[MUSIC] B.B. King is the greatest blues singer of all time. In his eighties he continues to travel and give concerts. As a very young teenager he played on the streets of Indianola, Mississippi for what people would drop into a bucket beside him. He played Gospel and Blues and then he hitchhiked to Memphis and on Beale Street began to play the Blues and issued his first recording. He was known as B.B. the Blues Boy of Beale Street, and began to play on the radio with Rufus Thomas, and developed a band and went on the road. And he's never looked back since. B.B. King is an artist of the first order who composes music, who works with bands that he's been with all his life. He is totally committed to his friendships and to the blues. He grew up without a family, without a father and mother in a home. And he told me that when he sings, the blues and looks out on the audience, they are his family. And he sings to them with an intimate voice that is unique. And his guitar, Lucille, is known throughout the world and he's had many Gibson electric guitars over the years but they all bear the name of Lucille. >> At 49 I am, I was playing at a place called Twist, Arkansas. There is such a place. [LAUGH] I thought that same thing. [LAUGH] But 49, my friends place geographically speaking it's about 45 miles northwest of Memphis, Tennessee. I was playing that place that was about the size of this stage. >> [LAUGH] >> And we used to have a good time there every Friday and Saturday night if it didn't rain. In fact, if it rained, we had a good time Friday, Saturday and Sunday. But in the wintertime, we had a big container. It looked like a big garbage pail. And we'd sit it in the middle of the floor and we'd fill it about half full with kerosene. Down home we call it coal oil. Oh, somebody knows [LAUGH]. Yeah, hey, hey. And they would light this fuel. It wasn't no fuel crisis either. It just, this was all we had for, for heat. And the people that was used to coming to the place normally would dance around this, this big container. But this particular night oh, a little more about the place. You could get about 75 maybe 80 people in there at once. But some nights we would have 2, 300 people. We had what we called a coming and going crowd. People would come in get hot dancing, would walk out. Other would come in. That's what I meant. But this particular night two guys start to fighting and one of them knocked the other one over on this container of kerosene. And when he did it spilled on the floor. And everybody starts trying to put it out and it seemed to burn more. And everybody started making for the front door, they figured they couldn't put it out, including B.B. King. [LAUGH] But when I got on the outside I remembered that I left my guitar on the inside, ran off and left it. And I went back for it and the guy is telling me you know, asking me not to do it. And then the building starts to collapse around me and I almost lost my life trying to save my guitar. So the next day, we found that two men had gotten trapped in a room above a dance hall and had burned to death. We also found that two men, these two men that was fighting, was fighting about a lady. And we learned the lady's name was Lucille. I never did meet her, but I named my guitar Lucille to remind me never to do a silly thing like that again. [LAUGH] [APPLAUSE] >> B.B. is a deep believer that blues should be taught within the classroom. So in secondary schools, in colleges and universities, he has helped put the blues inside the classroom by giving his archive of records and papers to the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi. And he has received honorary degrees from Yale University, from Tugalu College. And he is in every sense a professor of the blues.
