b.b. basking

I doubt if the organisers of the Dublin Blues Festival understood the symbolism when they invited B.B. King to call down the blues from the College Green stage outside the Bank of Ireland, once the home of Grattan’s Parliament.

The patriots and the original Irish Volunteers of 1782 weren’t all as faultlessly liberal as their flattering historical reputation makes out. They may have supported the Americans in their fight for independence but that rebellion against the oppressive reign of George III was led by such unashamed slave-owners as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Across the street within the gates of Trinity stands the statue of Edmund Burke, MP for the slave-trading city of Bristol.

For these men, freedom was often just another word for Eurocentric domination, an exclusive concept not on offer for lesser breeds. B.B. King’s blues isn’t bitter and promulgates no manifestos beyond fraternity but those blue notes he’s wrenching from his guitar also have their own history, however scorned by haughty Augustans. But if classical music still refuses to acknowledge its unpaid debts, tonight we’ll not be falsely civilised; we’ll dance no minuets on misery.

With the celebrant in a turquoise sequinned jacket, no lament could start this liturgy. ‘Let The Good Times Roll’ bellows B.B., as his band plays with a perfectly greased and lubricated swing. Yes, the blues can be pop and entertainment; his earliest black audience demanded their own good times at the start of the Fifties. So B.B. King who once revelled, playing with a 13-piece band now shows what he and the original rhythm’n’blues owed to the rampaging, unstoppable big bands of Count Basie, Lionel Hampton and Cab Calloway and their unquenchable urge to celebrate. A breeze starts to stir. By evening’s close, even the trees in College Green will be dancing to his own Memphis version of ‘Banish Misfortune’.

He still can be down and dirty but mostly, B.B. King now plays his blues with all the verve, the promise and the swing of a wilder, wider and far more welcoming American Dream that what Southern blacks were offered in his youth. Exclusion and discrimination had its torments but it also forced them carve their own culture and make their own opportunities from music . With B.B. King, the blues is a gift; generosity is at the core of his artistic personality.

Tonight it’s not only an Irish but an international audience with almost as many tourists and Spanish and Italian language students. B.B. King launches into one of his favourite standards, Willie Nelson’s ‘Night Life’. Both audience and context are choice, proof of how songs can gain secret lives of their own.

Irish, Spanish, Italians and the statues of Burke, Grattan, Thomas Davis and Thomas Moore look on, as a man from Mississippi sings the blues and his trumpeter plays a solo with all the flourishes of Louis Armstrong right in the middle of the Augustan heartland of Dublin. Could a Texas country singer ever have anticipated this setting, this performance when he wrote the song over thirty years ago? So does the blues earn its latest triumph.

“In 1956, I actually played 342 dates”. Forget Bob Dylan’s Never-Ending Tour; at 68, B.B. King is still the marathon champion for whom the road goes on forever .

‘Home Sweet Home’ hardly features in his repertoire. Only once since he became a touring artist does B.B. King recall spending an idle month at home.

Last month’s Dublin outdoor event was part of a punishing schedule of 25 European dates in 29 days. It’s lunchtime in the Westbury Hotel as we talk. Last night, B.B. played Barcelona, and after the flight, he and his band only arrived at the hotel at 4:30 a.m. Musicians young enough to be his grandchildren would quail at his workload.

But then for B.B. King, the blues is the labour of love that freed him from being a plantation hand in Mississippi. He definitely adopts Van Morrison’s deglamourising position that he should be seen as a working man still in his prime. For B.B. King, the blues now are often more about release than suffering.

He’s also insistent that the blues shouldn’t be bordered and isolated from the other streams of American music. Last year, he was duetting with George Jones on the Rhythm, Country’N’Blues project and he’ll spend a long segment of the interview talking about his jazz heroes. Surprisingly for those purists who want to neuter history, he’ll even confess to a liking for Bing Crosby. From B.B. King’s angle, the blues has always been inclusive, never exclusive.

Another Irish reference: The Chairman of the Board, the Mayor of Lovetown even came into the world on the self-same day, 16th September 1925, as the Boss, Charles Haughey. After the war, he navigated his way to Memphis, working as a D.J. before he could take wing as a fully-fledged professional musician. Check his confederates and you’ll learn that B.B. King was ecumenical from the off.

His first producer was Sam Phillips in the early years before Sun discovered Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis et al. In his recording band was the trumpeter, Willie Mitchell, later owner of Hi and Al Green’s producer. A fellow D.J. was Rufus Thomas, later Stax’s prototype rapper, whose daughter, Irma was also that label’s first female star, a constellation of friends and allies that represents the four generations of Memphis music over the next quarter-century.

But then B.B. King had arrived in the riverfront city just as the blues was making its own Memphis mutation. Electrified instruments – rap is far from the first black music based on technical innovation – and the break-up of the jazz big bands were together creating rhythm’n’blues.

It really was a melange. The Chicago blues of Chess was comparatively self-contained but in Memphis, the surrounding South and the West Coast, the blues was always renewing itself with new ingredients, recreating itself through impurity. B.B. King hailed from the Mississippi Delta but he’d turn his ears to Louis Jordan and Jimmy Rushing, to Roy Brown and Charlie Christian. At the risk of over-simplification, his music is a synthesis of the Delta and Kansas City, forged in Memphis.

