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>LAS VEGAS (AP) — B.B. King, whose scorching guitar licks
>and heartfelt vocals made him the idol of generations of
>musicians and fans while earning him the nickname King of the
>Blues, died late Thursday at home in Las Vegas. He as 89.
>
>His attorney, Brent Bryson, told The Associated Press that
>King died peacefully in his sleep at 9:40 p.m. PDT.
>
>Bryson said funeral arrangements were being made.
>
>Although he had continued to perform well into his 80s, the
>15-time Grammy winner suffered from diabetes and had been in
>declining health during the past year. He collapsed during a
>concert in Chicago last October, later blaming dehydration and
>exhaustion. He had been in hospice care at his Las Vegas
>home.
>
>For most of a career spanning nearly 70 years, Riley B. King
>was not only the undisputed king of the blues but a mentor to
>scores of guitarists, who included Eric Clapton, Otis Rush,
>Buddy Guy, Jimi Hendrix, John Mayall and Keith Richards. He
>recorded more than 50 albums and toured the world well into
>his 80s, often performing 250 or more concerts a year.
>
>King played a Gibson guitar he affectionately called Lucille
>with a style that included beautifully crafted single-string
>runs punctuated by loud chords, subtle vibratos and bent
>notes.
>
>The result could bring chills to an audience, no more so than
>when King used it to full effect on his signature song, "The
>Thrill is Gone." He would make his guitar shout and cry in
>anguish as he told the tale of forsaken love, then end with a
>guttural shouting of the final lines: "Now that it's all over,
>all I can do is wish you well."
>His style was unusual. King didn't like to sing and play at
>the same time, so he developed a call-and-response between him
>and Lucille.
>"Sometimes I just think that there are more things to be said,
>to make the audience understand what I'm trying to do more,"
>King told The Associated Press in 2006. "When I'm singing, I
>don't want you to just hear the melody. I want you to relive
>the story, because most of the songs have pretty good
>storytelling."
>
>A preacher uncle taught him to play, and he honed his
>technique in abject poverty in the Mississippi Delta, the
>birthplace of the blues.
>"I've always tried to defend the idea that the blues doesn't
>have to be sung by a person who comes from Mississippi, as I
>did," he said in the 1988 book "Off the Record: An Oral
>History of Popular Music."
>"People all over the world have problems," he said. "And as
>long as people have problems, the blues can never die."
>
>Fellow travelers who took King up on that theory included
>Clapton, the British-born blues-rocker who collaborated with
>him on "Riding With the King," a best-seller that won a Grammy
>in 2000 for best traditional blues album.
>
>Still, the Delta's influence was undeniable. King began
>picking cotton on tenant farms around Indianola, Mississippi,
>before he was a teenager, being paid as little as 35 cents for
>every 100 pounds, and was still working off sharecropping
>debts after he got out of the Army during World War Two.
>
>"He goes back far enough to remember the sound of field
>hollers and the cornerstone blues figures, like Charley Patton
>and Robert Johnson," ZZ Top guitarist Billy Gibbons once told
>Rolling Stone magazine.
>
>King got his start in radio with a gospel quartet in
>Mississippi, but soon moved to Memphis, Tennessee, where a job
>as a disc jockey at WDIA gave him access to a wide range of
>recordings. He studied the great blues and jazz guitarists,
>including Django Reinhardt and T-Bone Walker, and played live
>music a few minutes each day as the "Beale Street Blues Boy,"
>later shortened to B.B.
>
>Through his broadcasts and live performances, he quickly built
>up a following in the black community, and recorded his first
>R&B hit, "Three O'Clock Blues," in 1951.
>
>He began to break through to white audiences, particularly
>young rock fans, in the 1960s with albums like "Live at the
>Regal," which would later be declared a historic sound
>recording worthy of preservation by the Library of Congress'
>National Recording Registry.
>
>He further expanded his audience with a 1968 appearance at the
>Newport Folk Festival and when he opened shows for the Rolling
>Stones in 1969.
>
>King was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in
>1984, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987 and received the
>Songwriters Hall of Fame Lifetime Achievement Award in 1990.
>He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President
>George W. Bush, gave a guitar to Pope John Paul II and had
>President Barack Obama sing along to his "Sweet Home
>Chicago."
>
>Other Grammys included best male rhythm 'n' blues performance
>in 1971 for "The Thrill Is Gone," best ethnic or traditional
>recording in 1982 for "There Must Be a Better World Somewhere"
>and best traditional blues recording or album several times.
>His final Grammy came in 2009 for best blues album for "One
>Kind Favor."
>Through it all, King modestly insisted he was simply
>maintaining a tradition.
>
>"I'm just one who carried the baton because it was started
>long before me," he told the AP in 2008.
>
>Born Riley B. King on Sept. 16, 1925, on a tenant farm near
>Itta Bena, Mississippi, King was raised by his grandmother
>after his parents separated and his mother died. He worked as
>a sharecropper for five years in Kilmichael, an even smaller
>town, until his father found him and took him back to
>Indianola.
>
>"I was a regular hand when I was 7. I picked cotton. I drove
>tractors. Children grew up not thinking that this is what they
>must do. We thought this was the thing to do to help your
>family," he said.
>When the weather was bad and he couldn't work in the cotton
>fields, he walked 10 miles to a one-room school before
>dropping out in the 10th grade.
>
>After he broke through as a musician, it appeared King might
>never stop performing. When he wasn't recording, he toured the
>world relentlessly, playing 342 one-nighters in 1956. In 1989,
>he spent 300 days on the road. After he turned 80, he vowed he
>would cut back, and he did, somewhat, to about 100 shows a
>year.
>
>He had 15 biological and adopted children. Family members say
>11 survive.
>___
>Associated Press writer John Rogers in Los Angeles contributed
>to this report.
____________________________
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