B B King

The Arkansas Legislature has approved a $5,000 expenditure to build a monument honoring bluesman B.B. King in the tiny Delta town of Twist. More than 50 years ago, King's famed guitar Lucille earned its name after a dance hall brawl in Twist. King's trademark Gibson guitars have been called Lucille ever since. "B.B. put Twist, Ark., on the map," Allan Hammons, interim director of the planned B.B. King Museum in Indianola, Miss., said Thursday.

That Al Green tune was just the beginning. Weeks after President Obama sang a snippet of the soul hit “Let's Stay Together” during a fundraiser at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, he ventured into the blues Tuesday night. Maybe he was emboldened by the man who offered him the microphone: Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones. Maybe it was because Buddy Guy brought up Al Green, telling the president, “You done started something and you gotta keep it up now.” Next thing you know, Obama took the mic in hand and crooned, “Come on, baby, don't you want to go” - twice.

B.B. King raised a glass Tuesday at the new Universal City nightclub and restaurant bearing has name and toasted the invited audience. "I hope this can be the beginning of a very, very long friendship," he said. The beginning ? For blues fans, the love affair with King has been going on ever since he started making records nearly 45 years ago. He's perhaps the most influential electric guitarist in blues history and certainly one of the most revered blues figures, period.

'Kenny Burrell: 80 Years Young' Who: Burrell, with B.B. King, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Lalo Schifrin and the Los Angeles Jazz Orchestra Unlimited Where: UCLA's Royce Hall When: 7 p.m. Saturday Tickets: $30 to $85 Information: (310) 825-2101 or http://www.uclalive.org

During a recent interview, B.B. King--who turned 70 on Sept. 16 and who begins a series of local dates Tuesday night at the Coach House--was discussing a recording he made in the late '50s with members of Count Basie's band. He noted that, although he has established his own reputation as a bluesman, he remembers such jazzmen as Miles Davis and Charlie Parker "sending a sword through my heart" with their music.

THE tour bus where B.B. King is sitting has parked right outside the artists' entrance at Gibson Amphitheatre in Universal City so the walk to the stage will be short and painless. The venerated guitarist, singer and songwriter is balancing his lifelong yearning to get onstage against offstage life with diabetes. The illness has given him a latter-day second career as a spokesman for a glucose monitoring device, and he mentions those ads for comic relief once he's in front of an audience again.

Critics and fans alike consider him blues royalty, but B.B. King said Friday that he gets nervous meeting a real monarch. "I never met a king before," the bluesman from Itta Bena, Miss., said in the Swedish capital, where he'll receive the 2004 Polar Music Prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf next week. "I did meet the queen of England once, and I shiver every time I think about it now," he added. "So I'm wondering what will happen now that I have a chance to meet the royal family.

Even at age 66, as he finishes his 41st year on the road, B.B. King says that life as a traveling blues musician still holds new possibilities. Like finding a new country to play in. Speaking over the phone recently from Buenos Aires, a stop on a three-week tour of South America, the much-traveled King said that he had just played Chile for the first time. By now, though, King and his definitive blues style are pretty much familiar and universal entities, even in virgin territory.

B.B. King may be at once the -most famous and most taken-for-granted bluesman in pop history. One reason for both titles is familiarity. Where some classic blues figures (starting with Robert Johnson) died before the start of the rock era, and others (including Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf) enjoyed only limited mainstream success, King has registered almost three dozen singles on the weekly Top 100 pop charts and has toured so extensively that he always seems to be either in town or on the way.

Diabetes forced blues guitar legend B. B. King to cancel weekend appearances at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and all performances for the next several weeks, event officials said. King was scheduled to perform Friday night at the River Tent in downtown New Orleans and was to have closed the festival's Saturday show at the Fair Grounds. King suffered a diabetes attack Friday in Las Vegas and canceled three weeks of engagements, Jazzfest executive producer George Wein said.

As Garth Brooks' much-hyped return dominated the news, and all things Vegas focused on the opening of CityCenter, a little blues club and restaurant had a celebration at the Mirage last weekend. A VIP line formed stretching down a hallway an hour before the doors opened for the invitation-only grand opening of the latest, fifth outpost of B.B. King's Blues Club. The night promised to be special as the legendary performer would cap it by taking the tiny stage in the small club -- laid out with a restaurant, dance floor and a bar in the back -- to lead an all-star jam. As the line grew, King reflected on his career and the genre in a VIP suite, interrupting himself to check out the scene.

The thrill is gone at many attractions across the country as recession-mired tourists stay home, but in Indianola, Miss., a favorite son is packing 'em in at the B.B. King Museum. A year after its opening, the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center has drawn about 30,000 visitors to the Mississippi Delta town roughly 100 miles northwest of Jackson, where the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter-guitarist once made his living on a cotton plantation. Attendance exceeded a first-year projection of 25,000, despite the museum's opening last fall amid hurricanes, high gas prices, economic woes and the end of the traditional summer travel season, said Connie Gibbons, the museum's executive director.

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."

He started out here 60 years ago, singing the blues on a street corner for dimes. Now, less than three blocks from that corner, the legendary B.B. King will soon have his own museum. The B.B. King Museum & Delta Interpretive Center is set to open Sept. 13, three days before his 83rd birthday. The museum honors the man who Rolling Stone magazine says "is universally recognized as the leading exponent of modern blues." It is but one in a surprisingly long list of attractions in the Mississippi Delta -- surprisingly long only if you've never visited the region.

As the summer heat and a sense of nostalgia permeated the air, the Hollywood Bowl kicked off its 87th season Friday night with a stirring, fireworks-enlivened tribute to three new inductees into the Hollywood Bowl Hall of Fame. All -- flutist James Galway, singer-guitarist B.B. King and singer-dancer-actress Liza Minnelli -- were present and ready to perform.

B.B. King returned to his hometown of Indianola for the aptly titled "B.B. King Homecoming Festival." "It is something that I have been doing for 42 years, playing free for the kids," the 81-year-old blues legend said. "Watching them grow." With his trademark guitar that he named "Lucille," King is one of the nation's most influential blues musicians. His long list of hits includes "The Thrill Is Gone," "Every Day I Have the Blues" and "You Upset Me Baby."

Blues legend B. B. King left a Las Vegas hospital Monday in good spirits and "asking for his guitar" after being hospitalized over the weekend because of a bout with high blood sugar. King, who had to cancel performances at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival over the weekend, returned to his Las Vegas home for two weeks of recuperation, his manager said.

B. B. King posed the question of the night Saturday when he sang one of his signature songs: "How Blue Can You Get?" In the first of two New Year's Eve sets at the Celebrity Theatre in Anaheim, King and Bobby (Blue) Bland both provided the traditional response in solid, sometimes eloquent sets well-stocked with classics of the genre. For Millie Jackson, the bill's third attraction, being blue has more to do with the profanely outrageous comic tradition of Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor.

Ten people will receive the nation's highest civilian honor, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, on Dec. 15, the White House announced Thursday. This year's recipients include blues musician B.B. King; historian David McCullough, who has written several biographies of presidents; and the late John "Buck" O'Neil, a Negro League star and the first black Major League Baseball coach. Others to be honored are: * Natan Sharansky, a Soviet dissident and former gulag prisoner.

Jerry Lynn Williams, the little-known writer of such songs as Eric Clapton's "Running on Faith," Bonnie Raitt's "Real Man" and B.B. King's "Standing on the Edge of Love," has died. He was 57. Williams died Nov. 25 of kidney and liver failure on St. Martin in the French West Indies, where he had lived for the last two years, said his son, Chebon Williams of Malibu.