tavis: good evening. from los angeles, i am tavis smiley. tonight, the first of two conversations with the incomparable bb king. we often apply superlatives a bit too freely and early to artists. for bb king, every word of praise is more than deserved. and in that the into the rock 'n roll hall of fame and the presidential medal of the arts. most considered one of the influential blues artists of all time. he still tours tirelessly, ringing a sophisticated style that guitarists still try to emulate. we have joined you have asked we are glad you have joined us for a conversation with the king of the blues, bb king, coming up

right now. ♪ >> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. tavis: the bb king was born into in the mississippi delta in 1925. he was working at the fields at

seven and found solace in music and the church. memphis with to less than three dollars in his pocket. he honed his guitar style in the streets of that city. his first break on the radio had him performing as beale street blues boy, later shortened to blues boy king. let's look at a clip of him performing with his guitar, lucille. >> every day, every day, i have the blues lose ♪ hate to ♪

tavis: the king of the blues is in the house tonight. i have been looking forward to this -- i have been in the broadcast business, this is my 21st year. we have talked on radio, but never one on one on television. you hung out all over the world, in germany and europe. i have been with you on tour and all over the country. but never one on one on set. so i am delighted. i am glad you are finally here. you are hard to catch up with.

>> you said it. my best day is right behind you. -- my birthday is right behind you. tavis: how are you feeling? you are looking well. >> i think i have taken about as much of this as i can take. [laughter] tavis: you look good though. i just like to mess with you. i want to start our conversation tonight -- i am glad i have two nights with you. i want to start our conversation talking about things that people might not know about you. we know so much about your music. that is the fun part. but something that i find fascinating that help make you who you are that your fans and others might not know. you saw a lynching many years ago that impacted you and changed your life in profound ways. >> well, i did not actually see him being lynched, but i saw him

being drove up the streets over to the courthouse. i was in a little town called lexington, mississippi. i think it scared me more than anything else because i was maybe a few years older than he was. he was a boy and i was scared after seeing them drag him up the streets. tavis: how does that impact a child, a black child growing up in that part of the world? >> as i said, it scared me, for one thing. secondly, i felt like just as it happened to that guy, it could happen to me. i always liked ladies all my life, i guess i started with my mom. every time i saw a pretty lady,

i would think, she is pretty. that is what happened to this boy. tavis: for those who do not know the story, he was accused of whistling at a white woman. that was his crime. >> they killed him. took him out in blue lake. did you know they had a lake in mississippi called blue lake? tavis: i did know that. >> i forget, you are from mississippi. tavis: i know a little bit about it. not as much as you. you mentioned your mother, that you have always loved the ladies, starting with your mama. tell me about your mother. >> my mother was a very beautiful lady, i thought. she was very good to me.

she died when i was 9.5, but if she had lived, i probably would not be trying to play guitar. she wanted me to be known as something else, not a guitar player. tavis: for what? >> anything that is somebody -- tavis: doctor, lawyer, politician. >> make the world better. tavis: but you have made the world better to a lot of people. >> you are giving me so many compliments. i am going to jump up and start hollering. tavis: your mother died at 9.5. so where do you go? >> i have quite a few relatives. i have one close relative, my uncle. i stayed with him a lot. my mother and my dad were divorced. in country like mississippi, where they were not together, they used to call it separated.

i guess that happened to me. tavis: i want to ask you about the first time you saw a guitar being played in a black church. while we are talking about this, you mentioned how different your life might be had your mother lived, that you might not have played guitar because you love your mama and wanted to make her proud. mama don't want you to play guitar, you might have done something else. >> i would not have played guitar. tavis: exactly. so the question is, how different do you think your life would be if you had not grown up in mississippi? >> she would not have had grandchildren early. [laughter] tavis: you are in rare form tonight. all because you grew up in mississippi.

with them pretty girls running around. >> they have a lot of beautiful ones. tavis: i know they do. then and now. >> are you married? tavis: not yet. i am right behind you. pretty girls at the church was an interesting statement. >> she really wanted me -- i used to sing in a quartet. and she liked that. tavis: gospel or other stuff? >> gospel. tavis: so you were singing gospel quartet years ago and your mama liked that. the first time, i am told, that you saw a guitar being played was in church. tell me about it.>> the preacher. i wanted to be like him. we belonged to the sanctified faith. he was a preacher.

i wanted to be just like him. people used to tell me when i was younger that i played a lot like him. and i looked a lot like him. tavis: they did not say that. >> yes, they did. i tried my best to make myself look a little better. it did not work. tavis: the first year you played in church, did you first start playing in church? >> not really. at my uncle's house. my uncle, he was like a young baby when he was around my mother. and he was older. but if she said something, he would do exactly what she said. and i was a little different. she had to give my dad a razor strap. tavis: to get you to do anything. [laughter]

so you started playing at your uncle's. when did you get your first guitar? >> i started living with a family. and i had seen a guy, a white person who had a guitar. and he wanted to sell it. i offered all kinds of chores if they would give me one. he wanted five dollars for it. tavis: so you did chores to get it? you wanted that guitar bad. >> really bad. my uncle called me lazy. he is dead so he cannot hear you. tavis: but when you got that

guitar, you went to work. you are famously self-taught. >> yes. but i am -- i apparently learned that they were having blues shows, night dances, whatever you call them at little juke joints. i thought, it would be nice to go there. they will not let me play inside, but i can sit outside on the weekends. tavis: you said you listen to what was going on inside and started picking stuff up. so when did the memphis move come in? when did you make your way up to memphis? >> much later than that. i cannot remember the exact -- it was in the early 1950s. tavis: why specifically?

