“Lucille lost her dance partner…”

Tod Kelly

Tod is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He is also serves as Executive Producer and host of both the 7 Deadly Sins Show at Portland's historic Mission Theatre and 7DS: Pants On Fire! at the White Eagle Hotel & Saloon. He is  a regular inactive for Marie Claire International and the Daily Beast, and is currently writing a book on the sudden rise of exorcisms in the United States. Follow him on Twitter.

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5 Responses

  1. Glyph says:

    Great piece on a great man, Tod. I was going to quibble slightly on this:

    After the passing of John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and Robert Johnson, King was last true blues musician.

    …then I realized that the other guys I was thinking of (Junior Kimbrough, RL Burnside) are gone too.

    Report

  2. Lab Rat says:

    He was my wife’s favorite. We saw him live about five years ago. Even though his fingers were weak and numb (he could no longer play the guitar for more than 2 minutes at a time), he put on nearly a two hour show in the rain. It was great.

    He isn’t the last true blues musician, though. Buddy Guy still lives.Report

    • Maribou in reply to Lab Rat says:

      And so do a lot of equally old, less famous, perhaps less talented, but still damn good, stubbornly-still-gigging men and women that one stumbles across every now and then in some random bar somewhere and wishes they weren’t too old fashioned / broke to put out CDs.Report

  3. It has not been a good couple of days for Memphis.

    I remember, when I was quite young, watching a Democratic Party telethon on which B.B. King played, after a pretty perfunctory introduction by Hubert Humphrey. Someone must have said something to HHH, because after King finished he gushed “Wasn’t that great blues music? If you love blues music like I do, you know that B. B. King is one of the best.” And it was just obvious as all hell that Humphrey had never heard of the guy.Report

  4. Burt Likko says:

    I met the man very briefly once, at an L.A. club called The Mint. “The blues aren’t supposed to make you feel sad,” he said of that mournful solo in Thrill Is Gone. “They’re supposed to make you feel good!” He winked at me, shook my hand, and received more guests as anxious as I to meet him with gregariousness.

    He personified how the songs of the farm workers of the south became the mainstream of American music and a focus of our shared culture. He is missed, and mourned.Report