B. B. King

The crowds treat me like my last name. When I go onstage people usually stand up, I never ask them to, but they do. They stand up and they don’t know how much I appreciate it.

It seems like I always had to work harder than other people. Those nights when everybody else is asleep, and you sit in your room trying to play scales. I just wonder where I was when the talent was being given out, like George Benson, Kenny Burrell, Eric Clapton… oh, there’s many more! I wouldn’t want to be like them, you understand, but I’d like to be equal, if you will.

I wanted to sustain a note like a singer. I wanted to phrase a note like a saxist. By bending the strings, by trilling my hand – and I have big fat hands – I could achieve something that approximated a vocal vibrato. I could sustain a note. I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions. By fooling with the feedback between my amplifier and instrument, I started experimenting with sounds that expressed my feelings, whether happy or sad, bouncy or bluesy. I was looking for ways to let my guitar sing.

I always liked the steel guitar. I also love the guys that play the bottleneck. But I could never do it; I never made it do what I want. So every time I would pick up the guitar, I’d shake my hand and trill it a bit. For some strange reason my ears would say to me that sounds similar to what those guys were doing. I can’t pick up the guitar now without doing it. So that’s how I got into making my sound. It was nothing pretty. Just trying to please myself. I heard that sound.

Whenever I’m in Kansas City, I think back to all the jazz-blues greats who played the blues here – like Count Basie, Charlie Parker and Jay McShann. I watched those guys jam in different places and heard a lot of things – but I couldn’t do what they did. They were too good.

I thought Eric Clapton was good. He still is. Not only is he good – he’s rock’s #1 guitarist, and he plays blues better than most of us.

And let’s be clear: It’s not enough just to limit ads for foods that aren’t healthy. It’s also going to be critical to increase marketing for foods that are healthy.

Kids instinctively know – although they will argue to the contrary – that they really are not mature enough to make good decisions on some important issues.

We can aim to create a culture, where kids ask for healthy options instead of resisting them.

The problem is when that fun stuff becomes the habit. And I think that’s what’s happened in our culture. Fast food has become the everyday meal.

It is time for parents to teach young people early on that in diversity there is beauty and there is strength.

I was shy when I was a kid, I was very shy, but now I think I’ve improved a lot. I can speak OK with the media and with the people. My English is still bad but I feel a little bit better now than before.

The streets and woods around my house were a perfect setting for fake mischief. I would spend all afternoon pretending I had run away and had to live on my own. I would bring Toll House cookies and a sweatshirt and try to make a fire. I would sneak out side my house at dusk with a pair binoculars and search the streets for murderers. I created scenarios in my head that I always managed to escape from kidnap fantasies where I would wriggle free from the ropes.

Back when we was in school in Mississippi, we had Little Black Sambo. That’s what you learned: Anytime something was not good, or anytime something was bad in some kinda way, it had to be called black. Like, you had Black Monday, Black Friday, black sheep… Of course, everything else, all the good stuff, is white. White Christmas and such.

I realized that kids everywhere go for the same stuff; and seeing as we’d done it in England, there’s no reason why we couldn’t do it in America too.

You don’t want to be with a boy who is too stupid to appreciate a smart young lady. There is no boy who is cute enough or interesting enough to stop you from getting your education.

They say that every child learns from their mother – it’s ingrained from babyhood.

I think, at a child’s birth, if a mother could ask a fairy godmother to endow it with the most useful gift, that gift would be curiosity.

Youth is such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children.

What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child.

Parents are the last people on earth who ought to have children.