b King

Eric Clapton & B.B. King‘s album from 2000, Riding With The King, will be reissued next month to mark its 20th anniversary. The 12-track album of all-new studio recordings of blues classics and contemporary songs has been remastered from the original tapes (by Bob Ludwig) and is expanded, featuring two unreleased bonus tracks (recorded during the original sessions). Original co-producer Simon Climie rose to the occasion and produced and mixed these two additional numbers especially for this reissue.

King traveled to Nashville in the early 1980s and recorded overproduced pop ballads written by the likes of honky tonk angels Conway Twitty, Willie Nelson, and Mickey Newbury. King plays guitar about as often as Perry Como and Tom Jones would have.

B.B. King unleashes his inner crooner on this collection of 13 of his sentimental favorites. With a five-piece studio band rather than his usual orchestra, the arrangements stay spare throughout, allowing King to exercise his classic vocal chops. His most heartfelt selection may be "A Mother's Love", a performance that seems to draw on the heartache he still carries from the loss of his own mother when he was a child, nearly 70 years ago.

When B.B. King is cajoled into covering the Lovin' Spoonful's "Summer in the City," you know material's in dangerously short supply. It's the lead number on this rather undistinguished album, cut with most of his road band of the time. One staple of his live show, the sentimental blues ballad "Guess Who," came from this set.

The plodding rhythms laid down by a coterie of British rock stars for this set make one long for B.B. King's road-tested regular band. But it was the fashion in 1971 to dispatch American blues legends to London to record mediocre LPs with alleged rock royalty (the lineup here includes Ringo Starr, Peter Green, Alexis Korner, and Klaus Voorman).

A decent but short (nine songs) late '60s set, with somewhat sparser production than he'd employ with the beefier arrangements of the "Thrill Is Gone" era. Brass and stinging guitar plays a part on all of the songs, leading off with the eight-minute title track, a spoken narrative about his famous guitar.

Although Live & Well wasn't a landmark album in the sense of Live at the Regal, it was a significant commercial breakthrough for King, as it was the first of his LPs to enter the Top 100. That may have been because recognition from rock stars such as Eric Clapton had finally boosted his exposure to the White pop audience, but it was a worthy recording on its own merits, divided evenly between live and studio material. King's always recorded well as a live act, and it's the concert tracks that shine brightest, although the studio ones (cut with assistance from studio musicians like Al Kooper and Hugh McCracken) aren't bad.