The story of Lucille illustrates B.B. King’s down-to-earth attitude about the blues and about life in general. In the mid-1950s he was performing at a dance in Twist, Arkansas, when some men began fighting and knocked over a kerosene stove, starting a fire. The crowd got out safely, including King. But then he realized that he’d left his beloved $30 acoustic guitar inside and rushed back inside the burning building to retrieve it. He narrowly survived the ordeal. He later learned the men had been fighting over a woman named Lucille, and he named his guitar Lucille as a kind of lesson, to never do anything such as that again. Ever since, King’s trademark Gibson guitars have all been called Lucille.

In 1968, King played at the Newport Folk Festival and at the Fillmore West in San Francisco with top rock musicians. He gradually found himself playing to white audiences as often as black, if not more. In 1969, King was chosen by the Rolling Stones to open for them on an American tour.

Part of B.B. King’s appeal is his endearing onstage presence. He wrestles with Lucille to pull out those heart-breaking notes, showing his anguish in his distorted expressions. “My eyes are closed. I forget what I look like,” he says. “In fact, I don’t care what I look like because the feeling that I got through what I’m doin’ is so important.”

King kept on touring over the years to become probably the most widely known blues singer in history. For more than fifty years he has played to audiences across the United States and the world. He was the first to introduce blues to Japanese, Russian, and Chinese audiences. King has released over fifty albums, many of them classics. He continues to tour, playing over 200 concerts a year around the world.

B.B. King was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. In 1991 B.B. King’s Blues Club opened on Beale Street in Memphis, and in 1994, a second club opened in Los Angeles. Now there is a club on Times Square in New York City.

A museum for the King of Blues

Every year in June, B.B. King comes back to Indianola, Mississippi, to play a free Homecoming Concert and to play at the annual Medgar Wiley Evers Memorial Festival. Born September 16, 1925, near Itta Bena, King moved to Indianola as a young man, and he considers it home. In 2005 a documentary was made of King’s visit to Indianola’s Club Ebony - a tiny club that helped launch his career - by Mississippi Public Broadcasting and the B.B. King Museum and Foundation.

On June 10, 2005, the Foundation kicked off phase one of planning and building for the 2.3-acre B. B. King Museum complex in Indianola with a groundbreaking ceremony. The kickoff was an 80th birthday gift for King. Three years later, in September 2008, the $15 million B. B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center had its grand opening. The museum itself is housed in the Last Brick Cotton Gin, where King worked in the 1940s. The complex tells King’s life story, much of it narrated by King himself, including his difficult childhood in the Mississippi Delta and the early days of his career in Memphis. A replica of the WDIA radio studio and a recording studio, where visitors are offered hands on experience at mixing an actual recording, is featured. The adjacent Delta Interpretive Center promotes a curriculum of education and cultural outreach for at-risk youngsters of the mostly poor Delta region.