by Jeff Knight

The black man had grown up in the Delta, singing
Gospel and chopping Cotton, and
I'm not making up any of this.
Folks split when he was four, Little Riley moved
with his mother to another part of the state, didn't
see his father anymore.
His mother died when he was nine.

His mother died when he was nine,
and it would be worth a moment of our time to try
to remember being nine
and to remember, too,
what poets know is true:
the inadequacy of language to convey experience.

That said: His mother died when he was nine, and
he had to go to work chopping cotton for a tenant
farmer who made him a place. Nine years old, he
did backbreaking
sharecropper work and he didn't go to school. Did
that for a year.
A year is a long time when you're nine.
Then he did it again the next year,
and again the next.
Nine, ten, now he was eleven,
and he lived in that shack,
no family around,
for another year,
and another, and then,
when he was fourteen, his father found him and
came and took him home.

Now it moves along:
he lived with his father,
he had family all around,
he sang gospel at church,
he still did some farm work,
but he got to go to school,
an uncle showed him a few guitar chords, he grew
up, and in 1944 he got drafted.
During his stint in the Army
he learned some blues from the guys in his unit. He
did his time; he got out,
And in '46 or '47, he thumbed to Memphis. There,
he slept on his cousin's couch.
This cousin -- and I might as well tell you

the cousin turns out to be the great
bottleneck slide player Bukka White --
helped him get a job
singing in radio commercials. It was an in, and he
was able to turn it into something. He got work as
a DJ on WDIA, the first
radio station anywhere on this continent to feature
an all-black format.

His guitar playing improved.
He went to all the blues jams
at all the black clubs on Beale Street, and (Oh My
God!)
He cut their hearts out.
He cut their hearts out, night after night, blue note
after blue note rising, falling, tumbling liquid from
that big Gibson guitar, sad and sweet and smart,
fusing the styles of T-Bone Walker and Blind
Lemon Jefferson, city smoke and country dirt,
all bent strings and fat tone.
He started working Django Rheinhardt's
jazz flourishes into his Delta blues,
he had vocabulary,
he made something new,
he cut their hearts out.

He started playing his guitar
along with R&B records on the air.
Can you imagine this?
It is, oh, let's make it 1948,
you're driving through Memphis,
and as you cross the river you
tune in to WDIA and happen to catch
the HeeBee JeeBee Radio Show,
and you hear Howlin' Wolf,
or Dinah Washington,
or Junior Parker,
or Sonny Boy Williamson
cranking through the static
with additional guitar from the DJ,
and it's Little Riley
King all grown up,
Beale Street Blues Boy King
they called him, and later
it was just
B.B. King.

© 1997 Jeff Knight