Blues Boy King

When he was only 9 years old, Riley B King was working behind a plough to pay off family debts following the death of his mother then grandmother. As a boy he made a guitar from wire and a broom handle and sang gospel on street corners; on Saturday nights he would join other field workers outside Club Ebony, listening to Charlie Parker and Count Basie.

In 1947 he hitched to Memphis, to the large musical community where every kind of African American music could be heard. His cousin Bukka White tried to teach him slide with a bottleneck, but failing that, B B King devised his 'own technique for producing the tremulo without the slide' which he calls the butterfly, swiveling his wrist from the elbow back and forth, stretching the string, raising and lowering the pitch rhythmically. He later tried to teach it to Bill Wyman, without success.

All his guitars have been 'Lucille', since a performance in Twist, Arkansas, where a fight broke out over a girl named Lucille. The kerosene stove was knocked over causing a fire, but B B King nearly killed himself going back in to save his guitar.

Over the years he has developed one of the most distinctive guitar styles - Eric Clapton reckons he can 'tell BB from one note' in a new film recounting the bluesman's incredible life. 'The Life of Riley' is out on 15th October, a film by John Brewer about the 87 year old  BB King (narrated by Morgan Freeman) tracing his influence on Clapton, John Mayall, George Harrison, Peter Green to name a few. He still performs at over  100 concerts a year, including the Homecoming concert which was originally staged to remember Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist.