May 15, 2015 – Motor City Radio Flashbacks

OBITUARIES

BLUES LEGEND B. B. KING, INSPIRATION TO GENERATIONS OF MUSICIANS, DIES AT 89

By Randy Lewis | LA TIMES Staff Writer | May 15, 2015, 12:04 AM

B.B. King, the singer and guitarist who put the blues in a three-piece suit and took the musical genre from the barrooms and back porches of the Mississippi Delta to Carnegie Hall and the world’s toniest concert stages with a signature style emulated by generations of blues and rock musicians, has died. He was 89..

The 15-time Grammy Award winner died Thursday night in his Las Vegas home, said Angela Moore, representative for his youngest daughter, Claudette. He had struggled in recent years with diabetes.

King died peacefully in his sleep, Claudette King told The Times.

Early on, King transcended his musical shortcomings — an inability to play guitar leads while he sang and a failure to master the use of a bottleneck or slide favored by many of his guitar-playing peers — and created a unique style that made him one of the most respected and influential blues musicians ever.

“B.B. King taps into something universal,” Eric Clapton told The Times in 2005. “He can’t be confined to any one genre. That’s why I’ve called him a ‘global musician.'”

Because King couldn’t figure out how to play and sing simultaneously, he separated the two functions, laying the blueprint for the sung verse followed by the extended solo passage that would become a crucial element in blues as well as in rock music rooted in the blues. That template was exploited by subsequent generations of players, from Clapton and Jimi Hendrix on through to John Mayer and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Finding that he couldn’t make his elegantly long but thick fingers work the beer bottlenecks and metal slides used by so many other blues guitarists, he discovered that he could emulate that effect by rocking the fingers of his left hand rapidly on the guitar’s frets similar to the way a classical violinist creates vibrato, establishing a ringing tremolo that became his hallmark.

MCRFB Note: For the rest of this Los Angeles Times B. B. King Obituary article (May 15, 2015) please GO HERE.

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