If you really want to know something about B.B. King, consider this: He saw a boy lynched when he was a teenager.

He talks about it in a 2013 interview with Tavis Smiley. He recalls that the victim, a few years younger than himself, was dragged by a group of white men right past where King stood. The crime was apparently some kind of unsanctioned interaction with a white woman. King says that this frightened him and made him think "as it had happened to that guy, it could happen to me." Which, of course, is the point of lynchings. A brutality committed upon one body meant to regulate the behavior of all bodies.

I’ve wondered how much King thought about this when, two decades later, he was being introduced to all-white audiences for the first time as the opening act on the Rolling Stones 1969 U.S. tour.

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Like Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, and others, King’s "discovery" by white musicians is frequently subsumed into the narrative of "roots music" as an act of anthropological providence. We imagine him sitting on a crate in front of a dusty country store playing a guitar made from a cereal box and twine when an intrepid explorer stumbled upon him and recognized his primitive brilliance. But this is very far from the case. First of all, he was primarily distinguished from other musicians of the time by his extraordinary guitar work, a style that is now so ubiquitous that, like most blues, it comes across to modern ears as a trite cliche, something your dad would be into, everything we now hate about guitar rock. Yet in the 1950s he was the man who was inventing this. Aretha Franklin is rumored to have defined soul as "the ability to make other people feel what you’re feeling," and King had a way of isolating notes, bending his strings, vibrating tones with his fingers, alternately rushing and drawing out distinct phrases that made people feel exactly what he was feeling without him ever having to say it. Every musician wants that. B.B King was that.

But there’s another, perhaps more important, reason King’s work was picked up on by British kids nearly two decades after he played his first guitar.

His résumé.

In 1939, he was picking cotton for $1.50 per day. In 1941, he made his first appearance on the radio. In 1946, he made his first 45 rpm record and was paid two cents per side, 4 cents in total. By 1949 he was signed to a Los Angeles based label by Sam Phillips, who would go on to make a career of recording black music (though mostly sung by Elvis). By 1956 he was booking 342 concerts per year and owned his own record label. In 1962, he signed with ABC, which became MCA, which became Geffen. And by 1964, he had leveraged this robust marketing and distribution network to turn his recording Live at the Regal into an industry classic. He then began working with legendary manager Sid Siedenberg who had the connections to push King into the emerging blues rock scene. So by the time the Rolling Stones "discovered" him, he had been playing, recording, touring, traveling, and making incredibly accurate professional moves for two decades. He didn’t luck into fame. Like all people who grew up on hard labor, he had an exceptional work ethic and a knack for knowing exactly when to be confident and when to be just gentle enough that his career could continue. B.B. King was a masterful businessman who took very little, which is what most Black people had in those decades, and sculpted it into a great deal. In order for him to be "discovered" he had to still be there in the first place. Given the time and place of his life, this, alone, is an act of profound business capability.