When I was kid, I only knew B.B. King as a car­i­ca­ture of him­self. He was a large, round man, always smil­ing, played old-time music on a big black gui­tar worn high on his belly.

I first gave the man some seri­ous thought while watch­ing an episode of The Cos­by Show; I still didn’t know much about him but I knew that guest stars on the show were usu­al­ly leg­endary in some way, and so I paid atten­tion. I thought he was enter­tain­ing and fun, noth­ing I hadn’t heard before, some­where, but that pierc­ing mel­low gui­tar tone instant­ly made his music a signature.

Fast for­ward sev­er­al years…

I had learned to play a decent blues shuf­fle over the years but nev­er real­ly stud­ied it; it was some­thing I did as an after­thought, da da, da da, da da. My friend Ted­dy Mor­gan decid­ed that had gone on for far too long and popped a CD in the van, and it was there, on some anony­mous stretch of Mid­west inter­state, that I was intro­duced to the music of B.B. King for the first time.

This music was alive; it was a liv­ing, breath­ing soul brought to life by a fero­cious but restrained rhythm sec­tion and a pow­er­ful voice punc­tu­at­ed by a sharp, quick gui­tar. It was the sound of gen­er­a­tions of music that came before it and hints of the direc­tions it would take in the future.

It’s no sur­prise that a young me would dis­miss B.B. King as some­thing vague­ly famil­iar, because he was famil­iar; I was born into a world whose music had already been shaped by him. His con­tri­bu­tions are almost swept away by the sea of peo­ple he inspired.

B.B. King is blues music, one of those del­i­cate gen­res whose rel­e­van­cy today is main­tained most­ly by its lega­cy. But, oh, what a legacy.