📍Indianola, MS 38751, USA
1943 – 1946“I was born Riley B. King in September 1925 on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, in the Mississippi Delta, the son of sharecroppers Albert and Nora Ella King. When I was four my mother left my father, and I was raised mostly by my grandmother, Elnora Farr, in Kilmichael, in the hills, where I sang gospel in the choir of the Elkhorn Baptist Church. The preacher there played a guitar in church and taught me my first three chords, and the man I worked for bought me my first guitar for fifteen dollars. After my grandmother passed, I worked as a sharecropper on my own for a while, and as a teenager I moved to Indianola, in the heart of the Delta, which I always called my hometown. I drove a tractor on a plantation and worked at a cotton gin, and on Saturdays I played my guitar for tips on the corner of Church and Second Streets, where folks would ask for gospel songs and pay me more for the blues. I listened to everything on the radio, from T-Bone Walker to Django Reinhardt, and dreamed of something bigger than the cotton fields. During the war, they let me out of the army because driving a tractor was essential work. In 1946 I hitchhiked to Memphis to find my cousin, Bukka White, and I became a disc jockey on WDIA, where they called me the Beale Street Blues Boy, then B.B. With my guitar, Lucille, I played more than fifteen thousand concerts around the world. Indianola welcomed me home every year with a homecoming concert, and the B.B. King Museum, built around the cotton gin where I worked as a young man, opened there in 2008 with me on hand.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today