B.B. King

CTL-E-5812 · Person · musician · 1925–2015

VERIFIED evidence grade — build store (JSON graph)

Combined Graph record U-07071 · provenance: build store (JSON graph), record CTL-E-5812.

B.B. King, born Riley B. King on 16 September 1925 near Itta Bena, Mississippi, was an American blues guitarist and singer raised in the Mississippi Delta, where gospel singing in church was his earliest musical influence. He developed a lyrical single-string guitar style with a distinctive vibrato, shaped by T-Bone Walker, Delta blues players including his cousin Bukka White, and jazz guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian. Working as a disc jockey at WDIA in Memphis, he took the name "B.B.," short for "Blues Boy." His 1951 hit recording of "Three O'Clock Blues" began a lifetime of near-continuous touring — often 300 or more one-night stands a year. In 1964, in Chicago, he recorded the seminal live album Live at the Regal at the Regal Theater on the city's South Side. His 1969 recording "The Thrill Is Gone" won the first of his 15 Grammy Awards, and the guitar he named Lucille became one of the most famous instruments in American music. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 1987. King died on 14 May 2015 in Las Vegas, Nevada, at age 89.

The record

• Also known as: Riley B. King, BB King

Notes

Staged 2026-10-16 under CTL-GOV-006 (Census Intake Wave 2 — 747 Program, Wave 8; 40-record packet). Gate A (2026-10-16): no B.B. King entity in the live graph at 3,523 entities (exact / normalized / alias + token containment); ID CTL-E-5812 free. Supply: 747 Supply Ledger, Tier 3 — Famous Birthdays ABSENT census, readiness rank 537 (Guitarists list). The census supplied the NAME ONLY; no fact in this record is sourced to it (CTL-GOV-004). SCOPE GATE: PASS — Black American recording figure. Vital status: DECEASED — 14 May 2015, Las Vegas, Nevada, age 89 (Britannica). Tribute treatment.. NAME FORM: the census supplied "BB King"; the record is staged under the standard form "B.B. King," with the census form carried in aliases. NO CHESS EDGE: King recorded for RPM, ABC and other labels, not Chess Records, so no recorded_for edge to Chess Records (CTL-E-0165) is staged. STATISTICS (sourced, dated): 15 Grammy Awards across his career, the first for "The Thrill Is Gone" (1969); Live at the Regal recorded at Chicago's Regal Theater in 1964; Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee 1987 — Britannica / Wikipedia, accessed 2026-10-16. MEDIA: photo HELD (candidate: Library of Congress holdings and Wikimedia Commons portraiture of King; a CTL-created graphic is the cleared alternative; no file page was read at file-page level in this pass, so no image is cleared — CTL-PHOTO-001; a CTL-created graphic is the standing alternative); chart FILLED (charts/chart-ctl-e-5812-b-b-king.svg); video HELD (the Shorts Link Map catalog was checked by name and variants — no matching-entity CTL Short exists for this subject); audio HELD (no CTL-owned or rights-cleared matching-entity audio; the subject's recordings are third-party copyrighted material). MEDIA LAYER (staged 2026-10-16; full per-asset PHOTO-001 records + embed specs in the packet's staged JSON, Drive packet folder): map = N/A (Person records carry no map slot under the media-layer rule; maps attach to places and institutions.) | visual_assets = HELD: | chart = FILLED (CTL-created SVG (black / deep red / gold) built only from this record's sourced facts) | video = HELD (No matching-entity CTL Short in the Shorts Link Map catalog (checked by name and variants), and no official/em) | audio = HELD (No CTL-owned or rights-cleared matching-entity audio at staging; the subject's own recordings are third-party )

Sources

• Encyclopaedia Britannica, "B.B. King" — born 16 September 1925 near Itta Bena, Mississippi; died 14 May 2015, Las Vegas, Nevada; Delta upbringing and gospel influence; WDIA disc jockey where he acquired the name "B.B."; "Three O'Clock Blues" hit 1951; Live at the Regal recorded in Chicago in 1964; "The Thrill Is Gone" won the first of 15 Grammy Awards — https://www.britannica.com/biography/B-B-King (primary source · build store)
• Wikipedia, "B. B. King" — born Riley B. King; Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction 1987; performed on average more than 200 concerts a year into his seventies — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._B._King (build store)

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Record CTL-E-5812 · Combined Graph record U-07071 · CultureTechLens Knowledge Graph · 2 sources.
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Researched and maintained by the CultureTechLens research program · CultureTechLens Combined Graph, Release 2026-11-04. Corrections are public: the corrections log.

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