King was born to a family of poor sharecroppers on a plantation near the small town of Itta Bena in the Mississippi Delta.

I was glad I read it but perhaps I'll look for a more updated biography with which to compare this one.Riley B. Sawyer was a friend of BB and so had a knowledge of him later biographers may not have. He deftly deflected people that tried to take advantage of him and he always willing to lend a fiscal hand to his bandmates, even to his own detriment. He treated all and sundry with the respect he thought that deserved. He was not only a musical genius, he was also genuinely good man. I walked away from this book with a newfound respect for BB. As an example of the latter: he's got 20,000 records that he was working on transferring to tape. In addition to the Jim Crow south and the musical skills, it delved into BB's morality and his obsession with technology. Even though I was lost during some of the more intricate explanations of BB's musical skills, I appreciated the variety of areas of life that were covered. Granted, the book is almost 40 years old, but still he spent more time detailing BB's time on the Chitlin' Circuit than he did on BB's years in the spotlight. I think I'm so critical of the story because I expected more. He just got through retelling the troubles Jim Crow presented to the BB, people have longer memories than he credits them with. Since he was writing in 1980, I can forgive him not knowing about The New Jim Crow we've got going on today, but I feel he should have known better. One final critique: in the afterward, Mr. He would the a anecdote and then tell the same one later on.

Another confusing aspect was the repeating of entire paragraphs from previous chapters.

Then he has his manager taking him back on three years after being fired before he's even hired. getting divorced before he is even married. That wasn't out of the ordinary, a lot of biographies set the stage like that, but within the following chapters he tends to tell the endings before the beginnings.įor example, he has B.B. Then he flashes back to B.B's days as just Riley King. He and his band often played upwards of 340 one-night engagements in a year. He starts with a great rundown of the road warriors BB and his band were for more than twenty years. Sawyer tends to be as tight with time as a broken rubber band.

Autobiography of bb king