B.B. King (This one hurts)

B.B. King died on May 14, 2015.

He was 89.

That is a good long run for any life and even more so for him, considering the challenges he overcame.

Still, I am having trouble dealing with it. Saw it coming for a few years now, no surprise really, but the man was a legend. He transcended life and reality as only a select few do.

He should have lived forever.

Carol and I saw him three or four times. Saw him when he was strong, saw him when he sat all night and played and sang.

Didn't matter. That voice was strong. Gave me chills when he would turn up the volume; that voice was powerful and distinctive.

And his unique guitar playing tasted so good. With some musicians, all you have to do is hear their sound and you immediately know who it is. He was one of them.

B.B. picked individual notes. He did not fly all over the fretboard, he did not play at 200 m.p.h. He did it his way and it had a  strength to it. It did not sound thin.

I am obsessed with the blues. It is my favorite - by far - genre of music. It speaks to me directly, it stimulates my emotions, it feeds my soul, it is just a part of me.

When I listen to the blues it is as if the artist is keying in on a specific aspect of my personality or emotional make up and expressing and interpreting that through their own eyes, heart, lyrics and music.

B.B. was the ultimate ambassador of the blues.

He was born in Mississippi in a hamlet called Berclair, just outside the small town of Itta Bena. By the age of fourteen he was on his own. His mother had died, his father had taken off.

He was sharecroppping an acre of cotton, and thanks to the generous way white folks reimbursed black people in that situation he was forever in debt.


He eventually broke free and landed a job as a DJ, playing the blues on a Memphis radio station and, as a self taught guitar player, playing gigs wherever he could get them.

This is part of what fascinates me about the original blues dudes. The odds they had to overcome to make it.  The racism, and hatred and injustice they had to deal with, and the guts and self-confidence it took to make a living on the road in that environment.

B.B. said he made a conscious effort to avoid feeling bitter about his past. According to Charles Sawyer, who wrote the book "The Arrival of B.B. King": "and he was very conscious about how he presented himself to the world, and he didn't want to present himself as an angry man."

That is a strong, mature and deeply philosophical approach coming from a man who had the childhood and early manhood that B.B. had.

OK, enough of history and dry fact summation.

One of my favorite lyrics comes from a song B.B. performed. It was written by William Russo but B.B. sang it like he wrote it.

Talking about the evil way his woman treats him: "I gave you a brand new Ford but you said "I want a Cadillac,' I bought you a ten dollar dinner and you said 'Thanks for the snack,' I let you live in my penthouse, you said 'It was just a shack,' I gave you seven children and now you wanna give 'em back."

And when he sings "and now you wanna give 'em back" he raises his voice to that powerful B.B. place and fills it with anger and indignation.

Amazing.

B.B. King was a beautiful, talented, driven man who worked hard to get his music to the people, playing 100 nights a year well into his eighties, and a lot more than that when he was younger.

For which I am grateful because Carol and I got to see some of those shows.

When we did we knew we were seeing a kind, generous, loving and loved man on that stage. A man who had a unique approach to the blues shaped by his life and his philosophy.

It was always about more than the music at those concerts. You just wanted to meet the man after the show, sit down and talk to him, listen to and learn from him and just connect as a human being.

Because just as his music did, you knew intuitively that a conversation with B.B. King would make you feel better.

His death leaves an enormous hole in the beauty of this world, a gap that can never be filled.

If some good blues songs are born in tribute to B.B. King, it would be the ultimate expression of the impact this one man had on millions of lives.