He’d come up from Mississippi in ’46, landing up in West Memphis, the Arkansas town on the other bank of the river. His personal apprenticeship involved two masters: Robert Lockwood helped him with his guitar-playing while early in ’49, he had a few guest appearances on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio show broadcast from West Memphis’ KWEM.

Later that year, he got his earliest break as a disc-spinner on Memphis’ WDIA, the first radio station in America with an all-black format. Don’t always knock sponsorship; his show’s basic purpose was to advertise Pepticon tonic and as he spun the latest jump and Texas blues of Louis Jordan and T-Bone Walker, off-air he played along on his guitar, perfecting his style.

He was making his connections, hanging out on Beale Street with the other youngbloods who’d soon be blues legends like Bobby Bland, Johnny Ace and Junior Parker. Sam Phillips spotted him but only got to engineer his first 1950 recordings for Modern. Next year, ‘Three O’Clock Blues’ topped the national r’n’b charts. Henceforth, B.B.King’s two companions would be the road and ‘Lucille’.

And yet the versatility and variety was there from the start. B.B. King touches so many musics. Take two of innumerable examples. He’d first sing in gospel quartets while a player on his debut Modern sessions was Phineas Newborn Jnr., Memphis’ own lost virtuoso of modern jazz piano. As he says himself: “It reminds me of going shopping in the market when you say to the marketer, I’ll have two of these, I’ll have one of those notes there and three of these.”

Probably some year, B.B. King also did over 342 interviews. As a man with Southern country manners who also began his career on the other side of the mike, he has a long-established reputation as a courtly interviewee. What about his earliest break as a disc-spinner on Memphis’ WDIA, the first radio station in America with an all-black format? If a colleague and successor was Rufus Thomas, one of the earliest exponents of radio black jive-talk, B.B. King insists he adopted a smoother style.

Again a surprise. B.B. King claims his hero was Arthur Godfrey, the model white announcer of the era, syndicated through the CBS network. B.B. liked his downbeat sincerity: “He didn’t try to put on all that hype”.

Obviously B.B. was already a thorough professional. How you promoted your sponsors’ products counted as much as the rest of your patter and he admired Godfrey’s softsell for Lipton’s Tea and – one for Andy Warhol fans – Campbell’s Soups. Among his later clients were Coca Cola, Camel and Lucky Strike for 55 minutes each day, “playing everything from Bing Crosby to Lightnin’ Hopkins.”

He calls his format “bluesy” rather than strict blues. He’d play Hopkins and then Vaughan Munroe’s original of ‘Ghost Riders In The Sky’, Louis Armstrong’s ‘Lucky Old Sun’, Fats Domino and Louis Jordan, “Yeah, I’d play lots of Louis Jordan,” he says.

“So I would go blues and then bluesy,” he explains. “Not easy listening but good listening. And we had such a good library so they allowed me play what I wanted. It wasn’t necessarily a Top 40 station so we would take out our own programme but play some of the Top 40.”

That selection shows his early pragmatism and his ability to pitch himself to a wider audience. Stations like WDIA were also a key early element in cultural desegregation. Blacks and whites might not fraternise but they now could hear each others’ musics over the airwaves. Powerful transmitters blasting across the Mason-Dixon line also nationalised both black and white Southern music. Stations like WDIA were also an essential prerequisite for Elvis Presley and the later success of the Sun sound.

Quizzing B.B. King about his heroes and influences is like excavating Southern and American music. “My earliest idols were Lonnie Johnson – not Robert Johnson. He was okay but he was not my idol – and the Texas blues singer, Blind Lemon Jefferson. I never met him but I was crazy about him and those two people were the two acoustic guitar players I was crazy about.”

But then the next layer, the f7irst jazz electric guitar innovator, Charlie Christian. “I saw him with the Benny Goodman Orchestra and they had this thing called ‘Seven Come Eleven’ and I went crazy for that. I didn’t think of it in terms of jazz or blues. I just liked what he was doing.”

Next the Parisian gypsy jazz guitarist, Django Reinhardt, a discovery which involves a wartime tale: “One of my friends, we were both 18 in 1943 and we both went into the army at the same time. But I was only in the army for a short time since during that time, I was also working on the plantation where we were growing produce for the armed forces so they gave me partial basic training and then reclassified me and sent me back to the plantation.

“But my friend, they sent him over to France. So while he was over there, he heard of the Hot Club Of France. So he knew that I liked guitar so when he came home, he brought me five or six records. Django Reinhardt, I went crazy for Django, I fell in love.”

He may be sat in a Westbury Hotel, maroon, padded leather armchair but he’s almost preaching a musical sermon. “Because then,” he continues “a little bit later, I heard a song called ‘Stormy Monday’ and the guy’s name was T-Bone Walker and that’s when I really went crazy for the guitar and I’ve been crazy for it ever since. That’s the one that really destroyed me.

“But then I guess later on, I had my jazz sounds in my head. I’d always been crazy for the big bands and Count Basie because he had Jimmy Rushing. He’d sing the blues like nobody I ever heard and this big band playing the blues, man, I was in heaven again.

