B.B. King

King was twenty-two when a record on the radio stopped him cold: T-Bone Walker's "Stormy Monday," the first time he'd heard a guitar played electric. "I thought Jesus himself had returned to earth playing electric guitar," he wrote in his 1996 autobiography, Blues All Around Me. "I became his disciple. And remain so today. My biggest musical debt is to T-Bone." Within a couple of years he'd bought his own electric guitar and never turned back.

listen: upstream & heresource: Library of Congress — Call It Stormy Monday, essay by Brian Bader (King's own account of hearing T-Bone Walker; recording/chart history) ↗share

1947

Call It Stormy Monday (But Tuesday Is Just as Bad)T-Bone Walker

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1951

Three O'Clock BluesB.B. King

listen forPlay Walker's 1947 "Stormy Monday" against King's 1951 breakthrough "Three O'Clock Blues" and listen for the specific move King borrowed: sounding a note, then sliding up to the same pitch on the next string down, a technique the blues historian Robert Palmer identified as lifted straight from Walker. King's tone comes out bigger and rounder, his phrasing heavier, but the bent, ringing single string underneath — the guitar as a second, weeping voice — is Walker's invention wearing King's fingerprints.

When Riley King arrived in Memphis in 1946, he moved in with his mother's cousin Bukka White, an established Delta slide guitarist, and stayed close to a year, absorbing the older man's guitar technique and stage sense side by side. White's most lasting lesson wasn't musical: "Riley, blues musicians should always dress like they're going to the bank to borrow some money," he told his young cousin — advice King took so literally that he spent the rest of his career touring in tailored suits, forever dressed for a loan he'd already made good on.

listen: upstream & heresource: Guitar World — The story of B.B. King, the greatest blues guitar player of all time (Bukka White mentorship, the "bank" quote, vibrato origin) ↗share

1940

Parchman Farm BluesBukka White

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1953

Woke Up This Morning (My Baby She Was Gone)B.B. King

listen forListen to White's droning, moaning slide on "Parchman Farm Blues," then to King shaking a single note on 1953's "Woke Up This Morning" — the lineage is in the hand, not the tool. King never mastered a bottleneck slide, so he built his own version of that same crying sustain by wobbling his fretting finger instead. "It all comes from the wrist," he explained of the technique — the rapid, vocal-like trill that would define his guitar sound for the next sixty years.

Only two guitarists made B.B. King say he wished he could play like them — T-Bone Walker was one, and the other was Lonnie Johnson, whose gliding, jazz-inflected lines predated the electric guitar's takeover of the blues by two decades. "I was crazy about Lonnie Johnson," King said. "Where Blind Lemon was raw, Lonnie was gentle. Lonnie was more sophisticated." Fifty-five years after Johnson's "Tomorrow Night" topped the R&B chart, King finally cut his own version of the song, on 2003's Reflections — a debt paid, at last, in the studio.

listen: upstream & heresource: Line 6 blog — Jas Obrecht on Lonnie Johnson (B.B. King's testimony on Johnson) ↗share

1948

Tomorrow NightLonnie Johnson

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2003

Tomorrow NightB.B. King

listen forSet Johnson's unhurried 1948 "Tomorrow Night" beside King's 2003 remake and the gap closes fast: both let a single word bend and hang past where the beat expects it, phrasing borrowed from crooners more than blues shouters. King once said hearing Johnson sing the song taught him something about restraint — that a singer could go "to a place beyond the blues that, at the same time, never left the blues." His huskier, unhurried 2003 vocal is that lesson, fifty-five years in.