OVERSHADOWED BY B.B. KING’S GROUNDBREAKING HIT COMPLETELY WELL, HIS FOLLOW-UP, INDIANOLA MISSISSIPPI SEEDS, IS A FORGOTTEN MASTERPIECE THAT IS DUE ITS TIME IN THE SUN.

BY ED MITCHELL

1970 WAS TO be B.B. King’s year. As his 1969 studio album Completely Well continued to gain momentum, its groundbreaking single, “The Thrill Is Gone,” made the top three on the Billboard Best Selling Soul Singles chart and number 5 on the Billboard Top 100. A reworking of the 1951 Roy Hawkins hit, its brooding arrangement helped King win that year’s Grammy Award for Best Male R&B Vocal Performance.

“The Thrill Is Gone” is notable for its orchestral strings, a wash of ear candy that was commonplace on country and pop records in the 1960s but a real game changer for blues. A crossover hit, it changed King’s life too, and became his signature tune. After almost 30 years of overnight success, the King of the Blues had made the leap from chitlin-circuit workaholic to household name. Never one to let the grass grow beneath his feet, B.B. headed to Los Angeles that May to record Indianola Mississippi Seeds, the follow-up to Completely Well.

ESTATE OF KEITH MORRIS/REDFERNS/GETTY IMAGES

“Indianola Mississippi Seeds was the first B.B. record I did in L.A. after moving there from New York City in 1970,” producer Bill Szymczyk says of King’s 18th studio album. “I wasn’t trying to do something different, just make the best B.B. record I could at that time. In a sense, it could be considered Completely Well, but new and improved.”

The Seeds album cover is unusual, to say the least. It features a guitar cut from a watermelon, with a neck, bridge and pickups, and plugged into an old amplifier that looks like it’s been dragged through every juke joint in the Deep South. As for its title, Szymczyk recalls a conversation he had with King. “During one of the sessions, I asked B where he was born, and he told me Indianola, Mississippi,” the producer recounts. “I found it interesting that such a great talent came from such a small town. On a whim, I asked if he had a copy of his birth certificate. And he did! In designing the cover, we used that on the inside. Seeds are the songs B gave to the world.”