B.B. King, Sept. 16, 1925-May14, 2015

I remember in my callow youth how very old I reckoned B.B. King to be, some lingering relic of a long-past era, when I saw him play Winterland in December of 1967. "Caldonia, Caldonia," he sang, "what makes you big head so hard?" Little did I know at the time that this was the first song ever described as "rock 'n roll" in print when recorded by Erskine Hawkins back in the 1940's, and that B. B. King had been a disc jockey back then, and probably played the record on the air, since it was a pretty big hit, and probably knew it had been called "rock 'n roll" at the time, too. And there he was in front of a crowd of the white student/hippie sort that Winterland attracted, reading the origins of rock 'n roll back to us before getting on with the regular order of business of the blues.