B. B. King

I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your family.

I would sit on the street corners in my hometown of Indianola, Mississippi, and I would play. And, generally, I would start playing gospel songs. People would come by on the street – you live in Time Square, you know how they do it – they would bunch up. And they would always compliment me on gospel tunes, but they would tip me when I played blues.

I used to play a place in Twist, Arkansas… It used to get quite cold in Twist. And they used to take something that looked like a big garbage pail and set it in the middle of the floor, half-fill it with kerosene. They’d light that fuel and that’s what we’d use for heat… But this particular night, two guys started to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over onto this container. When they did it spilled on the floor. Now, it was already burning so when it spilled it looked like a river of fire. Everybody ran for the front door including yours truly. But when I got on the outside then I realized that I’d left the guitar inside. I went back for it. The building was a wooden building and it was burning so fast that when I got my guitar it started to collapse around me. So I almost lost my life trying to save the guitar. But the next morning we found that these two guys who were fighting were fighting about a lady. I never did meet the lady but I learned that her name was Lucille. So I named my guitar Lucille to remind me not to do a thing like that again.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

You’ve heard me call myself a bluesman and a blues singer. I call myself a blues singer, but you ain’t never heard me call myself a blues guitar man. Well, that’s because there’s been so many can do it better’n I can, play the blues better’n me. I think a lot of them have told me things, taught me things.

I look at an audience kind of like meeting my in-laws for the first time. You want to be yourself, but you still want to be somebody that they like. When I go onstage each night, I try my best to outguess my audience, and I like to feel in most cases like I’m a big guy with long rubber arms that I can reach around my audience and swing and sway with them – move them with me. And many nights, I can’t. Many nights I can. But you do like a good manager with a baseball team. You keep pulling pitchers, you keep trying.

I had a really good time in New Orleans, although I had some very tragic times in Baton Rouge. Some guys beat me up and threw my horn away. ‘Cause I had a beard, then, and long hair like the Beatles.

When Jazz broke through in England, I remember sneaking to listen on the radio much to my parent’s disapproval.

I’d rather be B.B. King. That’s the way I started. Let the heavy metal guys play heavy metal, let the others play the other… I try to do what I do better, not get away from it.

I don’t compose. I assemble materials.

I hear beauty and elegance combined with passion and fire.

People involve themselves with the superficiality of Jazz without digging for its soul.

The true musician plays what he/she hears. That cannot be a mistake.

I heard Mr. Wild Bill Davis. I heard him play in 1930 and he told me that it would take me fifteen years just to learn the pedals, the pedals of the organ and I got mad.

A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write to ultimately be at peace with himself.

Being a singer is a natural gift. It means I’m using to the highest degree possible the gift that God gave me to use. I’m happy with that.

You compose because you want to somehow summarize in some permanent form your most basic feelings about being alive, to set down some sort of permanent statement about the way it feels to live now, today.

I feel I have only scratched the surface of what I know I am capable of doing.

Change is always happening. That’s one of the wonderful things about Jazz music.

I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions.

Well if I could play like Wynton Marsalis, I wouldn’t play like Wynton.