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Gibson Custom BB King Lucille
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In 1949, the king of blues B.B. King was playing a small club in Arkansas when a fight broke, and the building caught fire. B.B. came out, realizing he had forgotten his guitar inside, and rushed back in to rescue it at the risk of his life. Once outside, he nicknamed that guitar Lucille, after the woman for whom the fight had started, and swore never to do something that dangerous again.
Since then, every single one of B.B. King’s guitar became a Lucille, and starting in 1980 the name became a model name that has been part of the Gibson catalogue ever since. It is just as lovely as a good ES-355 should be: a luxury version of the Kalamazoo semi-hollow complete with a Varitone circuit, stereo outputs and of course the level of decoration including the Custom fretboard inlays and the gold hardware. To make it perfectly fit for the king, Gibson has taken the f-holes away. The guitar remains semi-hollow but it never goes into uncontrollable feedback. The bridge is different too, and it features fine tuners, small wheels that are usually featured on Floyd Rose-equipped guitars or violins that allow to tune more precisely and more discreetly than with the tuners. B.B. King had a very demanding ear, so he made good use of that option. The model has finally outlived its creator and it now represents a fitting tribute to the one who could make a Gibson sing like nobody.
B.B. King
(1925 - 2015)
Main guitar: Gibson Lucille
Compulsory listening: Hummingbird
B.B. King is the most important electric blues guitar player ever. As an early convert to the joy of the electricity, he has invented a whole new way of playing by mixing his early Delta Blues roots to the jump blues of T-Bone Walker. He took the bending of the strings to a whole new level, and made a dramatically important discovery: with a band playing in the background, the guitar didn’t need to fill up as much space, and could be used as the instrumental equivalent of the human voice. With only a few sustained notes, B.B. King could tell much more than most guitarist would ever manage to say with a whole album. His vibrato was out of this world, and it was the perfect complement to his warm and sultry singing voice. And vice-versa.
Riley B. King was born on a plantation in Mississippi, but he moved to Memphis to try and make a living as a musician. He started off as a DJ, and eventually became a R&B sensation in the fifties. During the sixties, he was crowned as the main influence behind players like Clapton and Hendrix, and he mixed his own music with jazz and pop influences for a series of crossover albums that performed really well: Lucille (1968, named after his favorite guitar), Completely Well (1969) and Indianola Mississippi Seeds (1970).
In 1988, U2 invited him to perform on a song off the Rattle and Hum album, which reminded everyone of how great B.B. was. Never one to rest on his laurels, King was a very hard-working bluesman who would perform more than a hundred shows every year, a man who has relentlessly toured the world until the end.
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