By Christine Wilson

In the late 1940s in Indianola, Mississippi, a young man named Riley King was singing and playing guitar with his friends in a group called the “Famous St. John’s Gospel Singers.” They played in churches around the Delta and even went to the stations in Greenwood and Greenville and sang on the radio - they were that good.

At night Riley King changed hats and played blues on Indianola street corners for tips. He said later that when he played gospel music he got a pat on the head, but when he played the blues he got a dime. He didn’t have much money, and dimes were worth a lot more in the 1940s in Indianola than they are now (he made only $15 driving a farm tractor all day).

In 1946 King tried to convince the Singers to leave Indianola and seek their fortune together as a professional group. When they refused, he packed his bags and took off for the music town of Memphis, Tennessee, to live with his cousin, bluesman Bukka White. Musicians gravitated to Memphis from small towns all around. Beale Street - “the Home of the Blues” - was there, and Sam Phillips, of later Sun Records fame, had just arrived in 1945 and set up a recording studio.

Radio station WDIA

King immediately began playing around town, but his luck wasn’t running right, and later that year he went back to Indianola to his tractor job to make some money. After two years at home he was ready to try again and headed back to Memphis. This time he got a break: Sonny Boy Williamson let him play a song on his legendary radio show out of West Memphis. It led to his landing a ten-minute spot on the black-staffed radio station WDIA in Memphis, a spot that was so popular King got his own show, sponsored by Peptikon Tonic (King wrote the jingle: “Peptikon sure is good/ You can get it anywhere in your neighborhood”). Now that he was the hot new disc jockey in town, he needed a catchy name: “Beale Street Blues Boy” was shortened to “Blues Boy King” and finally to B.B. King. His close friends called him “B.”