Universally hailed as the reigning king of the blues, the legendary B.B. King is without a doubt the single most important electric guitarist of the last half century…
Universal's 2012 box set Ladies & Gentlemen…Mr. B.B. King is hardly the first B.B. King box set – MCA assembled a similar four-disc set called King of the Blues in 1992, Ace had a tremendous four-CD box called The Vintage Years in 2002 that covered his pre-ABC/Paramount recordings (apparently every ten years it's time for a new B.B. box) – but it certainly is the most ambitious, arriving in two separate career-spanning incarnations…
n a jaw-gnashing exercise of discographical loggerheads, The Soul of B.B. King was just a retitled version of a King album previously released on the Crown label, B.B. King. Further muddling the record-keeping, The Soul of B.B. King would appear on both the United and Custom labels (both of which were, like Crown, budget imprints of the Modern Records company)…
Released the week of B.B. King's 80th birthday, 80 is a star-studded duets album, the first B.B. released since 1997's Deuces Wild. It was recorded in a variety of locations in the spring of 2005 and features a variety of guest artists, ranging from the familiar (Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Bobby Bland) to the unsurprising (Billy Gibbons, Mark Knopfler, Elton John, Sheryl Crow) to the frankly bewildering (John Mayer, Daryl Hall, Gloria Estefan)…
American blues musician, singer and songwriter, born September 16, 1925 near Itta Bena, Mississippi, United States. He died in his sleep at May 14, 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States at 9:40 PM Pacific Time. B.B. is an abbrevation for 'Blues Boy'…
The potential for a collaboration between B.B. King and Eric Clapton is enormous, of course, and the real questions concern how it is organized and executed. This first recorded pairing between the 74-year-old King and the 55-year-old Clapton was put together in the most obvious way: Clapton arranged the session using many of his regular musicians, picked the songs, and co-produced with his partner Simon Climie…
Over-glossed R&B tracks, heavy doses of keyboards and drum programming are an ideal way to make albums for the pop charts, but for B.B. King, they are tools of disaster. Lyrically and vocally the album holds up rather well. …
B.B. King hasn't made many better pop-flavored albums than this. Besides making Leon Russell's "Hummingbird" sound like his own composition, King showed that you can put the blues into any situation and make it work…
Originally released in 1958 by the budget-priced Crown label, The Blues collected a dozen sides B.B. King cut for RPM and Kent between 1951 and 1958…