Keith Richards Told A Bar Full Of Musicians Real Blues Was Gone — BB King Picked Up Lucille D
Keith Richards told a bar full of musicians on Beale Street, Memphis in 1969 that real blues was dead. B.B. King was in the bar. B.B. King had been there the whole time sitting in the corner listening. B.B. King waited until Keith Richards finished saying what Keith Richards had to say, then B.
B. King picked up Lucille. What happened in the next 45 minutes changed how Keith Richards understood every note he had ever played. Keith Richards has said so. Keith Richards has said it more than once. Beale Street in Memphis in the autumn of 1969 was not what Beale Street had been in the decades when it was at the living center of a musical culture producing some of the most significant music the American century would contain.
By 1969, Beale Street had the specific atmosphere of a place that had been important and knew it. Some of the original establishments still operating. The music still present but in a different configuration than when it was being invented rather than preserved. The Rolling Stones were in Memphis in October of 1969 for a concert date that was part of the American tour that had begun in November.
The first American tour the Stones had done since 1966 and the tour that marked the beginning of the period when the Rolling Stones became the kind of band that filled the largest venues in North America. The tour was significant for many reasons. One of them was that it brought Keith Richards back to the American South at a moment when Keith Richards was thinking seriously about the blues tradition that it produced the Rolling Stones, about what that tradition was and what it had become and what the relationship was between what it had been and what it was now. Keith Richards was 25 years old in October of 1969. Keith Richards had been playing blues influenced music professionally since 1963. Keith Richards had spent the better part of seven years studying the American blues tradition, its recordings, its musicians, its specific way of using the guitar to say things that other instruments could not say in the same way, and had built a career on that study and on what the study had
produced in him as a musician. Keith Richards knew the blues tradition with the specific intimacy of someone who had loved it first and studied it second, which is the order that produces the deepest knowledge. Keith Richards was also, in October of 1969, in the state of mind that a musician enters when a serious study of a tradition produces a serious question about the state of that tradition in the present.
Keith Richards had been listening to new music being made in the blues idiom and had been forming a view that the tradition was being continued but not extended, that musicians were working within the vocabulary of the blues without finding new things to say in it, that the specific aliveness that the original blues recordings contained was becoming more difficult to find in new work.
Keith Richards had been thinking this for some time. On the evening of October 14th, 1969, on Beale Street in Memphis, Keith Richards said it out loud. The bar was called Handy’s, after W. C. Handy, the composer who had given Beale Street much of its musical identity in the early decades of the century.
Handy’s in 1969 was the kind of establishment that serious musicians in Memphis went to late in the evening after their own obligations were finished to drink and to talk and occasionally to play. The crowd on the evening of October 14th was a mixture of musicians at various stages of their careers, music industry figures who were in town for various reasons, and the specific category of person that exists in every serious music city, people who are not musicians themselves but who understand music at a level that earns them a place in the rooms where musicians talk. Keith Richards arrived at Handy’s after the tour sound check and sat at the bar with two members of the touring crew and a Memphis musician named James Fowler who had been hired as a local liaison for the tour stop and who knew the Beale Street scene well enough to have suggested Handy’s as the right place to end the evening. Keith Richards had a bourbon. Keith Richards had another. Keith Richards
settled into the specific kind of ease that good whiskey and the right room produce after a long day of tour logistics and sound check work and Keith Richards began talking about the blues. The conversation started as conversations about music start in places like Handy’s, loosely, exploratorily, people contributing observations that produced other observations, the conversation following the music the way conversations in music bars follow the music when the music is the reason everyone is there. Keith Richards was an engaged and specific talker about music, capable of making the precise distinctions that come from genuine and long sustained knowledge, capable of the kind of specificity that tells the people you are talking to that you have thought seriously about what you are saying and are not performing an opinion but expressing one. The conversation that evening in Handy’s was the kind that people came to that bar specifically to have. Then Keith Richards said it. Keith
Richards said that real blues, the blues that Robert Johnson had recorded in a hotel room in San Antonio in 1936, the blues that Muddy Waters had brought to Chicago from the Mississippi Delta, the blues that Howlin’ Wolf had put into a microphone and sent out over the radio from KWEM in West Memphis in 1948, and that had never sounded the same coming from anyone else, was gone.
