BB King Portrait Print

B.B. King, stage name of Riley B. King was an American guitarist and singer. With a long career, he was one of the most important exponents of the blues of the second half of the twentieth century and of the twenty-first. With his "Lucille", a Gibson ES-335 custom guitar, it has become an icon of the musical genre since the fifties. He won 14 times the Grammy. In the magazine Rolling Stone he is placed as the sixth best guitarist of all time (List of the 100 best guitarists according to Rolling Stone). His style is characterized by warm and incisive sounds, which give life to the elegant blues that has distinguished him throughout his career. His guitar style is characterized only by solo parts that alternate with singing, almost never leading to accompanying parts, if not for other musicians. In the winter of 1949, King was playing in a ballroom in Arkansas. A barrel containing kerosene had been lit to warm up the room, a practice not too unusual. Two men began arguing, dropping the barrel containing the burning kerosene on the floor. This triggered a fire and subsequent evacuation. Once outside, King realized he had left his guitar (a semi-acoustic Gibson) in the burning building and came back to retrieve it. The next day, King discovered that the two men had fought for a woman called Lucille and decided to call Lucille her first guitar, as well as all the guitars she had from that almost fatal experience, to remember never to thing like that. Another version instead wants that, known the name, had said "because of Lucille at times I put my life back" and then creating a double meaning between the girl and the guitar. In particular, Lucille is a Gibson Custom Shop based on the ES-355 model (in her career she also played ES-175, ES-330, ES-345 but it is 355 that made her mark), a semi-acoustic black guitar produced specifically for BB King and built according to its specifications. Like other 355, Lucille has the Vari-tone, a rotary selector that intervenes by inserting different R / C combinations to give different cuts to the sound coming from the pickups; in fact it goes from a swollen and round sound to the finer and subtler sound suitable for funky. Unlike normal ES-355, it does not have effe holes while being semi-acoustic, and has a maple handle instead of mahogany