BB King and Elvis Presley grew up in the same geography. Not the same neighborhood, not the same world in many of the ways that mattered in the American South in the 1940s and 1950s, but the same streets, the same city, the same musical air, the specific atmosphere of Memphis, Tennessee, in the years when the music that would reshape the world was being assembled in clubs and churches and living rooms by people who were mostly poor and mostly black and almost entirely unseleelebrated.
BB King was 25 years old in 1950 when he arrived in Memphis. He had come from the Mississippi Delta. He had been playing guitar since his teens. He had a style that was his own, the specific VBO, the way he made his guitar sing in a register that human voices reach for but rarely touch. He had a name, Beiel Street Blues Boy, later shortened to BB.
Elvis Presley was 15 years old in 1950. He was living in Memphis with his parents in public housing. He was learning music the way he learned everything by absorbing it completely without filter from every source available. The sources available in Memphis in 1950 included the music coming out of Beiel Street, the blues, the gospel, the early rhythm and blues that was beginning to emerge from the intersection of those traditions, the music that BB King was helping to make.
They were aware of each other. This is documented. BB King gave multiple interviews over his long career in which he described seeing young Elvis around Memphis, described conversations, described the specific quality of attention that Elvis brought to any musical performance he witnessed. He didn’t just listen, BB King said in one interview, “He absorbed.
You could see it happening.” Elvis described his own debt to the blues, to the music he had grown up hearing, to the artists who had created the language he then translated for a white audience that had never been exposed to it in interviews throughout his career. He mentioned BB King specifically more than once with the specific knowledgeable reverence of someone who understood exactly what he had taken and from whom.
They never recorded together. This fact has remained for music historians one of the most consequential missed moments in the history of American popular music. Two men, the same city, the same formative musical world, one who had created the source material, one who had transformed it. never in the same studio at the same time.
BB King was asked about this, asked directly, specifically why it had never happened in an interview in the late 1990s. He was quiet for a while. You want the honest answer, he said. The interviewer said yes. BB King thought for a moment. The honest answer, he said, is that the music business in the 1950s and 1960s had a very clear idea of what went where.
White music went there. Black music went there. And the people who decided where things went were not interested in conversations that crossed those lines. He paused. Elvis crossed them, BB said, “Every day, just by being what he was, by playing our music the way he played it, by insisting that it was music, but putting the two of us in a room together, that was a different kind of crossing, and the people who controlled the studios didn’t want to cross that one.
He was quiet for a moment. I’m not saying Elvis agreed with that, BB said. I’m not saying he wanted it that way, but that’s what it was. BB King described in the same interview a night in the early 1970s. Elvis was in Las Vegas. BB was in Las Vegas. Their engagements over overlapped by three days. Elvis sent a message through his road manager. He wanted to come to BB’s show.
Not publicly, privately. He would come early before the doors opened and watched the sound check. BB said yes. Elvis came. He sat in a chair in the empty showroom. He watched BB King run through three songs at soundcheck. When it was over, Elvis walked to the stage. BBE came down to meet him.
BBE described what happened next as one of the most specific conversations of his professional life. Elvis talked about the music. Not generally, specifically. He described what he had just heard in technical terms. The vibrto on a specific note, the way BB had bent a string in the third bar of the second song, the decision to rest at a particular moment.
He had been listening the way BB had described him listening 20 years earlier, absorbing. You could have taught me, BB said. Elvis was quiet for a moment. You taught me already, Elvis said 15 years ago on Beiel Street. I just didn’t introduce myself. BB King laughed. We played together that afternoon, BB said in the interview.
In an empty showroom, just the two of us and a couple of our guys. And I thought, “This is what it should have sounded like. This is what it would have sounded like if anyone had let it happen. No recording was made. There was no equipment setup. It was not planned. It was an afternoon in an empty room in Las Vegas.
Two men and their instruments and the music they had been circling each other around for 20 years. Nobody recorded it. Nobody has it. BB King described it in the interview as lasting about an hour. They played blues. They played gospel. They played things that didn’t have names. He could play. BB said, “People forget that.
They think of the voice, but he could play.” And when he played, it was honest. He wasn’t pretending. He wasn’t performing. He was just playing. BB King said that at the end of the hour, Elvis put his guitar down and sat quietly for a moment. This should have happened a long time ago, Elvis said. BB nodded. It happened now, BB said.
Elvis nodded. “That’ll have to be enough,” he said. BB King outlived Elvis by 37 years. He died in 2015 at the age of 89. He gave hundreds of interviews in those 37 years. He was asked about Elvis in many of them. He was consistent, always. Elvis loved the music. BB said he didn’t just take it. He loved it.
And the music knew the difference. The afternoon session in Las Vegas has no recording. It exists only in BB King’s account in the interview in the memory of a few people who were in the room. an hour of music in an empty showroom that the industry that controlled both of them had spent 20 years preventing. And that happened anyway in a chair in the afternoon with no cameras.
The way the most important things always happen when nobody’s looking. In the room where it’s just the music and the people who love
