Charles Hodges was making hits with Hi Rhythm. But all the way up to (1964’s famed) ‘Live at the Regal’ album he’s introduced as ‘ladies and gentlemen… the world’s greatest blues singer.’” “It’s hard to get your head around that now because there was so much adulation for his guitar work later on. His fans, the African American press, almost took it for granted that he played guitar,” says de Visé. “Throughout B.B.'s early career as an entertainer, in the Black R&B genre, he was almost never celebrated for his guitar work, he was known as ‘the greatest blues singer,’ over and over again in hundreds of clippings. Blues music - through the records of Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson and via his cousin, the slide guitar master Bukka White - had a profound effect on the young King who, between work at the local cotton plantation, would spend Saturday afternoons picking and playing on the street corners of Indianola. The great-grandson of a slave, his childhood was filled with heartbreak, as he lost most of his family by the time he was a teen. 16, 1925, in Berclair, Mississippi, between Itta Bena and Indianola. MUSIC ROAD TRIPS: Looking to hit the road? Five spots in Tennessee and Mississippi every music lover should visit Memphis was 'the big city' to B.B. That tells you the reach he had.”ĭe Visé began work on the King book in 2018 - three years after King’s May 2015 passing - and started his research in the Delta, Memphis and the Mid-South where the musician’s early roots lay.įOR SUBSCRIBERS: Memphis Music Icons: Meet the titans and pioneers of the blues, the city's defining genre I mean, we sold the foreign rights to this book in places like Estonia. “When you look at his career, he played something like 17,000 gigs in 90 different countries… it’s incredible. I think he’s the only true blues superstar,” says de Visé. I knew wanted to write some kind of music book. “I was always a kind of frustrated music writer.