Keith Richards said that the essential quality that made those recordings what they were was inseparable from the lives that produced them, from the specific conditions of poverty and displacement and creativity under pressure that had shaped the men who made the music. Keith Richards said that what existed now was accomplished and respectful and technically correct and completely missing the essential thing.
Keith Richards said the feeling was different when it came from study rather than from necessity, that you could learn the notes and the patterns and the scales and still not have the thing because the thing was not in the notes. Keith Richards said nobody playing blues now could touch what the original men had done.
Keith Richards said this clearly and at some length and with the specific conviction of someone who has been thinking about something seriously for a long time and has arrived after considerable thought at a conclusion. In the corner of the bar behind two other tables and partially obscured by the low amber light of Handy’s late-night atmosphere, a man had been sitting with a glass of bourbon since before Keith Richards arrived.
The man had been there quietly for the better part of an hour. The man had a guitar case under the table. The case was black with a small red sticker on the side. The case contained Lucille. The man was B.B. King. B.B. King was 44 years old in October of 1969. B.B. King had been playing blues guitar professionally since 1947.
B.B. King had recorded his first single in 1949 and had been recording and touring continuously in the 20 years since, building a career on the road and in recording studios that had made B.B. King one of the most respected blues musicians alive. B.B. King’s guitar playing was, by the assessment of virtually everyone who knew the blues tradition with any seriousness among the finest produced by any musician in the 20th century. B.
B. King’s tone, his vibrato, his specific way of making a single guitar string carry the full weight of a human emotion across an entire room. These were not technical achievements in the way that conservatoire training produces technical achievements. These were the product of a specific life lived in the Mississippi Delta and then on the road across America for 22 years.
A life that had put specific things into B.B. King’s hands and produced a specific relationship between those hands and a Gibson semi-hollow guitar that B.B. King had named Lucille after a woman at a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas in the winter of 1949. B.B. King had been playing with Lucille for 20 years by October of 1969.
B.B. King and Lucille understood each other in the way that two things understand each other when one of them has been the other’s voice for two decades. B.B. King listened to Keith Richards say that real blues was dead. B.B. King listened to Keith Richards say that nobody playing now could touch the original men. B.
B. King listened without interrupting, without shifting in his chair, without giving any outward indication that he was paying particular attention. B.B. King picked up his bourbon and held it and waited until Keith Richards was finished. Then B.B. King said three words, “Play something first.” Keith Richards looked at the corner.
Keith Richards looked at the man who had said this. James Fowler, the Memphis musician sitting beside Keith Richards, recognized B.B. King immediately and said nothing because James Fowler understood that the correct response to the situation was to say nothing and let what was going to happen happen. Keith Richards played something.
Keith Richards borrowed a guitar from a musician at the adjacent table, a road-worn Stratocaster that the musician handed over without hesitation, the way musicians hand instruments to other musicians in bars where everyone understands what is happening. Keith Richards played a blues passage genuinely and without performance, with the authentic feel and the real knowledge of the tradition, the way Keith Richards played when Keith Richards was playing for someone he respected rather than for an audience that needed to be won. Keith Richards played for 3 minutes and the bar went quiet and listened. B.B. King listened with complete attention. When Keith Richards finished, B.B. King said nothing for a moment. Then B.B. King reached under the table and opened the black guitar case with the red sticker on the side. B.B. King lifted Lucille out of the case. B.B. King checked the tuning with two brief notes. B. B. King looked at Keith Richards. B.B. King played for 45 minutes. What B.B. King played in those
45 minutes in a corner of Handy’s Bar on Beale Street in Memphis on the evening of October 14th, 1969 was not a demonstration of technical ability. B.B. King was not showing Keith Richards what his hands could do. B.B. King was answering the claim Keith Richards had made, the claim that real blues was gone, that nobody alive could produce the essential thing that the original men had produced.
