B.B. King rolls on: for 100 nights a year, the 80-year-old blues legend still proves that the thrill is not gone

IT'S 7 p.m.--in the middle of the desert, in the middle of the week--and more than 5,000 people from all walks of life have gathered for one purpose. To see an 80-year-old man play his guitar and sing the blues. But he's not just any 80-year-old man, and it's not just any old guitar he's playing. Tonight, at a sold-out Dodge Theatre in downtown Phoenix, B.B. King, the king of the blues, will take the stage with the guitar he fondly calls Lucille, and together the two will continue a history-making journey they started some six decades ago.

Perhaps the only solo artist who can sellout large arenas across the country, across the continent, and across the pond tonight after night, year in and year out--Riley B. King is universally treasured. He has been honored with more than a dozen Grammys, including the Lifetime Achievement Award. He also has received a Kennedy Center honor, the Presidential Medal of the Arts, and has been inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. He's even received the Polar Music Prize from Sweden's King Carl XVI Gustav. It's the country's musical equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

On this night in Phoenix, King (sitting in a chair because he can no longer stand for extended periods of time) strums out nearly two hours of grinding, heartfelt blues songs. The microphone is placed over his shoulder and the band is right behind his back. His face is gyrating and twisted in ways that only the blues can generate.

In between selections, King banters back and forth with the audience, sharing with them lessons that he has learned about life, mistakes he has made, and wisdom he has acquired. He talks about everything from relationships to money, always seeming to pick out an attractive woman in the crowd to focus on. "Women have been my one weakness," he says. "I love women."

While he's seen the makeup of his fan base lighten, likening it nowadays to "a salt shaker with a few specks of pepper," King says he's still the same person he was when he used to pick cotton from can-to-can't in Mississippi as a boy. "From the time you can see to the time you can't," he explained.

It was during those cotton-picking days that King developed his love for music. His mother died when he was 9, and since then he says that he's pretty much lived on his own. He would pick cotton by day and play guitar in juke joints and on the street corner for dimes by night. In 1947, he hitchhiked to Memphis and began playing on Beale Street. By 1956, King was playing 300 one-nighters a year. He traveled the "chitlin' circuit," up and down U.S. Highway 61 so much that part of it has been renamed in his honor.

Today, that number has dropped to about 100 shows a year. To his chagrin, King had to take off three months last year because of cataract surgery. "I haven't taken three months off in 57 years," he says.

To catch up with King, you've got to pack your bags and hit the road. Because for King, home is often wherever he lays his head for the night. From hotel to hotel, highway to highway, King is still a road warrior, a blues ambassador, and a businessman, having loaned his name to a successful chain of nightclubs.

In addition to performing, he has written a book, released a new CD, and is anticipating the opening of his own museum. In fact, he says that he doesn't feel like he's 80. "Most times I forget about it, until I have to go upstairs. Then I remember that I'm 80," he says with his big laugh. "I thank God that I have been able to be here for this long."

As he continues to put his age and other life-related realities into perspective, King says that the death of his longtime friend Ray Charles hit him bard. "I'm one of the few left," he says. "I've been out there it seems like 100 years. I sometimes wonder why I am still here."

He believes that maybe part of the reason is so that he can share his music with a new generation, a younger generation who can only imagine through his songs what hardship and pain and loss truly feel like.

For the man whose name is synonymous with blues singing, King reveals that in the beginning he actually had another preference. "I wanted to be a gospel singer and a preacher like our pastor was," he says. "The first electric guitar I heard was played by my pastor in church. But the money wasn't right. When I would sing gospel, the people would simply pat me on the head. When I sang the blues, people would give me money."

For much of his professional life, King has lived with the many prevalent misconceptions about blues music. He calls blues the "stepchild" to other forms of music, although he refuses to believe the blues music is unsophisticated in any way. "It doesn't get the radio airplay or respect that other music gets," says King, who never graduated from high school, but has received honorary doctorates from several institutions of higher learning, including Yale University.