Singing the People's Blues

THE DEATH of B.B. King this spring was marked by an outpouring of homage appropriate to the man’s talent, his influence on U.S. culture, and his fabled personal humility and generosity.

He started out picking cotton and singing on the street and ended as one of the most famous and honored men on earth—a classic rags-to-riches tale. But King wasn’t just a black Horatio Alger. And his story wasn’t just one of individual striving and achievement. King also understood that his art was rooted in the collective struggle of his people and that he was a part of that struggle.

I grew up about 30 miles from B.B. King’s Sunflower County, Miss., home, but I discovered him the same way most white people my age did, by hearing “The Thrill Is Gone” on the radio. It’s a recording that still jumps out of the speakers and grabs the heart. It starts with a mournful guitar melody. Then, behind verse two, an eerie, quavering wash of strings begins low in the mix and rises through the rest of the song. By the time King wails out to his lover, “I’m free from your spell, and now that it’s all over, all I can do is wish you well,” you knew you were hearing the last words of a dying man.

King was a virtuoso guitarist and a powerful singer. He wasn’t my favorite bluesman, but he became the one I most respected. That’s because, beginning in 1973, B.B. King came back to Mississippi in June every year to headline a free concert honoring Medgar Evers, the Mississippi civil rights leader who was assassinated by a white supremacist on June 12, 1963.

Eventually, King expanded his annual homecoming to include another free concert in his hometown of Indianola. But it was those early Evers tribute shows that demonstrated what the man was really about. Honoring Evers doesn’t seem like such a big deal today. After all the Jackson, Miss., airport is named for Evers and the major Jackson thoroughfare that runs closest to Evers’ home is called Medgar Evers Boulevard. Evers’ assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, died in prison in 2001, having been finally convicted of the crime in 1994.

But in June 1973, the wounds of the previous decade were still fresh. Most public schools in Mississippi weren’t integrated until 1970. Arch-segregationist James O. Eastland had just been re-elected to another term in the U.S. Senate. Beckwith was still a free man, though he was arrested later that year in New Orleans on his way to bomb the home of a prominent Jewish leader.

B.B. King didn’t come home to Mississippi just to “give back” philanthropically (although he did plenty of that). With those Medgar Evers concerts, he honored the sacrifice of a man who led a campaign of nonviolent civil disobedience aimed at disrupting the political and economic power structure of the state. King did that year after year for four decades.

And at every one of those shows I saw, he played a song he’d co-written in 1969 that became his statement of purpose. Called “Why I Sing the Blues,” it begins, “When I first got the blues / they brought me over here on a ship / men standing over me / and a lot more with a whip / and everybody wants to know / why I sing the blues. ... I’ve been around a long time / people, I’ve really, really paid my dues.”