousin, took B.B. King in when he first moved to Memphis?

Bukka White, a master of slide guitar, housed him for ten months and helped him onto the local scene, yet King still went home to Mississippi before trying Memphis a second time.

Which bluesman's radio show on KWEM in West Memphis gave B.B. King his big break?

Sonny Boy Williamson, the harmonica star, put King on air and then passed him a paying club date in West Memphis, the start of his life as a working bluesman.

Hearing which guitarist for the first time convinced B.B. King he had to have an electric guitar?

T-Bone Walker's 'Stormy Monday' did it: King said he 'had' to have an electric guitar, 'short of stealing', and he built his own single-string lead style on Walker's.

B.B. King played with Bobby Bland, Johnny Ace and Earl Forest in a Memphis group known as what?

The Beale Streeters backed each other on Memphis gigs and records around 1950; two of them stayed linked for life, as King and Bobby Bland co-headlined tours and live albums in the 1970s.

Which future rock-and-roll star, then a teenage talent scout, is credited with bringing B.B. King to Modern Records?

Ike Turner was paid by Modern's owners to find Delta talent while still in his teens; by their account and King's he made the introduction, and he then played piano on King's early hits.

Which producer recorded some of B.B. King's first RPM singles at his own small studio?

Sam Phillips taped King in 1950, but the breakthrough was not his: the label cut King's first number one in an improvised studio in a room at the Memphis YMCA.

Which slow blues gave B.B. King his first number one on the Billboard R&B chart?

3 O'Clock Blues, a Lowell Fulson song, ended King's days as a local disc jockey: on the strength of it he set off on his first national tour, playing the Apollo and the Howard.

B.B. King and James Brown played a three-day 1974 music festival staged to promote which Muhammad Ali fight?

The Rumble in the Jungle was postponed when George Foreman cut his eye in sparring, so the Kinshasa festival built to promote it went ahead with no fight to follow.

B.B. King's celebrated 1965 album Live at the Regal was recorded at a theatre in which city?

Chicago's Regal was one of the great stages of the Black theatre circuit, but King shrugged off the album's fame: he wrote that he had 'probably played hundreds of better concerts'.

In 2005 Live at the Regal was selected for permanent preservation in what?

The National Recording Registry is the Library of Congress's list of recordings to keep for good; taping the show was a producer's idea, and the album began King's crossover to white audiences.

B.B. King opened for which band on its 1969 American tour, winning a new audience of rock fans?

The Rolling Stones had long sung his praises and chose him themselves to open 18 shows, putting King in front of arenas of young rock fans just before his biggest hit.

Which song, first a hit for Roy Hawkins in 1951, became B.B. King's signature tune and biggest pop hit?

The Thrill Is Gone broke with King's own sound: his producer overdubbed strings in place of the usual punchy horns, and the slow minor-key blues climbed to number 15 on the pop chart.

Which Beatle told an interviewer that his ambition was to play guitar like B.B. King?

John Lennon said in a magazine interview that he wished he could 'do like B.B. King'; King read it and, by his own account, almost fell out of his chair in disbelief.

B.B. King won a new generation of fans in 1988 by recording 'When Love Comes to Town' with which Irish band?

U2 put King, then in his sixties, in front of millions of young rock fans; he then toured with the band, walking on each night to share the encore.

B.B. King's hit 'When Love Comes to Town' was recorded at which historic Memphis studio?

Sun Studio was picked for its ghosts: the first stars of rock and roll had recorded in the same small room in the 1950s, and King's hosts wanted to pay tribute to the music made there.

B.B. King's 2000 album Riding with the King was a collaboration with which British guitarist?

Eric Clapton was among the British rockers whose praise in the 1960s put King in front of young white audiences; three decades on, their album became the best-selling record of the bluesman's career.

At 85, B.B. King took the main stage at which British music festival in 2011?

Glastonbury put him on its Pyramid Stage, where King let his band play a long fanfare before he appeared, then told the crowd he wished he could just go on and on.

To which pope did B.B. King present his guitar after playing a Christmas concert at the Vatican?

Pope John Paul II was handed the guitar at a private audience after the 1997 concert, a rare gift from a man who had once run into a burning dance hall to save one.

Which fictional supergroup did B.B. King front in the 1998 film Blues Brothers 2000?

