Arts & Lectures
2005-2006 Performing Arts Season News Release
For Immediate Release

April 4, 2006

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents blues great B.B. King on his 80th Birthday Celebration Tour at the Arlington Theatre

Summary Facts:

UCSB Arts & Lectures presents “The King of the Blues” B.B. King on his 80th Birthday Celebration Tour on Tuesday, May 16 at 8 pm at the Arlington Theatre, 1317 State Street, Santa Barbara. For more than half a century B.B. King has defined the blues for a worldwide audience, right up to his 2006 Grammy Award—the 14th of his storied career—for 80—B.B. King & Friends. Since he started recording in the 1940s, he has released over fifty albums, many of them classics. Don’t miss this legend and his brilliant guitar Lucille when they celebrate B.B. King’s 80th birthday at the historic Arlington Theatre. Billboard asserts, “His name has become a brand for his own style of blues,” while Rolling Stone hails him as “the greatest living guitarist.”

Riley B. King—better known as B.B. King—was born September 16, 1925, on a plantation in Itta Bena, Mississippi, near Indianola. In his youth, he played on street corners for dimes, and would sometimes play in as many as four towns a night. In 1947, he hitchhiked to Memphis, to pursue his music career. Memphis was where every important musician of the South gravitated, and which supported a large musical community where every style of African American music could be found. King stayed with his cousin Bukka White, one of the most celebrated blues performers of his time, who schooled B.B. further in the art of the blues.

King’s first big break came in 1948 when he performed on Sonny Boy Williamson’s radio program on KWEM out of West Memphis. This led to steady engagements at the Sixteenth Avenue Grill in West Memphis, and later to a ten-minute spot on black-staffed and managed Memphis radio station WDIA. “King’s Spot” became so popular, it was expanded and became the “Sepia Swing Club.” Soon King needed a catchy radio name. What started out as Beale Street Blues Boy was shortened to Blues Boy King, and eventually B.B. King.

In the mid-1950s, while he was performing at a dance in Twist, Arkansas, a few fans became unruly. Two men got into a fight and knocked over a kerosene stove, setting fire to the hall. B.B. raced outdoors to safety with everyone else, then realized that he left his beloved $30 acoustic guitar inside, so he rushed back inside the burning building to retrieve it, narrowly escaping death. When he later found out that the fight had been over a woman named Lucille, he decided to give the name to his guitar to remind him never to do a crazy thing like fight over a woman. Ever since, each one of King’s trademark Gibson guitars has been called Lucille.

Soon after his number one hit “Three O’Clock Blues,” King began touring nationally. In 1956, he and his band played an astonishing 342 one-night stands. From the chitlin circuit, with its small-town cafes, juke joints and country dance halls to rock palaces, symphony concert halls, universities, resort hotels and amphitheaters, nationally and internationally, King has become the most renowned blues musician of the past 40 years.

Over the years, King has developed one of the world’s most identifiable guitar styles. He borrowed from Blind Lemon Jefferson, T-Bone Walker and others, integrating his precise and complex vocal-like string bends and his left hand vibrato, both of which have become indispensable components of rock guitarist’s vocabulary. His economy, his every-note-counts phrasing, has been a model for thousands of players, from Eric Clapton and George Harrison to Jeff Beck. King has mixed traditional blues, jazz, swing, mainstream pop and jump into a unique sound. In his words, “When I sing, I play in my mind; the minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.”

King was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame in 1984 and into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. He received NARAS’ Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award in 1987. In 1991, B.B. King’s Blues Club opened on Beale Street in Memphis, and in 1994, a second club was launched at Universal CityWalk in Los Angeles. A third club in New York City’s Times Square opened in June 2000 and most recently two clubs opened at Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut in January 2002.

B.B. King is presented by UCSB Arts & Lectures and sponsored by the Santa Barbara Independent. The concert is generously supported by Fredric E. Steck & Kelly LeBrock and Bruce & Judy Anticouni. Tickets are $75, $65 and $45 for the general public and $25 for UCSB students who must show valid ID at ticket purchase and the evening of the show. Ticket prices are subject to convenience fees. Tickets are on sale now and can also be purchased at the door, if still available.

For tickets or more information,
call UCSB Arts & Lectures at (805) 893-3535,
or the Arlington Ticket Agency at (805) 963-4408.

Editor: For photos, please call
Colleen Debler at (805) 893-2098.

©2006 UCSB Arts & Lectures, University of California, Santa Barbara