Blues Boy : the life and music of B.B. King /

B.B. King, the most important artist in modern blues history, developed a style of playing and singing the blues that incorporates elements of both jazz and popular. He brought the blues out of the black ghettos to make the genre not only acceptable to but demanded by white Americans and audiences around the world. Unfortunately, King's biographers--first Charles Sawyer (The Arrival of B.B. King: The Authorized Biography, CH, Mar'81) and now Danchin, a Frenchman who specializes in African American culture--have fallen short. Both books tell essentially the same story, though Sawyer includes more social and cultural background, and Danchin provides an excellent discussion of musical style and development in his last chapter. Danchin begins by calling King his "hero," and though well written the book is paean to King lacking the objectivity and completeness of good biography. Apart from two interviews with King and two with other blues artists, Danchin cites only secondary sources. B.B. King's personable as-told-to autobiography (Blues All around Me, written with David Ritz, 1996) is less complete and open to question. Still, these books will have to suffice in libraries until someone produces a complete and probing account of B.B. King's life and music. C. M. Weisenberg University of California, Los Angeles