Why It Took So Long for the World to Discover B.B. King

B.B. King – the music legend who died on Thursday evening – was the blues. It’s even right there in his name: B.B. stands for “Blues Boy,” a name that King (real first name Riley) adopted after moving to Memphis to make it in music. He came to Memphis in 1948, in his early 20s.

But, though he had the emotional depth and technical skill to cut it, it took decades for his name to be in lights.

As TIME reported in a 1969 profile of the by-then-famous bluesman, King and his guitar — nicknamed Lucille — just didn’t fit in with the musical tastes of the time:

Until early in 1968, King was locked into a dreary circuit of one-nighters—sometimes more than 300 a year—in big-city ghetto clubs and back-country roadhouses and shacks. Unlike such performers as Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley, he was not flamboyant or commercial enough to cash in on the rock-‘n’-roll explosion of the 1950s. Unlike such country stylists as Son House and Mississippi John Hurt, he was not primitive enough to be taken up in the folk revival of the early 1960s.

…Then came the recent wave of white, blues-oriented rock. King’s guitar style suddenly started echoing through the playing of gifted youngsters like Mike Bloomfield, Eric Clapton and Larry Coryell, who singled him out as a touchstone of musical sincerity and grit.

Within a year, he was playing some of the nation’s most important venues — the Fillmore Auditorium, the Village Gate — and touring Europe.

“People are starting to go with me,” King told TIME back then. “I think it’s because they know I’m not kidding out there. Blues is a message, and they’re getting it.”

Read the full 1969 story, here in the TIME Vault: Blues Boy

Write to Lily Rothman at lily.rothman@time.com.