That what remained was accomplished imitation of a feeling that could no longer be reached. B.B. King answered that claim with 45 minutes of music that contained the essential thing. B.B. King was 44 years old and had been playing since 1947 and the essential thing was in B.B. King’s hands and in Lucille and it came through the amplifier in the corner of Handy’s and filled the room and answered the claim as completely and as honestly as any claim has ever been answered.
The bar went quiet within the first 90 seconds. People stopped their conversations. People turned toward the corner. People who had been about to leave did not leave. A musician at the bar who had been in his own deep conversation has said that he became aware of what was happening not through his ears but through the specific quality of silence that descended on the room.
The silence that only happens when something is being played that demands complete attention and receives it. Keith Richards listened to all 45 minutes. Keith Richards did not speak. Keith Richards did not move from his position at the bar. Keith Richards has described the 45 minutes in private conversations with people who have known him across the 50 years since that evening in Memphis, always in the same terms, always returning to the same central observation with the consistency of someone describing something that is not diminished in the memory. Keith Richards has said that the 45 minutes did not teach him something he had not known. The 45 minutes taught him something he had known and had forgotten or had known in his head and had not known in his body, not in the way B.B. King knew it in his body, not in the way 22 years of playing the blues on stages and in
recording studios across America had placed it in B.B. King’s hands so completely that it came out without effort, the way breathing comes out without effort. The 45 minutes put something back in Keith Richards that years of study and success and professional music making had quietly eroded.
The specific understanding that the blues was not a style to be learned and applied, but a living thing that lived in specific people who had been shaped by specific experiences and that B.B. King was one of those people and was sitting in a corner a bar on Beale Street in Memphis with that living thing in his hands.
Keith Richards has said that when B.B. King finished, Keith Richards understood what he had been missing in the new blues he had been listening to and finding insufficient. Keith Richards had not been listening for the wrong notes. Keith Richards had been listening for the wrong thing in the wrong way. B.B.
King corrected that in 45 minutes. After B.B. King finished, Handy’s bar on Beale Street was quiet for several seconds. The specific quality of that silence was the silence of a room full of people who have just heard something that requires a moment before any response is adequate.
Then the bar applauded in the specific way that a room full of musicians applaud something that has genuinely moved them. Not the enthusiastic applause of an entertained audience responding on cue, but the deliberate measured recognition of people who understand exactly what they have witnessed and are acknowledging it with the gravity it deserves and no more.
Keith Richards said something to B.B. King. Keith Richards has not made that something public. Keith Richards has only said that what he said was inadequate to what B.B. King had played and that B.B. King received it with the generosity of a man who understood that some things are larger than any available words and had made peace with that fact decades ago.
Keith Richards has not said in any interview or public statement in the 50 years since October 14th, 1969 that real blues was dead. Keith Richards has said many things about the blues tradition and about its relationship to the music Keith Richards has made across that time. Keith Richards has not repeated that claim since October 14th, 1969.
The claim was answered in 45 minutes by a man who had been sitting in the corner of Handy’s bar the whole time, who had been in the living tradition the entire time, who had the essential thing in his hands and in Lucille the entire time, and who had simply been waiting for the right moment to use it. B.
B. King died in Las Vegas in May 2015 at the age of 89. B.B. King was still playing until close to the very end. Lucille is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland in a glass case available to be looked at, but no longer available to be heard. The 45 minutes are in the memory of everyone who was in Handy’s bar on the evening of October 14th, 1969.
Keith Richards was there. Keith Richards has said so. Keith Richards has said it more than once. The specific claim Keith Richards made that October night in Memphis is the only claim Keith Richards has never repeated in 50 years. If this story moved you, subscribe and leave a comment below.
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