Riley B. King was born in 1925 on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. After his mother left when he was four, he was raised largely by his grandmother, worked a cotton gin in Indianola, and learned his first three chords from a Pentecostal minister who played a Sears Roebuck Silvertone in church. His first guitar cost $15, paid off when his employer docked his wages for two months. Radio broadcasts of King Biscuit Time out of Helena, Arkansas, showed him a profession beyond the fields, and after a failed first stint in Memphis with his cousin Bukka White, he returned polished enough to land a spot on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio show, then a 10-minute slot on WDIA that grew into the Sepia Swing Club. There, the announcer’s “Beale Street Blues Boy” was shortened to Blues Boy and finally to B.B.

This episode traces how a player who struggled with chords rewrote the language of the electric guitar through single-note phrasing, the butterfly vibrato, and fluid string bending, and how his guitar Lucille got her name in a burning juke joint in Twist, Arkansas. It follows his jump from $85 to $2,500 a week after “Three O’Clock Blues” hit number one, the 342-show years on the chitlin circuit, two divorces and 15 children, and the late-1960s crossover engineered by manager Sid Seidenberg that put him in front of Rolling Stones audiences and earned a Grammy for “The Thrill Is Gone.” It also covers his decades as a licensed private pilot, his live album at Cook County Jail and prison reform foundation, his diabetes advocacy after a 1990 diagnosis, and his 2015 passing at 89, followed by a brass-band funeral procession down Beale Street and burial on the grounds of his own museum in Indianola.

• Why learning music by watching a minister’s hands in a Pentecostal church shaped King’s communal, observational approach to the guitar
• How the golden age of radio and a 10-minute WDIA spot bypassed segregated club geography and built the B.B. King name
• The mechanics of the butterfly vibrato, string bending, and staccato picking that let one note sound like a human voice
• Why relentless touring on the chitlin circuit was economic survival rather than wanderlust for Black artists of the era
• The 1969 Rolling Stones tour, the Grammy for “The Thrill Is Gone,” and later work with U2, Eric Clapton, and a guitar presented to Pope John Paul II