B.B. King is full of it. Humility, that is.
Listen to what the blues master has to say about the $15-million museum bearing his name that's slated to open Saturday in the small Mississippi Delta town where he sweated for a few cents a day picking cotton nearly eight decades ago.
"When you're running track, they pass you -- I don't know what you call it . . . -- the baton. I just picked up the baton and kept running with it. But guys like Robert Johnson, Jimmy Rogers, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and I could name you many, many more -- they are the ones that were the base," King said last week during a stop in L.A. "They could have picked any one of them to name the museum after."
Not likely. Especially not in Indianola, Miss., where perhaps more than anywhere else, the man born Riley B. King in 1925 will forever reign as the King of the Blues.
So, it's the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center that he'll christen this week, an opening timed, not coincidentally, near its namesake's 83rd birthday on Sept. 16.
"I think I may have planted the seed," he said, seated comfortably in a throne-like chair, dressed meticulously, as he typically is on stage, in a dark suit, neatly pressed shirt and tie and what look like size 13 spit-polished black loafers. Gold-framed glasses glint in the light next to his ever-whitening short, curly hair.
"I don't live in my home state now, but I bought some land down there and I was going to build me a house on it," he said softly. "After my demise I wanted this to be open as a museum . . . But they said, 'Why wait till you die? We do it now, you could see it!' I like that idea."
The facility's been built with a combination of private and public funds, including some sizable corporate donations. Officials in Mississippi hope it will be a boost for tourism to the western part of the state, where Indianola sits between Jackson and Memphis, along the celebrated Highway 61. The 18,000-square-foot museum is built around an old cotton gin mill, one, in fact, where King worked as a boy.
He's donated much of his own collection of memorabilia from his long career -- "much more than I wanted to," he said with an easy laugh. That includes the guitar he calls "Lucille's sister," a sibling to the celebrated black Gibson he still plays on stage 100 to 125 nights a year.
