Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 60: B.B. King, “Sweet Sixteen / Don’t Cut Off Your Hair”

In Washington in 1999, B.B. King explained why he played the blues:

“Growing up on the plantation there in Mississippi, I would work Monday through Saturday noon,” he said. “I’d go to town on Saturday afternoons, sit on the street corner, and I’d sing and play.

“I’d have me a hat or box or something in front of me. People that would request a gospel song would always be very polite to me, and they’d say: ‘Son, you’re mighty good. Keep it up. You’re going to be great one day.’ But they never put anything in the hat.

“But people that would ask me to sing a blues song would always tip me and maybe give me a beer. They always would do something of that kind. Sometimes I’d make 50 or 60 dollars one Saturday afternoon. Now you know why I’m a blues singer.”

It sounds reductive, but it gets to the heart of what made King an original.   As Muddy Waters uncoupled the blues from the travails of rural life and made it the sound of the city – Chicago in particular – King uncoupled the blues from its roots in African-American spirituals and made it the music of African-American cosmopolitan man.  

He wore a tuxedo, lived in Las Vegas, and fathered (by his own count) fifteen children by fifteen different women.  

Still and all, he wound up playing a command performance for John Paul II – and gave the pope one of his signature “Lucille” guitars.  

This grainy video from New York’s Cafe au Go Go in 1968 shows King at his worldliest, shortly before the performances at the Fillmore West later that year that King considered the turning point in his own career – the point when he ceased to be a roots musician and became a world-class showman.

The blues would never be the same.