Swear to Tell the Truthfor Tuesday, May 26th, (1:00-2:30 pm)
On this week’s program, we present a tribute to B.B. King who died two weeks ago Wednesday. We’ll be mostly following a playlist we developed for a program we presented last July. The show showcased a few of B’s most important influences and then followed the course of his early career on records.
The description we gave for that earlier program explains the approach we took last July:
“Considering his place in blues history, we’ve played relatively little B.B. King over 139 shows. A listener suggested we put a B.B. King feature or special on the air and we thought it was high time that we did that. Whenever we concentrate our attention on a particular artist or theme we find ourselves going back to music we’ve overlooked, forgotten or misremembered and our research turns up information we’d forgotten or never knew about in the first place. In the case of B.B. King, we read the man’s autobiography for the first time, a book co-authored with David Ritz. In the book, King recalls the criticism he and Bobby Bland encountered from new white blues fans during the so-called blues revival. His music and Bland’s was condemned as commercial and a sell-out by people whose point of entry to blues was the folk movement. In time, the folk purism dissipated and British commentators, as well as some British musicians, had a lot to do with the inevitable reassessment of B.’s music and his place in the blues tradition. Still, King recalled the period before that happened as a time when his music was being rejected by both its traditional audience, now engaged by soul music, and the new audience who saw it as a betrayal of a tradition they barely knew about. Today, B.B. King enjoys almost universal and largely uncritical celebration. His dedication to studying his craft and improving his technique appear to have been lifelong commitments, as attested to by former members of his bands. As a DJ and a student of his own tradition he has developed a broad awareness of blues before and after B.B. King and not just blues. B’s musical interest is pretty wide-ranging.
Our feature deals with the period of greatness when B.B. King and his audience were in the same place and B. was extending the horizon of blues and taking the audience with him.”
On the Show:
B.B. King – Lonnie Johnson – Charlie Christian – Roy Brown
Listen to the program at FM 93.3 in Hamilton or on CFMU online at cfmu.msu.mcmaster.ca. The program will be available to stream or as a podcast until Jun 23rd.
Contact Us
To reach us with comments or queries, write us at sweartotellthetruth@gmail.com.
You can also follow the program at sweartotellthetruth@nosignifying on Twitter.
Next week (June 2nd)
Magazine show – no special theme
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