Another Music Legend Has Left Us

(The photo above of the great B.B. King is from the New York Times.)

The music world, and all music lovers, have lost another legend. Blues guitarist B.B. King died Thursday in Las Vegas at the age of 89. I was lucky enough to see Mr. King in a Dallas performance a few years ago, and I still treasure the memory of that concert. He will certainly be missed, but he left us with a treasury of music to remember him by -- and to teach future generations of his incredible talent.

I have always loved the story he told of breaking through to a wider audience. Here is how it's related in the New York Times:

Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: “O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.” It had infuriated him.

When he saw “long-haired white people” lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, “I think they booked us in the wrong place.” Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: “Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.”

“Everybody stood up, and I cried,” Mr. King said. “That was the beginning of it.”