The blues were all around Riley B. King from the moment he was born into a poor family of sharecroppers on a Mississippi cotton plantation in 1925. He grew up listening to the call-and-response work songs of the black farmhands while he picked cotton, and later to some of the earliest recorded blues artists, Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson, on his Aunt Mima's 78 rpm Victrola.
King learnt his first three guitar chords from the reverend of his church, and his first ambition was to be a guitar-playing, gospel-singing preacher himself. But he never received 'the calling', and furthermore noticed that while he would only get 'God bless you' playing gospel on street corners, when he played the 'devil's music' he would get money. His uncle Bukka White had achieved a certain measure of fame as a blues slide guitarist, and King decided to follow in his footsteps. The man now known as B B (short for 'Blues Boy') King has stayed true to the blues ever since.
King's 'autobiography', written with help from David Ritz, is a straightforward account of a long life lived to the full. The language is down-home and folksy, like the music he plays. It is the result of endless hours of interviews on the road, and Ritz has carefully preserved King's manner of speech without making it seem affected.
'The blues are a simple music, and I'm a simple man,' King says. From this book, this seems to be an accurate self-assessment. True to the image of the wandering blues player, he loves women, whiskey and gambling, and he expresses the resulting joys and sorrows in his music. One point he repeatedly makes is that the blues is not just about tragedy: 'The fact is that the blues contains all the basic feelings of human beings - pain, happiness, fear, courage, confusion, desire . . . everything.' Perhaps the greatest love in King's life is Lucille, his Gibson guitar, currently in her 17th incarnation. The story goes that he rescued the original Lucille from a nightclub fire started by two men fighting over someone called Lucille. Since then Lucille has remained his constant companion - the only female in his life he has ever stuck with.
The death of the two women he loved most at an early age is one possible reason for this. After his mother and grandmother died in quick succession, King was left alone at the age of nine in his mother's cabin, where he chose to stay. He worked hard for the plantation owner and hid his grief, 'a pattern that set me on a course for life'.
But another reason could be his prodigious appetite for sex. He reveals unapologetically that he has sired 15 children by 15 women (the book is dedicated to them), and claims that he enjoyed sexual intercourse from the age of six with an 'older woman' aged seven. He is candid about sex: he talks about the pleasure of 'going down' on a woman, which he discovered only after his second divorce; a painful circumcision he had to endure in late middle-age; and that in his old age he is a big fan of pornographic movies.