Customer Reviews

His Best: Electric B.B. King

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I hate to give a B.B. King CD any less than five stars, but not every song on this CD is great. I did not like track number 3, The B.B. Jones, at all. It's some cheesy dance tune, from a movie soundtrack. It seems like a song that B.B. was required to perform. His heart is not in it at all. Having said that, the rest of the CD is really good. Several King classics are here like Don't Answer The Door, Paying The Cost To Be The Boss and Sweet Sixteen. There's even a nice instrumental which showcases B.B.'s guitar nicely. Overall, I think there are much better B.B. King collections out there than this one, but it still has some really good stuff (Don't Answer The Door is awesome!) Get Live At The Regal or Live In Cook County Jail before this.

Written off in 1965, blues was given new breath thanks to its rock and roll followers-Cream, Rolling Stones-from over under the union jack, and by 1968, the music had a real boom on. Even the bluesman agree the British Invasaion helped them get their infanately deserved credit.

For eletric times, electric blues is perfect, and you can't get much more perfect than this set by BB King.

By this time, bluesmen had acess to much better backing bands and recording equipment, which was imrpoving every few months. But King's seacret weapon here is Quincy Jones.

Quincy was a jazz dude, but knew how to catch the essence of the blues better than anybody. To this he added a polish and the best musicans around.

This shows in spades on this album. This is basicaly 12-bar material, but with the horns and funky rhythms, has an elegance 1950s Chicago blues was not aiming for. Just the rhythm section alone gives this music that late-60s funk feel that many have seem to forgotten about.

If you want to start with the blues, you can't go wrong with this classic.