ONCE AND FUTURE KING

B.B. KING was the gracious, perma-gigging ambassador of the blues, but his seeming serenity glossed a rollercoaster career, struggles with racism and gambling, audiences lost and found. As a new tribute album reinforces his legacy, MAT SNOW goes to bat for arguably the most underrated legend of the form, starting with the gig that turned everything around...

All hail the King: B.B. performing on-stage with Lucille, Sydney Entertainment Centre, 1989.

Photograph by STEVEN SIEWERT

IN THE SUMMER OF 1966, THINGS LOOKED BAD FOR B.B. King. He was 40 years old, and his audience was ageing too – and withering.

Gigging solidly for 14 years, he’d perhaps 5,000 shows under his belt, but the blues that had built his fame and fortune in the segregated ’50s was failing to connect with a new generation of black Americans in the Civil Rights ’60s. “I was the outsider, the bluesman, just like I’d been the outside bluesman in the rock’n’roll shows of the ’50s,” he reflected years later. “I still felt like a sheep among cows.”

Whenever he was booked onto a bill with new R&B stars like Sam Cooke, Jackie Wilson, Marvin Gaye or Curtis Mayfield, things could turn ugly. “It hurts to hear young audiences heckle me, because they don’t understand what I am singing,” King told Ebony magazine. “They think all blues singers drink gin and smoke pot and beat their wives every Saturday. They don’t realise we can be gentlemen, too, and have families and want respect.”

Let it B: (clockwise from left) King with band leader Johnny Otis, 1952; King performing at San Quentin Prison in 1981; singing When Love Comes To Town with U2’s Bono (left) and Adam Clayton, Paris, December 12, 1989; recording B.B. King In London with Ringo Starr, 1971; King in his early twenties at Memphis’s WDIA radio station; (right, opposite) giving it his “Lemon Face”, Central Park, NY, 1969.

Steven Siewert, Fairfax Media via Getty Images

Getty (6)

Even worse for King, those 300-plus annual one-nighters were taking a personal toll. A compulsive womaniser and gambler when on the road, King was stricken that summer when his second wife Sue filed for divorce, citing mental cruelty. Along with the love of his life, King waved goodbye to their house in South Pasadena, his ’66 Mustang, a VW camper and $35,000 in cash. At that low point he had no idea that salvation lay at hand.

THE FILLMORE WAS SAN FRANCISCO’S GRANDEST outpost of the chitlin circuit, the string of black entertainment venues ranging from boondock cinderblock shacks to swanky city theatres where King had been making his living for years, and he knew it well. But when his latest booking came in he had no idea that the Fillmore was under new ownership with a completely different bill of fare and audience.

“We used to play there when it was 95 per cent black,” he recalled of that fateful Sunday, February 26, 1967 to the BBC’s John Tobler and Stuart Grundy. “When I got there that day, there were all these white kids with long hair sitting all over the place. I thought I was in the wrong place. Our promoter Bill Graham said, ‘B, we’re glad to have you.’ I said I was nervous and needed something to drink. After I’d done had me two or three slugs of Courvoisier, I was kind of OK.

“Bill Graham himself introduced me – and I’ll never forget it, it’s ringing in my ears now – ‘Ladies and gentleman, I bring you the Chairman of the Board, B.B. King.’ And everybody stood up. I cried, I couldn’t believe it, and from that time on, my fear left.”