Google Celebrates Blues Legend B.B. King With Exclusive Doodle

Today’s animated Google Doodle celebrates the life and legacy of B.B. King—the iconic “King of the Blues”—commemorating what would have been his 94th birthday.

The Google doodle is currently on the Google homepage and when users click on the image, they will be taken to a video, which you can see in full below.

Born Sept. 16, 1925, on a Mississippi Delta plantation near Berclair, Miss., Riley B. King was a sharecropper’s son whose soulful, piercing guitar solos became recognizable with a single note. Often imitated but never duplicated, B.B. King’s sound became a blueprint for many of the world’s biggest rock stars who followed.

“I wish I could just do like B. B. King,” John Lennon once said. “If you would put me with B. B. King, I would feel real silly.”

Raised singing gospel music in church, King picked cotton and drove tractors before taking to playing guitar, after being taught by his preacher uncle. He performed on street corners before making his way to Memphis and landing a daily job on the air at radio station WDIA (regarded the first radio station in America entirely programmed by African Americans for African Americans) in 1948. There, station management re-christened him with the moniker “Beale Street Blues Boy,” which was later shortened to “Bee Bee” and finally “B.B.”

King began recording in 1949 and his cover of Lowell Fulson’s ‘Three O’Clock Blues’ became one of the biggest selling songs of 1952.

Named one of the greatest guitarists of all time by Rolling Stone, King won 15 Grammys and sold more than 40 million records worldwide—considered a remarkable number for a blues artist.

Known for averaging more than 300 shows a year throughout various points in his career, King was revered by artists and dignitaries far and wide. He collaborated with Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin, recorded with Eric Clapton, Elton John, U2 and shared the stage with Solange, for a great rendition of his most famous recording ‘The Thrill Is Gone’.

Inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, King’s opus Live At The Regal was declared a historic sound and permanently preserved in the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. In 1990, King was awarded the National Medal of Arts, which is the highest honour given to an artist or arts patron by the United States government.

Illustrated by Little Rock-based guest artist Steve Spencer and animated by Brooklyn-based guest artist Nayeli Lavanderos, today’s Google Doodle depicts the Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, who died in 2015 at age 89, doing what he was known for; playing guitar—the famous instrument named Lucille. which he holds in the Google Doodle. Lucille is heard on his most popular recordings, including ‘The Thrill Is Gone’ and ‘Sweet Little Angel.’

“When I sing, I play in my mind,” King once said. “The minute I stop singing orally, I start to sing by playing Lucille.”

In the early 1980s, King donated about 8,000 recordings to the University of Mississippi and also supported the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola, Miss., a $10 million, 18,000-square-foot structure, built around the cotton gin where King once worked.

“I want to be able to share with the world the blues as I know it—that kind of music—and talk about the Delta and Mississippi as a whole,” he said in 2005, reported the Associated Press.

“B.B. King…became the ambassador who brought his all-American music to his country and the world,” Barack Obama wrote on Facebook upon King’s passing in May 2015. “No one worked harder than B.B. No one inspired more up-and-coming artists. No one did more to spread the gospel of the blues.”

Listen to the Best of BB King On Apple Music and Spotify.

Format: UK English