>> they had better places you could play and they let people in my age. sometimes, the proprietors of the juke joints would give you a couple of dollars. and i loved that. tavis: in your own words, even though you are from mississippi, how does memphis play into the success of bb king? >> it plays into all of it. i ran into a guy called rufus thomas. tavis: oh lord yes.[laughter] i love rufus thomas. >> what happened, i would go to what they called an amateur show. and rufus thomas was the mc. he would hear my crying and whining to get on. so he was letting me on even though i maybe was on last week.

but he looked at me and i guess i looked so pitiful, he said, "you were just on last week." and i said, yeah, but i do not have any money. if you went on, you got one dollar. if you won, you got five. i never did get the five. tavis: what did you make of the fact that the other guys who won the five, they did pretty good, but later you ended up coming the king of the blues? >> i never said that. tavis: anybody who knows how good you are says you are the king of the blues. but you never won a five dollar night? did you get over it? >> i am not mad about it. he was one of my best friends. tavis: when did you know, i am not talking about what other people said, when did you know that you were really good at the guitar?

>> a record company from l.a. started to record me and do you know what they paid me per side? two cents. tavis: come on. >> i am not lying to you. tavis: so you got four cents per record? >> yes. very glad to get it. tavis: four cents. >> yes. before i really stopped, i was glad to get five cents per record. that is why, when i see people today and they complain about what they get and i picked cotton for 2 dollars, half a day. my cousin and i used the pick 1000 pounds per day.

we could stay in and rest in bed until everyone else was gone to the fields. then he would say, come on out here. we did not go to the fields with other people. you would get balled at. if we went later than the rest of the family and picked -- i was averaging about 400 pounds per day. my cousin picked more. tavis: as i listen to you tell this story, something is wrong about you making more money picking cotton them playing your guitar. that do not sound right, bb king. it just is not fair. >> not later. that was the beginning. i thought it was good though.

tavis: playing the guitar or picking cotton? >> picking cotton.[laughter] tavis: then you started picking your guitar. how did, and i know there is no simple answer to this, if you really want an appreciation of bb king, you talk to buddy guy. every time i talk to buddy guy, i am trying to talk about buddy guy and all he wants to talk about is bb king. he wants to talk about the licks that you play. how did you establish that signature sound? >> i do not know. it just seems like the way i played was nice. i always thought that buddy guy was really good. there were a lot of other young

players around at that time. older people like blind lemon, which was one of my favorites. i was just there with my -- did you ever see, i do not mean to give them a plug, but rca, they had a trademark on the record players. it was a little dog listening to the records as they play. the signal was that the records were so good that the dog could understand who it was. and that was me. tavis: i think you are too modest. you created a signature sound that everybody then and now wants to imitate and you do not even know how you did it. >> no, i don't. tavis: we are not going to mess

with it then. >> that sounds good to me. that is the way my preacher played in church. not exactly like i was, because naturally i did not play the blues in church. tavis: there are so many players and you did not start playing in the church. but your mother loved you singing quartet. there were so many players in the black community that come out of the church. did you have any point in your life that you wrestled with what you wanted to play in the church, whether you wanted to play the blues? >> i had to play in the church when i was still trying to play. that was the only way i could play. you do not know my mother. tavis: she did not play though. >> with a strap or something, she could beat you nicely. [laughter] tavis: that sounds oxymoronic, but i will take it.

>> i do not know what you mean. tavis: you cannot beat anybody nicely. but you know what the blues are saying. talk about the time that you did the stint in the army. you spent some time in the army. >> just a short time. tavis: tell me how that affected your life. >> well, first, let me tell you a little story. when we won world war ii, i was a tractor driver. i drove tractors on the plantation. and so when they start calling people my age, 18, i was one to call. and i went to camp shelby, right

outside of -- not far from jackson, mississippi. and i already knew how to drive a tractor pretty good. so they would give me a job driving a tractor. nothing special because i had been doing that all the time. and i kind of liked that. but they reclassified us. i said us because there were several of us, about 80 of us, that when in at the same time. scared us to death on the bus. we were on a greyhound bus going to camp shelby. and two or three of the guys were not from mississippi. they were picking with the white girls on the side of the road while picking cotton.

if i had to ride the bus for pay, i still had to sit in the back. but i got through it pretty good. i had a lot of older friends around me that had taught me about white people. tavis: so when you got in the army, you knew how to behave. you got in and you got out. >> no problem. tavis: i suspect we will talk more about this tomorrow night. let me put this question out now. there is a movie that i love called "cadillac records." it talks about all the artists and how they got ripped off so bad back in the day. what is your worst horror story about getting ripped off over the years as an artist? >> i do not think i knew about

getting ripped off at the time. hey, i am recording. i was recording. being a recorded artist, girls. tavis: and the money would take care of itself. at some point, you came out to understand. >> some of the guys that had ripped me off helping me out. tavis: explain that. they are ripping you off and helping you out. >> after i left them, they were showing me that i was playing pretty good and i should come back to them and they would give me a dime, maybe even a quarter. and i then went to one of the larger companies. and here i am. i can work for you now.

tavis: get out of here. i can come work for you. i will carry lucille on and off the bus or the stage any time you want. >> some people around here would not like that. tavis: i do not want to take anyone's job. that is night number one of our conversation with bb king. after all these years, he is on the road all the time, he is finally here for two nights. we will continue with night two with the king of the blues, bb king, tomorrow night. until then, thanks for watching and keep the faith. ♪

thrill is gone the thrill is gone away the thrill is gone, baby the thrill is gone away ♪ >> for more information on today's show, visit tavis smiley at pbs.org. tavis: hi, i'm tavis smiley. as we wrap upime our conversation with the king of the blues, bb king. that is next time. we will see you then. ♪

>> and by contributions to your pbs station from viewers like you. thank you. >> be more. pbs. >> be more. pbs.

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