B.B. King and Lucille

B.B. King has touched the hearts of music fans all over the world, including my own.  I found a gem while I was cruising YouTube and wanted to share it with you.  It’s the story of how Lucille, B.B. King’s famous guitar, got her name.  You may have heard the story before, but I really enjoyed hearing Mr. King tell it himself.  Then I found a feature that Gibson Lifestyle put out about the relationship between B.B. King and Lucille over the many years of their career together.  I hope you dig it as much as I did.  Enjoy!

I found the video of B.B. King telling the story about Lucille here at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGsvAMRFivo.

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I was so interested in the story, I dug a little bit more to find this great feature on the famous blues pair by Gibson Lifestyle at http://www.gibson.com/en-us/Lifestyle/Features/bb-king-0916/.  Plus there’s a cool video performance that includes musicians: B.B. King on guitar, Sonny Freeman on drums, James Toney on organ, Mose Thomas on trumpet, and Lee Gatling on sax.

Perhaps no other musical partnership has a history as long as that of the blues legend B.B. King and his beloved guitar named “Lucille.” Today the Gibson B.B. King Lucille model is a gorgeous ebony queen with gold hardware bearing King’s name on its headstock. But over the years there have been many Lucilles, including an actual woman whose name King took for his guitar.

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The Lucille saga begins with her in the winter of 1949, when King – who turns 85 on today – was playing a Twist, Arkansas dance. A fight broke out and the burning barrel of kerosene that was used to heat the room spilled, spreading its flaming contents. Panic ensued as the fire began to cover the floor. Everybody, including King, fled. Once outside, he realized he’d left his prized guitar, a $30 Gibson acoustic, and returned to retrieve it.

The next day King learned two people had died in the blaze, and that the fight triggering the conflagration was over a woman named Lucille. He renamed his Gibson after her that day, as a reminder to never do anything as stupid as fight over a woman or enter a burning building again.

King switched to electric guitar and began his recording career that same year, cutting his first single “Miss Martha King” for Nashville-based Bullet Records. At that point, he played another solid body electric, but by the early ’50s he was a Gibson man for life. During that era he was photographed with a Les Paul Gold Top and a hollowbody Gibson L-5CES, and when semi-hollowbody Gibson guitars hit the market, he switched to those to achieve greater volume at the fore of his orchestra.

He made his way through the Gibson “ES” family, traveling and recording with a series of ES-335s, ES-345s and finally ES-355s until 1980. King began using the ES-355 as soon as it was introduced in 1958. With its bold block neck inlays, gold hardware, split diamond headstock emblem and ample binding, the model remains the Cadillac of the ES series. In 1980, just before the regular production of ES-355s ceased, the first Gibson Lucille Model was built.

The Lucille has evolved over the years, but the first-generation models were drawn right from the ES-355TD template – with the “T” standing for “thinline” and the “D” for dual pickups. The guitar also sported both stereo and mono output jacks – the better for King to achieve his thick, buttery tone. With its six-position Varitone rotary dial prominently displayed on its body, the Lucille, and ES-355s with the Varitone option, for that matter, may resemble the ES-345, but there are important differences. The Lucille has a maple rather than mahogany neck for a brighter tone and there are no f-holes, which makes the guitar better suited for higher volumes. Initially, Gibson also made Lucille in cherry red. The one notable exception from the contemporary model’s ebony finish is Joe Perry’s “Bille” one-off Lucille variant – named after his wife – that was made in white especially for him by the Gibson Custom Shop.

Today there are two B.B. King Lucille models in production. The Gibson Custom Shop makes the flagship version, with a gleaming ebony finish, gold hardware, block inlays, stereo and mono output jacks, sumptuous binding and “B.B. King” set ornately into the headstock over a curlicue inlay and beneath a pearloid crown. There’s also an Epiphone B.B. King Lucille, with a more modest headstock bearing only the names “Lucille” and “Epiphone,” and a fine-tuning tailpiece.

Along with King’s birthday and the 30^th anniversary of the Lucille model, there’s one more historic event in King’s career to celebrate. The album that many believe to be King’s finest, Live at the Regal, was released 45 years ago, in November 1965. Recorded the year before at Chicago’s Regal Theater, where King was a regular and a local hero, it is one of the greatest live albums ever cut, if only for the way it captures the loud and relentless magnetic connection of the audience and their beloved performer.

At times the screaming threatens to overwhelm the performances of such great entries in the King repertoire as Memphis Slim’s “Everyday I Have the Blues,” Robert Nighthawk’s “Sweet Angel,” Leonard Feather’s “How Blue Can You Get?” the early King hits “Please Love Me” and “You Upset Me Baby” plus the tongue-in-cheek “Help the Poor.” The disc captures King as a vital pup of just 40 years, at the height of his stunning vocal and guitar powers, with a Gibson ES-355 named Lucille tucked under his arm. And the album remains a touchstone for anybody interested in understanding what the magic of live blues is all about.

B.B. King and Lucille are blues legends and I encourage you to spend as much time as you can studying them.  I know I have.

Thanks,

Griff