A cotton-field boy who wanted to be on the radio

Every story about B. B. King seems to begin with a radio. Riley B. King was born in 1925 on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. When he was four his mother left, and his grandmother raised him. In 1941 he sat on his break at the plantation and listened to King Biscuit Time, a show of Delta blues beamed from Helena, Arkansas. He was a self-taught guitarist, and from that day he wanted to be a radio musician himself.

The guitar came through the church. He sang in the gospel choir at Elkhorn Baptist Church in Kilmichael and was drawn to the music of the Pentecostal church nearby, where the minister played a Silvertone guitar and showed him his first three chords. His employer, Flake Cartledge, bought him a guitar for fifteen dollars, then kept back money from his pay for two months until the debt was settled. In 1943 King left to drive a tractor and play with a gospel group, the Famous St. John's Gospel Singers of Inverness.

Memphis was the next step. In 1946 he followed his cousin Bukka White there and was taken in for ten months. Two years later he came back to West Memphis, Arkansas, where he played on Sonny Boy Williamson's radio program. Steady club work followed, then a ten-minute slot on Memphis station WDIA that grew into the Sepia Swing Club. The boy who had listened to the radio was now on it.

What he built from there was a way of playing as recognisable as a voice: fluid string bends, a shimmering vibrato, a clipped, staccato attack. He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, and he never stopped working. In 1956 alone he played 342 shows, and well into his seventies he still averaged more than 200 concerts a year. Songs like “Ain't Nobody Home” carry that lifetime of travel in every bent note, patient and unhurried, sure of where the next phrase is going.