Bobby Bland, a stage mover man, he can move the people, Little Milton and myself, you know we do what we do, but we couldn’t move the crowd quickly like Bobby Bland. “Performing were Bobby Bland, Little Milton, Little Junior Parker, Howlin’ Wolf and myself. “We were in Memphis at the Auditorium, Elvis was there watching,” King remembered. In the early years of his success, King stayed in Memphis where he was a big star… but he wasn’t always the biggest star on every stage. Not quite an overnight sensation, but it was the start of the most successful long-running career in modern blues history. On a subsequent visit to Memphis, Bihari recorded B.B.’s version of Lowell Fulson’s “Three O’Clock Blues.” It entered the chart on Decemand eventually spent five weeks at No.1 in early 1952. in a room at the YMCA on January 8, 1951. These records failed to catch hold and so Joe Bihari, the youngest brother, went to Memphis and recorded B.B. The start of the most successful long-running career in blues historyĪt the time, RPM Records’ Bahiri brothers were visiting Memphis in search of talent, and agreed to release the sides that King had cut with Phillips. into his Memphis Recording Services studio in September 1950. His first sides weren’t particularly successful, but then Sam Phillips got B.B. People would write me and instead of saying the Blues Boy, they’d just abbreviate it to B.B.” His popularity in Memphis earned him the chance to record for Bullet in 1949. “When I was a disc jockey, they use to bill me as Blues Boy, the boy from Beale Street. King soon began working at WDIA, a local radio station. And I’ll give you six days of work, room and board.’ Man, I couldn’t believe it.” They seemed to enjoy me playing, so Miss Annie said, ‘if you can get a job on the radio like Sonny Boy, I’ll give you this job and I’ll pay you $12 and a half a night.
The 16th Street Grill had a gambling place in the back, if a guy came and brought his girlfriend or his wife that didn’t gamble my job was to keep them happy by playing music for them to dance. So he asked the lady that he had been working for, her name was Miss Annie, ‘I’m going to send him down in my place tonight.’ My job was to play for the young people that didn’t gamble. I had a hard time trying to teach him.” Nonetheless, King “got to audition for Sonny Boy, it was one of the Ivory Joe Hunter songs called ‘Blues of Sunrise.’ Sonny Boy had been working out a little place called the 16th Street Grill down in West Memphis. In Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues, Lockwood claims that King’s “time was apesh-t. One of his first guitar teachers during this time period was Blues legend Robert Lockwood. Inspired by Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio show, young Riley moved back to Memphis in 1948. King had already been singing and playing guitar for many years by that point. was a lot of money compared to the other people that was working there,” explained King.īut music was calling. “My salary, which was the basic salary for us tractor drivers, $22 and a half a week. The sharecropper’s son first went to Memphis in 1946 and stayed with his cousin Bukka White, but soon returned to Indianola to work as a tractor driver. King became known, sought to change all that. Plantation first, that’s always first.“ But it was not long before The Beale Street Blues Boy, as Riley B. King, “Any time you’re born on a plantation you have no choice.