The Thrill is Gone

Put on the news this morning shortly after I got up, and the news crawl at the bottom of the tv screen had some sad news- BB King had died.  This was not a shock- he's old, and has been sick for a while, entering hospice care recently.  It deserves mention here, because blues music and my art have been linked for a long time.  I officially became an art major in college right around the time that I was training to be a radio disc jockey with plans to host a blues music show.  No real relation between the two except that both became part of my life around the same time.  Sometimes I used the music as inspiration and subject in prints.  Above is an etching I did in the spring of my junior year, which served as both a class project and became a poster for my show.  My print professor that semester was a bigger fan of the radio show than my prints, but I was still doing etching back then, not yet tried my first woodcut.

Following my first degree, I moved back to New Jersey and started working on my second degree at Montclair State.  In those years I had the habit of attending an annual blues festival in Philadelphia, in a large open air space right on the river.  Philly doesn't have a major blues tradition, but this festival was able to draw a lot of big names, both legends and up and coming musicians.  Saw John Lee Hooker there, Clarence Gatemouth Brown, Taj Mahal, Buddy Guy, Buckwheat Zydeco, a whole bunch of Alligator Records artists, like Lonnie Brooks, and Lil' Ed.  One of my favorites of all the times I went was an acoustic set from Cephas and Wiggins, a Piedmont style duo.  We all just sat on the brick paved ground around the stage.  I was a fan from an album of theirs I played regularly on my show, but the live performance had an extra kick to it.  The photo I took above went on to inspire two prints.

I used the image of guitarist John Cephas in the above multi color experimental image from 1991, and more recently below as a multi block demo piece for a linoleum workshop I was teaching in the Studio a few years ago.

BB King was probably the biggest name in blues music in most of my lifetime.  People who knew nothing about the music usually at least knew his name.  And he had several studio albums come out during the years I was on the air, but I never played them on my show.  Way overproduced, sound smoothed until profoundly dull, extensive credits for drum machine programmers for each song.  That ain't blues.  But King live was another story.  He and his large band spent decades performing 250 to 300 shows a year, a professional group of musicians, with BB's legendary guitar work front and center.  (live King records that came in got played, as well as occasional cuts from my copy of BB King Live at Cook County Jail)

BB King also showed up at the Philadelphia festival once, and the performance did not disappoint.  So on this sad day, I'll enjoy these shots I took down in Philly about 25 years ago, and let his signature guitar sound play through my head.