You wouldn’t know it from reading this blog, but there are other musicians I like besides Bob Dylan - one of them being the late, great B.B. King. Recently, I was happy and surprised to learn, thanks to an article by Tony Attwood on the Untold Dylan blog, that King had recorded a Bob Dylan song: a Shot of Love-era outtake called ‘Fur Slippers’, which King recorded for the soundtrack to the 1999 CBS miniseries Shake, Rattle & Roll: An American Love Story.
The Dylan version of this song (co-written by Bob's Gospel-era bassist Tim Drummond) has never been released (Edit: it has now! - 19/09/21), although it was apparently shortlisted for inclusion on The Bootleg Series Vols. 1-3 before ultimately being left aside. I haven’t managed to track down any mention of how ‘Fur Slippers’ found its way to B.B., but the ‘90s was a decade when Dylan was happy to gift unreleased songs to other performers, including Willie Nelson, The Band, and Sheryl Crowe. Perhaps he thought ‘Fur Slippers’ would be a good fit for King and sent it his way.
Hearing two of my favourite performers cross over in this fashion reminded me that, besides ‘Fur Slippers’, B.B. King had something else in common with Bob Dylan: a Never Ending Tour....
Bob Dylan has spent an extraordinary amount of time on the road over the last three decades, but the touring life of B.B. King makes Dylan’s NET schedule seem positively conservative by comparison. Hitting the road with his band in the early-to mid-’50s (sources differ on the exact year), King toured continuously until his final performance at Chicago’s House of Blues on 3rd October 2014. And when I say continuously, I mean continuously; in all of that time, B.B. never seems to have taken a single year off. In his prime, he also doesn’t appear to have broken his tours down into ‘legs’ as most performers do. Charles Sawyer’s authorised biography The Arrival of B.B. King, published in 1980, describes King as having taken a total of just two months' vacation over the preceding thirty years, with B.B. choosing instead to simply grab a few days off here and there to return to his home in Las Vegas.
Sawyer also reports that, at the time the book was published, King was playing an annual average of 300 shows a year, and in 1956 had performed a staggering 342 one-night engagements. Even in his final years in the early 2010s, King was still performing around 100 shows a year.
As has been the case with Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, B.B. King’s touring band evolved significantly over the years. Originally (according to Sawyer) a sprawling thirteen-piece group featuring a large horn section, by 1957 King had scaled the band down to a smaller unit led by drummer Sonny Freeman, who would remain with B.B. as his bandleader for the next eighteen years. During Freeman’s tenure, the band acquired the unofficial moniker of ‘Sonny Freeman & The Unusuals’; it was various configurations of this group that appeared on the classic live albums Live at the Regal (1965), Blues is King (1967), Live at Cook County Jail (1971), and Live in Japan (Japan-only release 1971, wider release 1999). Arguably the greatest tragedy of King’s recording career is that he rarely used his touring band in the studio, although the albums Blues on the Bayou (1998), Makin’ Love is Good For You (2000) and A Christmas Celebration of Hope (2001) did feature his excellent latter-day backing group.
Despite Dylan and King's respective Never Ending Tours criss-crossing the globe simultaneously for years, I can only find one instance of their paths intersecting, when King opened for Dylan in Adelaide, Australia on 19th April 2011 (they had previously appeared on the same bill at the inaugural Farm Aid event in 1985, three years before Dylan began his NET). Although they didn’t play together, there’s a lovely photo of the two meeting backstage that captures the mutual admiration that must have existed between these two 'road warriors'.
Bob Dylan has spent an extraordinary amount of time on the road over the last three decades, but the touring life of B.B. King makes Dylan’s NET schedule seem positively conservative by comparison. Hitting the road with his band in the early-to mid-’50s (sources differ on the exact year), King toured continuously until his final performance at Chicago’s House of Blues on 3rd October 2014. And when I say continuously, I mean continuously; in all of that time, B.B. never seems to have taken a single year off. In his prime, he also doesn’t appear to have broken his tours down into ‘legs’ as most performers do. Charles Sawyer’s authorised biography The Arrival of B.B. King, published in 1980, describes King as having taken a total of just two months' vacation over the preceding thirty years, with B.B. choosing instead to simply grab a few days off here and there to return to his home in Las Vegas.
Sawyer also reports that, at the time the book was published, King was playing an annual average of 300 shows a year, and in 1956 had performed a staggering 342 one-night engagements. Even in his final years in the early 2010s, King was still performing around 100 shows a year.
As has been the case with Dylan’s Never Ending Tour, B.B. King’s touring band evolved significantly over the years. Originally (according to Sawyer) a sprawling thirteen-piece group featuring a large horn section, by 1957 King had scaled the band down to a smaller unit led by drummer Sonny Freeman, who would remain with B.B. as his bandleader for the next eighteen years. During Freeman’s tenure, the band acquired the unofficial moniker of ‘Sonny Freeman & The Unusuals’; it was various configurations of this group that appeared on the classic live albums Live at the Regal (1965), Blues is King (1967), Live at Cook County Jail (1971), and Live in Japan (Japan-only release 1971, wider release 1999). Arguably the greatest tragedy of King’s recording career is that he rarely used his touring band in the studio, although the albums Blues on the Bayou (1998), Makin’ Love is Good For You (2000) and A Christmas Celebration of Hope (2001) did feature his excellent latter-day backing group.
Despite Dylan and King's respective Never Ending Tours criss-crossing the globe simultaneously for years, I can only find one instance of their paths intersecting, when King opened for Dylan in Adelaide, Australia on 19th April 2011 (they had previously appeared on the same bill at the inaugural Farm Aid event in 1985, three years before Dylan began his NET). Although they didn’t play together, there’s a lovely photo of the two meeting backstage that captures the mutual admiration that must have existed between these two 'road warriors'.
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Possibly the most impressive aspect of B.B King's six-decade-long touring career is that it's practically impossible to find footage of him coasting or performing badly. Even when age began to slow him down in his 70s and 80s, I have no doubt that he was giving it everything he had, every night, until he could do it no more. Here are a few videos of the King of the Blues in action:
