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WorldBeat's Serena Yang looks at the roots of the blues
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July 23, 1999
Web posted at: 5:36 p.m. EDT (2136 GMT)

From Serena Yang
CNN WorldBeat Correspondent

MEMPHIS, Tennessee (CNN) -- In 1931, at the age of 11, John Lee Hooker moved to Memphis and began working on the now-legendary Beale Street. Fifteen years later, a young guitarist named Riley King landed in Memphis as well, and began learning the blues from his cousin.

Half a century later, B.B. King's blues club stands as a landmark on Beale Street, and both men are renowned the world over as the senior statesmen of blues guitar.

Hooker says his earliest musical influence was his stepfather, Will Moore, the one who told him to "be what I am, not just toe the line."

He had to make his own decision not to join the burgeoning blues scene in Chicago, however -- not a tough choice to make. "I didn't go to Chicago," Hooker says, "because there was too much competition there between the heavy hitters -- but (in Memphis) there was no heavy hitter there but me."

Meanwhile, King's guitar style -- he is today considered a master of the single-note solo, punctuated by his signature bravado -- was greatly influenced by jazz.

"I like jazz; I really wanted to be like Lonnie Johnson, because Lonnie Johnson was to me like the link between jazz and blues, that link between gospel and blues, you name it, he played it," he says.

And so can B.B. King. The roots of any blues-based electric guitarist, including Otis Rush, Eric Clapton and Stevie Ray Vaughn, can be traced back to him.