Blues legend B.B. King, who’ll be performing in Providence Wednesday, won his 14th Grammy last week for the album One Kind Favor, a record that featured the back-to-basics production of T-Bone Burnett and put King in one of the grittiest, most lo-fi settings he’s had in decades. And King delivered, with his trademark stinging guitar and growling vocals in good repair even after all these years.

Working with Burnett was “fine,” King says in a phone conversation, and while in some ways the album is a return to blues basics, King says “I think we went beyond some of the things that I’ve ever done. … We did some songs that were recorded before I even started recording,” including a few that he’d always wanted to do.

But as an elder statesman for his form he’s worried about the landscape for blues music. While he remains as popular as ever, King sees fewer and fewer opportunities for younger blues musicians to break out and make the same kind of broad imprint on the national culture as he did.

He uses the Grammys for an example. The blues section of the award show, King points out, is in the pre-telecast portion of the program, which is in fact where most of the awards are handed out. And it’s been around 10 years since a blues performer actually played on the telecast, which doesn’t help the profile of the music. “They give us awards, and the Grammy for me I appreciate very much, but wouldn’t it be nice to see us walk up and get it sometime?

“And I used to be a bit sad for myself,” King says. “But now I’m an older person, and I’m sad for the young people who don’t get the breaks they should, I think.

“You can’t hear them on the radio; there’s only one radio, and that’s satellite radio. Other radio stations, I never hear any of them. Even some of the superstars like Stevie Ray Vaughn, Corey Harris, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Robert Cray — all of these, I think, should be heard. But I don’t hear them.”

Not that this has kept King from having a long and successful career — “I’ve been playing electric guitar ever since I could afford electricity” at age 16, he says — but he did it the hard way, and he had hoped that things would be easier.

“I appreciate it and I’m grateful for that, but the way I’ve done this has been traveling,” says King, who adds that he averages 250 shows a year and used to do more. “But don’t you think it’s time, if I didn’t get any help, that they should help the younger people coming up behind me?”

Still, even at age 83, King manages to put on one of the best shows in the blues business.

“See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” which contains the line that gave the new record its title, is in King’s set list, and sometimes he’ll throw a couple more in, but after making so many classics for so long (“Every Day I Have the Blues,” “The Thrill Is Gone,” “Why I Sing the Blues”), it’s hard to fit a lot more new stuff into the show.

“I’ve been making [records] since ’49,” King says, “so I can’t just take the whole thing and not do some of the others. I’m not like some people who can make one album and sell 60 million copies, so I have to pick some from each decade, or each year I’ve been recording.”

Even with so many years on the road and all his misgivings about the state of the blues, King says he will keep going until he’s gone, and for the same reasons as he had for getting started in the first place: “I enjoy it, and I try to be an entertainer. This has been my job for 60 years.”

And while he says his voice “is not like it was when I was 25. … I think the guitar [playing] is better. I’m always learning.”

Rick Massimo
The Providence Journal