B. B. King

Verified Timeline

Lore & Background

Riley B. King was born on a cotton plantation in Berclair, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. He was raised by his maternal grandmother and as a teen moved to Indianola, which he called his hometown. He taught himself to play guitar, learning his first three chords from a local minister. His employer bought him his first guitar for $15. He served in the U.S. He assembled the B.B. After a fire at a show in Twist, Arkansas, he named his guitar 'Lucille' as a reminder not to fight over women or run into burning buildings.

Reader's Guide

B. B. King's significance lies in his transformation of electric blues guitar playing. His fluid string bending, shimmering vibrato, and staccato picking created a sophisticated soloing style that became a foundation for later blues and rock guitarists. AllMusic's recognition of him as 'the single most important electric guitarist of the last half of the 20th century' underscores his impact. His influence on electric guitar playing and blues music remains profound, as he helped shape the genre's evolution from regional roots to global recognition.

Did You Know?

• He named his guitar 'Lucille' after a brawl over a woman in Twist, Arkansas, to remind himself not to fight over women or run into burning buildings.
• He learned his first three chords from a local minister.

Roots in Edmonton and the Road to Music

Ruth Berhe entered the world on July 2, 1995, in Edmonton, Alberta, the daughter of Ethiopian immigrants who left their homeland in the 1980s. Growing up bilingual, she speaks Amharic with full fluency alongside English. Music entered her life early; by the age of eight she was already at the piano. Her teenage years were grounded in ordinary routine—she held a part-time job at a local Reitmans clothing store and, in a candid interview with The Canadian Press, called herself an introvert who was never the life of the party. She completed secondary school at Ross Sheppard High in 2013 and enrolled at MacEwan University, though she eventually paused her studies to devote herself fully to songwriting. It was during those retail shifts that she discovered Vine, a six-second video platform she preferred over longer formats like YouTube simply because uploading short clips felt less demanding. That low-pressure creative outlet would become the launchpad for everything that followed.

The Vine-to-Viral Breakthrough

Berhe uploaded her very first Vine clip in May 2013, but it was roughly a year later that she began posting six-second covers of well-known songs, steadily building an audience. The turning point arrived in November 2014, when she recorded a Vine featuring a single line she had written herself, sparked by the television series Once Upon a Time. Within a week the clip collected approximately 84,000 likes—an unusual spike for her at that stage. Comments from followers urged her to expand the fragment into a complete track. She obliged, and the result, "Lost Boy," was shared on YouTube on January 18, 2015. The song would go on to earn double-platinum certification and rack up more than 850 million Spotify streams. That same year she released her debut EP, The Intro, in November 2015, which carried the track "Superficial Love." Two years later, on May 5, 2017, her full-length debut Safe Haven arrived, a collection that also housed the then-quiet track "Dandelions." By June 2024, Safe Haven had surpassed 2.5 billion total streams worldwide.

A Storyteller's Palette

Ruth B's sound weaves together threads of pop, R&B, alternative, and soul, and she has openly cited a wide roster of inspirations: Lauryn Hill, The Beatles, Carole King, Grouplove, Adele, Taylor Swift, and Ed Sheeran. In a conversation with Idolator she distilled their common thread, noting that every artist she admires is, above all, a storyteller, and that narrative is the element she strives to embed in her own work. That storytelling instinct has found outlets well beyond the recording studio. In September 2017 she sang Neil Young's "Heart of Gold" during Bryan Adams's induction into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. The following year she lent her voice to the theme song for the CBC Kids series Addison, and her track "Shadows" was placed in the second season of Netflix's Dear White People. In 2022, "Paper Airplanes" served as the lead original song on the soundtrack for Tyler Perry's Netflix film A Jazzman's Blues, further demonstrating her range across genres and media.

Sleeper Hits and a Social Conscience

What began as a quiet album cut transformed into a global phenomenon when "Dandelions" caught fire on TikTok in 2022. The track charted in markets as diverse as India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Brazil, and Germany, and has since amassed over two billion streams on Spotify alone. That viral surge cemented Ruth B's place in the streaming era, even years after Safe Haven's initial release. Her willingness to engage with current events is equally notable: in the summer of 2020 she released "If I Have a Son," a direct response to the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. That same year she performed a virtual concert for the MusicCares Foundation to raise funds during the pandemic. Her second studio album, Moments in Between, followed in 2021, preceded by the single "Dirty Nikes." On the awards front, she took home Breakthrough Artist of the Year at the 2017 Junos and earned three nominations—including Artist of the Year and Album of the Year—at the 2018 ceremony.