The BB King Museum
The BB King Museum in Indianola, Mississippi is, like the king of the delta blues himself, larger than life. The sound of his wailing blues guitar greets you as you get out of your car in the parking lot, where you’ll also find his tour bus, called Lucille, like his favourite guitars.
Riley B King was his real name and he was born in 1925 on a cotton plantation in Berclair, a few miles outside Indianola. An introductory video in the movie theatre shows an elderly BB King trying to find the exact place where he grew up. It’s an emotional movie, ending with part of a King concert in Paris and the musician reflecting on the journey that took him from abject rural poverty in the American Deep South to international fame.
King’s early life was hard. His parents separated when he was four. He then lived with his mother till she died in her late twenties, possibly from diabetes, when Riley was nine. He then went to stay with his grandmother, who died five years later. He stayed alone on her farm for several months till word reached his father, who went and fetched him into his new family. A poignant quotation in one of the many excellent displays says: ‘I would give nearly any amount of money today to have a picture of my mom.’
As a young boy he walked six miles to a one-room schoolhouse where all the children relied on a local woman making them soup or beans to provide them with lunch.
He had his dreams, though, as one of the signs on display shows:
Like another dirt-poor Mississippi boy, Elvis Presley, King began singing in church. King’s preacher played the guitar, and taught the young man his first three chords. He listened to music on the radio constantly, and saved money from his wages as a farm labourer in Indianola to go and see stars like Count Basie when they came to town. He began playing on street corners on a Saturday night, and was soon earning enough to match his farm wages.
One day he said, ‘Come hell or high water, I’m going to Memphis.’ In 1946 he got his wish but not in the way he wanted. A tractor accident snapped off its exhaust stack. He feared his boss would never forgive him so he left a note and ran away to Memphis. ‘Memphis to me then was like the Eiffel Tower, or the Tower of Pisa, or the Grand Canyon.’
In Memphis he discovered Beale Street, of course, and as the legendary Memphis musician Rufus Thomas said: ‘If you could be black for one Saturday night on Beale Street, never would you want to be white again.’
In Memphis King got a job as a radio DJ, as well as playing gigs, and his break came in 1952 when he went into Sun Studios – where Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and others would later record – and recorded a song called ‘3 O’Clock Blues’. It was King’s first hit, and was followed by hit after hit as the public responded to King’s extraordinary guitar skills, and to his voice.
The museum is as fascinating about King’s life on the road as it is about his childhood. It shows exactly what life was like as a black musician under the South’s Jim Crow laws, where he and his band could only stay in certain hotels and eat in certain restaurants.
If you’d never even heard of BB King and had no interest in blues music the museum would still be fascinating for its displays on life in the south and especially in the delta, and in Memphis. In fact it was King’s own wish that the museum should not just be about him. He remained a modest man despite his fame.
But King fans will be there for hours. There are numerous personal artifacts, including several guitars and his notebook from which he’d memorise lyrics and learn guitar chords.
One display even has his entire home recording studio. There are touch-screen displays where you can listen to the King influences on people like Jimi Hendrix, Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck, and a display with a guitar attached where you can learn to play like BB King. Well, maybe.
Outside is the most moving feature of all about the museum, for it’s here that BB King is buried. A memorial garden is part of a planned extension due to open in Spring 2019. It will allow his tour bus to be displayed inside and visited, along with two of King’s cars which are currently on loan to the Tupelo Automobile Museum.
BB King lies beneath a simple black marble stone, a tasteful and eloquent final resting place. At the top of the grave was, on my visit, a vase of beautiful blue flowers. Blue flowers for the King of the Blues seemed perfectly fitting.
