His take on the blues and the Beale Street of the late 40s and 50s is quite captivating. He writes at how he arrived at his distinctive style, using his "fat hands" to sustain and bend notes like a plaintive steel or slack-key guitar. After that he started to get more recognized and starts getting a bigger audience.
Commercially, the turning point was "The Thrill is Gone" for which he won a Grammy in 1970.
He gets a break on the radio and is also doing gigs all the time. After honing his skills in Indianola, King moved to Memphis, the black music hub of the south. He is enthralled by the music of Sonny Boy Williamson, Blind Lemon Jefferson and T-Bone Walker among others. King’s love of music started through the church. He lost his mother and grandmother as a child and was thereafter shuttling between sharecropping relatives in the Mississippi delta. This book comes across as an honest story of a very hard-working man.
And what a career it was.ī.B King was the consummate bluesman. Here's to Peaches, his first love, and to his first wife, whom he left in the delta to live with her family there after he ran away to Beal Street in Memphis to pursue his career. Many years and millions of dollars later, he returned to find her, to repay her handsomely, but the house was gone and the neighbors knew not what had happened to the old woman. A little old lady at the side of the road had him in, gave him food and water and a bed to sleep in. As he tells the story, on his way to Memphis, riding a child's bicycle on that very hot summer day, he was hungry and dying of thirst. The amazing stories of a superstar that only someone like BB could write. The story of his life is, indeed, fascinating-how he worked his way up to as many as 290 shows per year how Lucille got her name how he had 17 children by 17 different women (or did he lose count?) how he wrecked a tour bus into a bridge at 4:00 am without insurance. I have read other autobiographies by Johnny Cash, Steven Tyler, Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, George Carlin, but this was by far my favorite. And then fearing for his future there, he leaves his wife, runs away and rides a bicycle all the way to Memphis, Tennessee. It is quite the story how he gets out of the Mississippi delta after wrecking his landlord's tractor. This book is a great, great story, written by King himself, simply and artistically done just like the music he plays and creates. I am a blues lover and always have been, beginning with B.B.
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