Paying Tribute to a Blues Giant
Andrea Morales for The New York Times
INDIANOLA, Miss. — B.B. King, the man some called the ambassador of the blues, came home this week for the last time.
After audiences with presidents and a pope, after concerts at the Royal Albert Hall and the Cook County Jail, after TV commercials for Toyota and Burger King, after Kennedy Center honors and 15 Grammys, after living through — and belting out — tales of love, heartbreak and triumph, Mr. King returned to this small, swampy city where he once picked cotton and busked for dollars on a rowdy, juke-lined downtown street.
On Friday morning, his body lay in a bronze coffin, dressed in a purple satin shirt and a floral-print tuxedo jacket, flanked by a pair of black Gibson guitars and two Mississippi Highway Patrol officers who stood heads cast downward.
At 6 a.m., fans, acquaintances and fellow musicians began lining up at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, the slick $15 million monument to his story, a kind of blues fable. At 10 a.m., they began filing past the man who had lived it.
"B.B.'s been in my life, in my father's life, in my mother's life," said McClinton Samuels, 72, a retired corrections officer from New Orleans. "He was one of the best I've ever heard."
Mr. King, one of the most distinctive guitar players in the history of his idiom, died May 14 at age 89 in Las Vegas, where he had lived for many years. He was born in a cabin in the tiny town of Berclair, Miss. But he had long embraced Indianola, a city of 10,000 about 18 miles from his birthplace, as a kind of spiritual hometown, one he returned to year after year to play concerts, commune with old friends and subtly inspire — or so he hoped — a spirit of racial reconciliation in a place long haunted by the cruelties of racial segregation.
"He didn't go into a lot of detail here about his treatment by white folks," said Carver A. Randle, 73, an African-American lawyer who represented Mr. King locally. "He wanted to heal people through his music. He wanted the people of his hometown to get together. And he wanted to be a part of that."
After a viewing in Las Vegas on May 22, Mr. King's body was taken to Memphis, the big city from which he had started his globe-spanning career. On Wednesday, a jazz funeral processional played its way down Beale Street. Then Mr. King's hearse, escorted by the police, made its way south on Route 61, through the heart of the Mississippi Delta, where adults and children, black and white, lined the road in tribute.
Mr. King is to be buried here Saturday after services at Bell Grove Missionary Baptist Church, which is on a road that bears his name. The farewell comes amid notes of drama, suspicion and pain: Two of Mr. King's daughters, Karen Williams and Patty King, have accused a manager, LaVerne Toney, and a personal assistant, Myron Johnson, of having a hand in Mr. King's death.
"I believe my father was poisoned and that he was administered foreign substances," the sisters said in affidavits provided to The Associated Press.
In Indianola, Ms. Toney said she "certainly" denied the claims. "All of them are false, and the people making them know they are false," she said.
The lawyer for Mr. King's estate has also denied the claims. John Fudenberg, the coroner in Clark County, Nev., said that no evidence of foul play was found during an autopsy and that the results of a more thorough investigation would be available in six to eight weeks. In a statement, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department said it was not conducting a homicide investigation.
At the visitation, the mood was both solemn and celebratory. By the time the doors opened, a racially mixed crowd of hundreds had lined up to pay their respects. Mr. King's records played through outdoor speakers. Jennifer Jones, a woman who calls herself the "Dance Queen of New Orleans," swayed along with an umbrella and a lace-covered top hat.
Eddie Dillard Sr., 71, had made the six-hour trip from Atlanta with his wife, Mary. Mr. Dillard recalled a childhood in Swainsboro, Ga., catching ecstatic snatches of Mr. King's records on late-night AM radio, despite the disapproval of his churchgoing grandmother.
"No 'frolicking,' she called it," he said. He also recalled the power of Mr. King's guitar work. "Man, he could make that thing talk."
One fan, Atsuko Shichiji, had come from Tokyo to honor a man she said she had seen in concert more than 50 times. "Mr. King's music is from the heart, and it tells the truth about the human mind," Ms. Shichiji, 48, a legal secretary, said.
After an early afternoon rainstorm, the guitarist Buddy Guy, 78, Mr. King's close friend and a fellow titan in the blues world, entered the museum, regretting that he had not been able to visit it while Mr. King was alive.
Mr. Guy said that it was an early 1950s single by Mr. King, "3 O'Clock Blues," that made him want to become a guitarist; the famous vibrato Mr. King achieved by waggling his fretting hand, he said, was "a special effect" that set him apart from every other guitarist.
"I can say one thing: His shoes will never be fulfilled," he said. "And I'm sure someone's going to come along and play like I did. But you'll never be a B.B. King."
Mr. King's final homecoming meant even more to the locals. There was a period in the 1960s and '70s when Mr. King was not often seen in town. Jim Abbott, the former editor of The Enterprise-Tocsin, the local newspaper, said that Mr. King had been stung by the fact that he and his band had not been allowed to stay in the local motel or eat at a burger joint when they passed through in the mid-1960s.
Mr. King told Mr. Abbott that story in 1977, and shortly thereafter, Mr. Abbott, who is white, and a number of progressive-minded residents set out to show Mr. King how things were changing in a town that had once been dominated by the White Citizens' Council, the infamous statewide segregationist group that was founded here in the 1950s.
A breakthrough came in 1980, Mr. Abbott said, when a white radio disc jockey orchestrated a movement to persuade Mr. King to play here. That grew into a series of yearly "homecoming" shows, which Mr. King would go on to play for decades to come. Many here said the shows played a role in eroding some racial barriers, with blacks and whites working together to plan the events and then attending them together.
"It was fun — there wasn't no color nowhere," said Maggie Rogers, 56, a retired cafeteria manager from nearby Ruleville, Miss.
In 1983, Mr. Abbott and others planned an interracial cocktail party honoring Mr. King, an overt effort, he said, to bring blacks and whites together. The event is still recalled as a groundbreaking moment here.
The museum opened in 2008, with an exhibit tracing Mr. King's sharecropper upbringing, and the musical influences that trickled to him during his years in Indianola, roughly from 1943 to 1948. The museum is frank about the injustices African-Americans faced, but it also records moments of grace that Mr. King remembered from his childhood, including the kindness of a white farmer who employed Mr. King and treated him like family.
"B.B. used to say, 'There are bad things that people do, but there are no bad people,'" recalled Charles Sawyer, who wrote a biography of Mr. King that was published in 1980.
If Mr. King's final visit created a carnival atmosphere — one candidate for local office was distributing fliers downtown boasting of her friendship with him — it was also a moment, for some, to mourn. R.O. Williams, a former state trooper who had provided security for Mr. King when he returned to Mississippi, was on the job again Friday, standing at attention as the crowds said goodbye.
The day before, he had choked with tears in describing his last detail. "It's going to be different, because you can't talk to your friend," he said. "He went out, he played, he loved, he lived. And now he's back to rest."
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