B.B. King, “The king of Blues,” a Mississippi-born son of sharecroppers whose shimmering guitar leads and endless touring schedule came to define the blues across multiple generations, has died. He was 89.
King, who had been in hospice care at his home in Las Vegas after falling ill earlier this year, died peacefully in his sleep at 9:40 p.m. PDT Thursday, his attorney Brent Bryson told The Associated Press. Deteriorating health had caused King to be hospitalized twice since April.
Inarguably one of the greatest guitarists of all time, King brought wave after wave of new fans to the blues even long after the form faded from its heyday, and influenced numerous budding guitar masters — many of them longstanding legends in their own right by now — with his searing, heartfelt vocals and soloing on songs such as “The Thrill Is Gone.”
His trusty hollow-body Gibson, which he affectionately called “Lucille,” was itself a character in the B.B. King story. There were actually multiple Lucilles, variations of Gibson’s ES-355, which the manufacturer custom-built for King, who came up with the name after a dance hall he was playing in 1949 was set ablaze by two men who knocked over a kerosene heating barrell while fighting over a woman named Lucille.
King’s influence is among the deepest of roots in modern music, and his presence is immortalized anywhere the blues is played, including clubs that bear his name in Memphis, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York and Connecticut. He sold millions of records worldwide and was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and was awarded his 15th Grammy in 2009 in the traditional blues album category for “One Kind Favor.”