B.B. King: A giant-sized force of life, fun, worry and immortal blues

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B.B. King sang that nobody loved him but his mother, but that for all he knew she could have been jivin' too. How blue can you get? The man had answers.

He will be remembered as a giant-sized force of life, fun and worry – his booming voice, seemingly rising up from his shoes, world-weary and thundering deep about regrets, longings and costs, about good times that rolled and bad times that did too, and about thrills that were gone, never to come back.

King, a defining blues artist and the face of the genre across decades, died Thursday evening at his home in Las Vegas. He was 89.

The story goes that young Riley King showed up rain-soaked at the big-time Memphis, Tenn., radio station WDIA in 1949. He had walked from the bus station, his guitar wrapped in a newspaper. "He looked so sad," recalled the program director at the time, "but when he began to play, we all knew he had it."

The initials B.B. stood for "Blues Boy."

He was a Delta plow-boy from Indianola, Miss., and his style of blues was an electrifying mix of country-thumping, big-city bustle and swinging sophistication. He played no chords on his big black Gibson guitar called "Lucille," sticking to ringing and stinging notes, a glistening vibrato effect and bristly tones. Adhering to the harmonically sparse blues scale, he relied on clever rhythmic variation to fashion the sharpest of phrases.

His story is one of perseverance. Until the late 1960s, blues was "race music." He once suffered the indignity of playing behind a curtain – an outrageous buffer between black musicians and white patrons. From his despondent minor-keyed Chains and Things:

Well you talk about hard luck and trouble,

Seems to be my middle name.

All the odds are against me,

Yes, I can only play a losing game.

King's guitar solo in Chain and Things is emblematic: It begins with a wrong note; he sticks with it and works his way out.

In 1968, he broke through. At a concert at Bill Graham's Fillmore West in San Francisco, an adoring, long-haired audience of white youths gave him a standing ovation before he even played a note; Paul Butterfield had introduced him as the greatest living blues guitarist. "Everybody stood up, and I cried," King later recalled. "That was the beginning of it."

And so, high times, as reflected in his crowd-pleasing shuffle Let the Good Times Roll, a concert staple. "Tell everybody, B.B. King's in town," he would proclaim, with a big, proud smile. The audience roars; King bows, thumbs in lapels.

I got a dollar and a quarter [Bam! The band strikes a chord] And I'm just rarin' to clown [Bam!] But don't let nobody… [Bam!] Play me cheap I got 50 cents more than I'm gonna keep…. King let the good times roll, and he let the tour buses roll. I spoke to him once in his bus, outside Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall in 2006. A photographer suggested King change seats for a different shot. "Would you mind?" the shooter asked.

"I would mind," King replied. "This is where I sit." He chuckled when he said it, but didn't budge. "This is where I sit every day."

We discussed the generations of guitarists indebted to him, even if they didn't recognize it themselves. When I mentioned that Rolling Stone magazine had recently rated him the third-greatest guitarist of all time, behind Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman, he was humble.

"I thank them, but I don't agree with them. Out of a hundred, I believe I should be on it, but in the position they put me in … I'm just grateful to them for doing it."

How long would he go on, I asked. "I think only God knows when it's time for me to stop," he said. "As long as people come to see me, they keep buying my CDs and patting me on the head at shows like they used to, I'll keep trying."

King's last Toronto appearance was at Massey Hall, in 2013. He played while on a chair, and he talked as much as he played or sang. There was a sing-along version of You Are My Sunshine, and I recall the slow, haunting, melancholy of The Thrill Is Gone. "Take it way down," he told his band, directing the mood and tempo, "like you're stealing something."

The show was fairly short; his eight-piece band ushered him off with walk-off music, taking care of him. "I ain't tired," he protested. "I wish I could go on."

We all did.