ABOUT THE COLUMNIST
Gracie Bonds Staples is an award-winning journalist who has been writing for daily newspapers since 1979, when she graduated from the University of Southern Mississippi. She joined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2000 after stints at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Sacramento Bee, Raleigh Times and two Mississippi dailies. Staples was recently promoted to Senior Features Enterprise Writer. Look for her columns Thursdays and Saturdays in Living and alternating Sundays in Metro.
Handel’s Hallelujah! chorus, according to legend, is the piece that Handel composed in a single setting one night. He then exclaimed that he had seen heaven opening.
That's the image I got the other day reading an email about the demise of B.B. King and his music. Not the blues, mind you, but the gospel.
King, who died May 14 at age 89, was considered by many to be the world's greatest blues singer and came to be known as "King of the Blues."
“God wanted the baddest gospel band and the baddest guitar player in the land in Heaven,” Dr. L. Ray Matthews wrote. “Heaven has got to be rocking day and night.”
That was probably true even before Riley B. King arrived last week but Matthews' reasoning was more personal than prophetic.
His father, the Rev. John Matthews, and uncle, O.L. Matthews, were members of the Famous St. John’s Gospel Singers, the same quartet that King sang with before abandoning gospel for the blues. King wanted the gospel group to travel to Memphis with him in search of fortune and fame; however, they were reluctant to leave the Mississippi Delta.
John Matthews died in 1982 and O.L. in 2002. King was the band’s last surviving member.
By the time, Dr. L. Ray Matthews was born in 1963, King had not just abandoned the gospel, he’d long given up any dreams of the St. John’s singers ever becoming famous.
“I didn’t start out to be a blues singer,” King was quoted as saying once. “I wanted to be a gospel singer. In fact, it was my pastor that was the first person I heard play an electric guitar, and I wanted to be like him.”
In the late 1940s, King left the Mississippi Delta and headed to Memphis, a blues hot spot, to be with his cousin and fellow blues man Bukka White, to hone a new craft.
He got his first big break when he performed live on KWEM, a radio station in West Memphis. The debut led to a job as a deejay with WDIA, one of the nation’s first all-black radio stations. King’s show became so popular that he became known as the “Beale Street Blues Boy.” “Blues Boy” was eventually shortened to “B.B.”
In 1949, King made his first recording for Bullet Records. The recording solidified his status in the Memphis area and two years later he recorded his first blues hit, “Three O’Clock Blues.”
In 1969, he recorded his signature song, “The Thrill Is Gone.” The recording won him a Grammy and hit No. 15 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1970.
By then, Matthew’s head and heart was brimming with stories of King during his time in Indianola, MS with the St. John’s singers. There was little mention of the blues. The gospel, though, was another story. The gospel was, well, king.
“He was a better gospel singer than blues singer,” said Matthews, a trauma surgeon and director of the surgical critical care unit at Grady Memorial Hospital.
But King couldn’t be bothered by perceived slights in the church of his day. Even then, he and the Famous St. John’s Gospel Singers were considered musical pioneers, integrating radio in Mississippi and the guitar in church music, which was widely unaccepted in the 1940’s. Some even considered it an abomination.
“Some of their engagements were even cancelled until people in the Mississippi Delta noticed that the churches that they did play were jammed pack,” Matthews said. “Needless to say, guitars became a regular in church music and B. B. King went on to become world famous.”
When the king of blues returned home for the annual B.B. King Homecoming or anywhere else for the matter, Matthews and his family visited King often.
The surgeon said he last spoke to King here in Atlanta in August 2013, when they reconnected back stage at a concert.
“He was always such a nice guy,” Matthews said. “My parents talked about him all the time.”
After a public viewing and a private service for family members in Las Vegas, King is scheduled to be buried May 30 on the grounds of the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola.
Matthews will try to attend. Either way, he’ll be thinking about the stirring Hallelujah reunion that’s bound to be taking place in the sky.
I just hope the “king” got to take Lucille, his trademark cherry-red Gibson ES-335, with him.
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