The Louisiana Gator Boys, an all-star band of real blues and rock greats with King singing lead, meet the Blues Brothers in the film's battle of the bands, and it is the heroes who lose.

Which honour did George W. Bush hang around B.B. King's neck at the White House in 2006?

The Presidential Medal of Freedom went to a man who, as Bush reminded the room, had picked cotton as a boy and first reached Memphis with $2.50 in his pocket.

Which feature did B.B. King ask Gibson to leave off his signature guitar?

F-holes, the violin-style openings in a hollow guitar's top, invite howling feedback at stage volume, so King asked for his signature model to be built without them.

Before his famous Gibsons, which rival maker's guitars did B.B. King play on most of his early RPM records?

Fender built the plain solid-body, an Esquire or a Telecaster, that King used in the studio in the early 1950s; within a few years he had gone back to the hollow Gibsons he is pictured with.

B.B. King held which qualification, unusual for a touring bluesman?

A private pilot's licence: King learned to fly in 1963 and often flew himself to shows, and at 74 he was still telling an interviewer, 'I'm a pilot also. I fly airplanes.'

Which singer did B.B. King name as his favourite, calling himself a 'nut' for his records?

Frank Sinatra's In the Wee Small Hours was, by King's own account, his bedtime listening, and the admiration paid off: he credited Sinatra with opening white-run showrooms to Black performers like him.

B.B. King recorded a celebrated live album before an audience of inmates in 1970 at which correctional facility?

Cook County Jail's warden invited him, and the visit changed King: he went on playing prisons for free and co-founded a foundation for inmate rehabilitation with the lawyer F. Lee Bailey.

For years B.B. King appeared in television commercials as a spokesman for people living with which condition?

Diabetes was his own condition for decades: King advertised the OneTouch blood-glucose meter and kept touring past 80, and the strokes that killed him at 89 were put down to the disease.

Which fast-food chain did B.B. King advertise on television in the 1980s and 1990s?

McDonald's hired the King of the Blues for its commercials; years later he switched sides, fittingly, to sing for Burger King.

Which PBS children's show had a blues-singing character modelled on B.B. King?

Between the Lions is set in a library run by a family of lions, so its father, Theo, moonlighted as a guitar-playing bluesman called 'B.B. the King of Beasts'.

Which actor narrated the 2012 feature documentary about B.B. King's life?

Morgan Freeman was a fitting voice: raised in Mississippi like King, the actor co-owns a blues club in Clarksdale, in the Delta where the bluesman was born.

Which president sang a few lines of a blues standard with B.B. King at a White House concert?

Barack Obama joined the all-star finale of a 2012 blues night for Black History Month, sharing the stage with King, Mick Jagger and Jeff Beck; he had opened the evening by saying the blues speaks to something universal.

Which song did a brass band play as B.B. King's funeral procession moved down Beale Street in 2015?

When the Saints Go Marching In led his hearse past thousands of fans; it then drove south into Mississippi, where people in town after town lined the road to see him home.

B.B. King was sixth on Rolling Stone's 2011 list of greatest guitarists; who was first?

Jimi Hendrix topped the list, so the pupil outranked the teacher: Hendrix was one of the young rock guitarists whose playing showed how closely they had studied King's records.

Which singer joined B.B. King in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's 1987 class?

Aretha Franklin became the Hall's first woman that night without turning up, leaving her brother and her label boss to accept for her; King was there, and was inducted by Sting.

Which Swedish international award did B.B. King receive in 2004?

The Polar Music Prize takes its name from the record label of its founder, ABBA's manager Stig Anderson; it pairs a popular musician with a classical one, so King shared his year with the composer Gyorgy Ligeti.

B.B. King died in his sleep in 2015 at his home in which city?

Las Vegas was home to a man born in a sharecropper's cabin: by his 80th birthday King was a millionaire many times over, with a mansion in the city. He died there at 89.

What is the title of the autobiography B.B. King published in 1996?

Blues All Around Me, written with David Ritz, recalls the wonder of his first radio job: a farmhand who had never owned a record player found himself in a room with a thousand records.

B.B. King's set at the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival finally reached cinemas in which Oscar-winning documentary?

Summer of Soul was built from concert tapes that had sat in a basement for 50 years after television lost interest; its director, Questlove, said he had never even heard of the festival.