B.B. & ME: PROFESSOR'S WRITINGS ON B.B. KING INCLUDED IN COMPENDIUM ABOUT BLUESMAN

"Each time he would hit a note, it was just like there was not going to be another one -- so I'll take care of this here, and milk this one as long as I can. So each time he touched that (note) it was like touching a lady, you know; this is it!."

-- Blues legend B.B. King on the playing of guitar legend Django Reinhardt

Jerry Richardson was a guitar teacher in San Jose, Calif., when his students first introduced him to B.B. King's blues. Many years later, the doctoral student in ethnomusicology at Memphis State University was granted an interview with the blues master.

That 1987 interview became part of Richardson's dissertation, an examination of King's music and playing.

Both the interview and the analysis appear in the recently published book "The B.B. King Companion: Five Decades of Commentary." Edited by Richard Kostelanetz, the book contains both interviews with the blues legend and stories written about him.

Now a professor of music at Southeast, Richardson says King told him that being a blues guitarist was like "being black twice."

By that he meant the prejudices faced by black people were double for black musicians who played the blues. Chuck Berry and Fats Domino were crossing over into the white market in the mid-1950s, but King did not. "His music was adult in content, raw in execution, and lacked the catchy little hooks so beloved of Top 40 radio," Colin Escott writes in the book.

As the book points out, white blues-loving musicians like Mike Bloomfield, Elvin Bishop, the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton were the first to make the music of B.B. King and other black blues artists known outside the listenership of black radio stations and the so-called "Chitlin' Circuit" of black-only clubs.

The book informs us that B.B.'s Christian name is Riley, and that B.B. is probably a derivation of Beale Street Blues Boy.

B.B. King admits he isn't a fast guitar player, and explains in his interview with Richardson how his singing and playing are related.

"After the melodic line leaves the lisp. the serious part starts on the guitar. And then the facial expression takes over as if it is the guitar being strummed," he says.

"In other words, it leaves from here and goes here (gesturing towards his face). When I am serious singing the melody, then I am strumming the guitar, which is not very serious. After I stop singing, I am singing through the guitar."

King also revealed that he'd tried to copy other guitarists but couldn't learn to play like them. "That is what turned me out to be the B. B. King that I am now, because I could never play like anybody else," he said. "I guess I just can't hear, and (I) have stupid fingers that just don't work."

The interviewer responded that those fingers seem to get the job done just fine.

In his own playing, Richardson leans more toward jazz than blues and recently has taken up the sitar. To demonstrate the sound of his Gibson L5 jazz guitar, he plays "Stompin' at the Savoy."

He played saxophone and bassoon in college and graduate school at San Jose State while gigging with Top 40 bands six nights a week.

Southeast hired him to teach classical guitar in 1978. But Richardson says most of his students want to play jazz or blues when they graduate.

Many are in college to get a backup degree in case the professional career doesn't work out. Richardson did the same.

"I was happy to get that degree."

He requires his students to practice 1 1/2 hours a day or more. "If they don't do it they're out," Richardson says.

Richardson chose King for his dissertation in ethnomusicology -- the study of a region's music and its socio-cultural implications -- primarily because the bluesman is from Northern Mississippi, not far from Memphis State.

The interview with King took six months to arrange. With PBS also doing interviews and Kris Kristofferson hanging around, the conversation originally was to have lasted only 30 minutes but they ended up talking for an hour and 45 minutes.

In his analysis of the guitarist's playing, Richardson transcribed 20 of King's songs from records. By themselves, these are invaluable to anyone who wants to learn to play guitar the way B.B. King does, he says.

And that would be some feat. "He is one of the greatest blues guitarists to ever come around." Richardson says.

"...He influenced Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton and Mike Bloomfield before he was even popular."