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The King Of The Blues B.B.King by Joel Selvin (SF Chronicle)

Posted by Ed Miller

It was his first gig in five weeks. The indefatigable 79-year-old took time off for a second cataract surgery, after recovering from the first cataract operation with only a few appearances in between, for what amounted to three months out of action.

“I haven’t had three months off in 57 years,” said King, who will play nine shows in the next 11 days on a short West Coast swing before he heads through the Midwest and into deepest Canada over the next couple of months. He owns a house in Las Vegas, but he calls any place he stays three nights home.

At this point in his life, B.B. King has come to represent an entire generation of black musicians. Born Riley B. King in the Mississippi Delta, he can remember playing tobacco barns in the South on the same circuit as Ray Charles, Big Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris and all the others, long gone, where people dancing kicked up the dust between the floorboards until they couldn’t see who they were dancing with. King sang movingly and tearfully at Charles’ funeral last June. How many others are left?

“I haven’t checked since this morning,” he joked. “Not that many ... not that many. I’m one of the few.”

The blues often was seen as nothing less than the devil’s music by many of the more pious in the black community. At best it was considered a gangly, unsophisticated country cousin of big-city jazz and rhythm and blues. The music’s humble origins and old-fashioned traditions often were linked with unpleasant memories of life under segregation for a generation of blacks raised in the cities, far from the country life and farm work King grew up doing.

Bearing all that in mind, he always approached his profession with immense dignity because he knew he would be one of the main figures to take this low-born, provincial music out of the rural South, the juke joints of the Mississippi Delta and the roughneck gin mills of West Memphis in the ‘40s, and expose it to the rest of the world. He said that was one of the reasons he still works so hard.

He rattles off the names of younger blues musicians—John Mayer, Jonny Lang, Corey Harris, Keb’ Mo’. “I’ve been out there it seems like 100 years,” he said. “I keep a watch on what I hear around me. I hope they don’t have to go through what I went through.”

He sang songs he has been singing since he worked the chitlin’ circuit at places like Oakland’s Showcase Lounge and was entirely unknown in the white community. He did old Louis Jordan numbers. He did the U2 song Bono wrote for him, “When Love Comes to Town.”

He played his own signature pieces such as “The Thrill Is Gone,” “How Blue Can You Get,” “Rock Me Baby.” He sang numbers like Big Bill Broonzy’s “Key to the Highway” that connect him to the music’s beginnings.

He is truly a tribal elder, a shaman with wisdom and magic to impart. But at the core of everything he does lies the immutable truth of the blues, the inevitable hands of fate and fortune extracting their terrible price from human existence.

“Listen to the blues ... listen to what they’re saying,” he sang Thursday in “Nightlife,” a song written by Willie Nelson that King has been singing at least since he recorded the number on his classic 1967 album, “Blues Is King.”

“Oh, the nightlife, ain’t no good life,” he sang, “but it’s my life.”