Lucille was named after a fight he ran back into fire for
In Twist, Arkansas, a brawl over a woman named Lucille set a club ablaze. B. B. King escaped, then rushed back for his guitar. He named every treasured instrument Lucille afterward—a reminder not to fight over women or dash into burning buildings. The nickname stuck longer than the fire.
Riley B. King was born September 16, 1925, on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, and raised largely by his grandmother after his parents separated. A local minister taught him three chords on a Sears Silvertone; employer Flake Cartledge advanced fifteen dollars for his first guitar and docked his pay for two months. He listened to King Biscuit Time on break from plantation work and dreamed of radio. Following cousin Bukka White to Memphis, he earned a spot on WDIA, where "Beale Street Blues Boy" shortened to "Blues Boy" and finally "B. B." Hearing T-Bone Walker made him determined to own an electric guitar.
His first Billboard R&B number one, "3 O'Clock Blues" in February 1952, lifted weekly earnings from about eighty-five dollars to twenty-five hundred. Hits piled up through the 1950s; in 1956 alone he played 342 shows and founded Blues Boys Kingdom on Beale Street. Live at the Regal, recorded in November 1964, he later called a day when everything came together. Sid Seidenberg steered him toward rock audiences; opening for the Rolling Stones in 1969 and a 1970 Grammy for "The Thrill Is Gone" widened the room. AllMusic later called him the single most important electric guitarist of the late twentieth century for fluid bends, shimmering vibrato, and staccato attack.
He entered the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987, won the Polar Music Prize in 2004, and kept touring into old age—sometimes three hundred nights a year. A 1988 duet with U2, "When Love Comes to Town," reached new listeners; in 1997 he presented Lucille to Pope John Paul II at a Vatican Christmas concert. Riding with the King, with Eric Clapton in 2000, took another Grammy. He died May 14, 2015, having argued that blues belonged wherever beautiful music belonged—dirt-floor joints and concert halls alike.
Source: B. B. King
