BB King is the last of the great bluesmen – the sole survivor of a tradition that goes back to the Mississippi Delta and the early 1920s. BB king started playing the blues at the time when some of the most important people in blues history were playing, such as Muddy Waters and Jared Lee Hooker. BB King, like many blues artists had direct links to slavery in his family, "My father was born on the plantation, I was born on the plantation. I wanted more for my children. This, the guitar,was my way out." The plantation he was talking about was located between Itta Bena and Indianola, Mississippi, where Riley B. King was born on September 16, 1925. His parents split up when he was a small child, and though he lived for a few years with his mother in the Mississippi hills, he found himself alone at age nine after she died. His father retrieved him from a tenant farm a few years after that. Working as a farmhand on a cotton plantation in Indianola, he earned $22.50 a week. "I guess the earliest sound of blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be picking cotton or chopping or something”
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Few artists have that "distinctive" sound that is immediately recognizable. BB King is a legend because he brought the Blues to the masses and continues to wow people with his music even to this day. BB King’s influences were set at an early stage. Being from Indianola, Mississippi, he can still remember the sound of field hollers and the cornerstone blues figures, like Charley Patton and Robert Johnson. You can hear that BB King’s influences in the melodies in his songs and also he not only sings vocally but lets his guitar sing instrumentally with the melodies that he plays in between his singing. He plays in shortened bursts in between vocal phrases, some of the licks that he plays are still played by other guitarists that looked up to him and were influenced by him at