B.B. King – Original Greatest Hits

Talk about your American odysseys — B.B. King’s has been like no other. To see where it’s gone, look at the photos on pages 31 and 32 of Treasures, a coffee-table book just published in honor of King’s 80th birthday, then at those on pages 99 and 111, and those on 143 and 144. In the first two, one of him with his guitar and one of him with his girlfriend, a teenage Riley King stares mutely into the camera, seemingly trying to give up as little of himself as possible. In the next two, both circa 1970, around the time white America discovered him, a beaming B.B. King stands in front of the piano in his New York apartment, and leans off the stage to shake hands with young fans at Boston arena. In the last two, a somber, dignified King presents a guitar to the pope in 1997 and accepts an award from the king of Sweden in 2004.

But if a picture is worth a thousand words, a few licks from B.B. King can speak even more, and for that you should turn to the two-CD Original Greatest Hits, which documents the evolution of his self-taught style by collecting his earliest singles. A two-sided Bullet Records single from 1949 reveals a guitarist-singer who is barely recognizable as King. “3 O’Clock Blues” (his first #1, in 1951), a frantic stomper recorded at the Memphis YMCA with Ike Turner’s Kings Of Rhythm behind him, is more like it, but still sounds more like a building block by a quick learner.

By 1953-54, with Bill Harvey assuming leadership of King’s band, things are starting to swing. But even on “The Woman I Love”, King is using much broader strokes than he is on “When My Heart Beats Like A Hammer” and “Every Day I Have The Blues” from later that year. By the 1956 “Sweet Little Angel”, the King style — his stretching of strings to emulate the sound of the slide guitar, his touch, tone and timing, all of it — is fully realized. And by 1960’s “You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now”, recorded with just bass, drums and piano accompaniment, his guitar intro plays off his voice to distill his technique down to its bare-bones essence. (That song comes from the untouted My Kind Of Blues, which King has always cited as his favorite among his albums — which makes me wonder why he didn’t record more often with small groups.)

Don’t overlook King’s vocal style, either. Where most singers would build to a falsetto to climax a song, on the likes of “The Woman I Love” and “When My Heart Beats Like A Hammer”, King hits his highest notes early on and them comes back to them several times without sounding histrionic.

Original Greatest Hits goes up to 1964, when King left Modern/RPM, the Los Angeles blues label that marketed his albums via the 99-cent bins, for ABC-Paramount, which had a broad roster of acts in all genres. The rest of his story is told in other compilation discs, and by King and Dick Waterman (with various friends, colleagues and observers) in Treasures: his hippie-era breakthrough to the Fillmore audiences aided by the proselytizing of Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and other admirers; his #15 pop hit from 1970, “The Thrill Is Gone”, which shocked purists by featuring strings (though he’d already used them much earlier, as on the 1961 R&B hit “Peace Of Mind”); worldwide tours as King of the Blues; collaborations with the biggest names in pop music; countless awards.

From the beginning, his self-reliance and faith drove him to work constantly — in 1956, he played 342 one-nighters — and, accepting the limitations of the blues, to continue to refine his guitar style within those limitations even to this day. Broadening the expressive range of guitar, he’s given it a human-like voice that makes his work arguably the most instantly recognizable in American music.

The text of Treasures won’t reveal much that wasn’t already known from previous King books. But the photos are never less than captivating, and the accompanying mementos — from, bluntly and brutally, a copy of landowner Edwayne Henderson’s 1940 account record of the credits and debits for his 14-year-old sharecropper Riley King, to prints of old show posters — add to the story. The book may not be essential for any except King’s biggest fans, but together with Original Greatest Hits, it leaves no doubt that the man was one of the most extraordinary and most influential musicians of the 20th century.