Leadership topic - BB King

Riley B. King was born on 16 September 1925 on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi. His parents separated when he was 4, his mother died when he was 9, and his grandmother died when he was 14. In his own words, “My mom died when I was nine, and I lived alone from the time I was nine until I was 14.” The man who changed the direction of that life was not a talent scout. He was a preacher, Reverend Archie Fair, who let the boy hold his Sears Roebuck Silvertone and showed him 3 chords. His employer sold him his first guitar for 15 dollars, taken out of his wages over 2 months. Nobody gave him anything. Somebody sold it to him on terms, which for a boy with no parents is a form of respect.

By 1948 he was a disc jockey at WDIA in Memphis, billed as Beale Street Blues Boy, which shortened to Blues Boy, which shortened to BB. In September 1951 he cut his own version of Three O’Clock Blues in a room at the Memphis YMCA with Ike Turner on piano. It went to number 1 in February 1952 and the day job was over. In 1956 he played 342 one-night stands. In 1958 his tour bus was in a crash that killed 2 truckers, the liability landed on him personally, and through the years it took to dig out he paid himself 75 dollars a week and kept the organization running. In June 1969, at 4 in the morning, his producer rang his hotel room wanting to add strings to a blues record. The Thrill Is Gone became his first million seller and won Best R&B Vocal Performance, Male, at the ceremony held on 16 March 1971.

He is on leadingwithmusic.com because of how he ran the organization, not only because of how he played. He hired the man before the musician. He wrote his discipline rule in 2 halves so everybody could recite both. He refused pickup bands anywhere on earth and did every date his band did. He named a guitar after a stranger he never met, as a standing correction he wore in public for 65 years. And in 2008, at 82, with 15 Grammys and nothing left to prove, he made a record of nothing but the songs of the men who formed him, and hired T Bone Burnett for 1 stated reason: “He liked the sound of the records I made in the 1950s.” He never announced a farewell tour and he never retired. He played his last date on 3 October 2014 and died 7 months later.