“Then I heard Duke Ellington. Everybody was talking about how sophisticated he was in his writing but he’d also write for people like Al Hibbler. And then I heard Johnny Hodges, man, that beautiful alto solo. And you know what happened and I guess most people think I’m crazy but when I would hear Johnny Hodges play, his flow was so smooth, so easy, I could still hear Blind Lemon, I could hear Lonnie Johnson, I could hear Django, I could also hear Charlie Christian.”

He’s tying the loose ends together: “All of these people I loved so much and Louis Jordan, I can still hear what I’d heard in them in a jazz player like Johnny Hodges. He didn’t improvise a lot like Charlie Parker but what he’d do to me, it seemed like he’d just sing the melody.”

Trumpeter Bobby Hackett was another early idol but what unifies all these people in his mind “is that they all seemed to have one something, the phrasing and the way they attacked the note, it would just go through me.

“I used to do what I call and sometimes still do,” he remarks later, “the borderline of any kind of music. Border the line of jazz, border the line of rock’n’roll. When I say border, I don’t really play it but play something similar to it.”

The point, of course, is that his own musical background knew and respected few borders.

Choosing between the blues and gospel was his first experience on the borderline. Inevitably we talk about “When Love Comes To Town”. I’ve always been struck by the way Bono reversed the stock roles in the song since he plays the sinning bluesman and B.B. – and perhaps there’s a shadow of Martin Luther King here – is the one who “conquers the great divide” with the release of Christian belief.

B.B. King thinks “he wanted me to do that because I had talked about it so. I was so overwhelmed. I was brought up in the church. I believe in God, so that just touched me deeply. I think if I remember correctly that might be the reason he gave me that verse.”

The tension between the blues and gospel, between the secular and the sacred, is a regular feature among his generation and B.B. King also makes his own distinctions. The blues, he even says “has nothing to do with my soul. I tried to explain that to people like my family, my mother’s people. They used to be on my case and say ‘Sing no mo’ Blues’ and I didn’t want to be, as we use the word, sassy to them. But I would have them know that when I worked the fields, I was making a living; when I drove tractors and trucks, I was making a living; now I sing the blues, I’m still making a living. It has nothing to do with my inner soul . . . this is what I believe God put me here to do.”

B.B. King doesn’t run the voodoo down; he refuses to buy into the myth that the bluesman must always be some doomed, almost-Faustian figure with a hellhound forever on his trade. As he’s already acknowledged, Lonnie not Robert is his Johnson:

“I don’t remember the last time I had a drink of liquor. I haven’t had a beer in four or five years. I don’t have a wife to beat and I wouldn’t beat my wife if I had one. I don’t go to church that often but I do go to church. A lot of things in the myth that blues singers are supposed to do, I don’t do,” he concludes with a chuckle, “so I guess I’m really not a blues singer.”

That blend of pride and pragmatism, the self-belief of a self-made man has always fired his career. Even in the Fifties, King was the butt of white blues purists who preferred plantation authenticity and scorned the new theatricality and electrification of the blues. As he says: “a lot of the blues purists never did much like me because for one thing, I tried to make a living. I didn’t try to be traditional. I tried to make a living and keep my band working. I also wanted to be entertaining.”

During the Fifties and early Sixties, the time of his greatest success with the black audience, it seems B.B. King always feared he was living on borrowed time; he knew he was vulnerable to the next change in the cycle:

“The black audience when I started to play was usually my age and older so when I was a very young man, they were young and older. Somehow my songs and my way of delivery always seemed to attract the adult person or the person who knew my situation or had been in similar situations. The young people who liked Jackie Wilson or James Brown would tolerate me, but they didn’t really care about me. People needed to be a little older, a little more experienced in life to do that.”

In the late Fifties he ran a 13-piece band that even warmed up with Count Basie material, but through the Sixties he encountered further generational problems as Motown and Stax stole the young black audience. As everybody knows, the white blues boom was his salvation and he talks movingly about his first date at the Fillmore West before a white hippie audience.

Did those San Francisco flowerheads know that B.B. King had known Jimi Hendrix long before he was popular and extremely profitable? When Little Richard shared a tour with King, Hendrix was his guitarist.

Now B.B. recalls him as someone “with whom I’d sit and talk. But I didn’t know him to be then what he became to be. Like I knew Elvis before he was Elvis when I used to record at Sun studios. I knew Jimi to be talented but to become what he really was, no way would I have predicted that or bet on it.”

“He was very quiet and usually in the intermissions in the dressing-room, he would sit like I did and maybe, practice something and discuss things with you. Like ‘how do you do this here, this is the way I do it.’ We just talked. That’s the way usually with good musicians, they’ll never stinge about being helpful. And next time I heard him, I never knew who he was till I saw him. But he was playing well then; it was just he was never featured.”

So much for memories. B.B. King still keeps working. He keeps looking for new vistas on the blues and is planning an album where he plays acoustic guitar with just a few delicate shades of Lucille in the background. The 21st Century’s nearly in sight. 2001, love may still be coming to town for a rematch at College Green.