The second annual B.B. King Day at Mississippi Valley State University, coming up Thursday, is free, open to the public and guaranteed to give you the blues — in a good way.
Serving up panels of musicians, academics and experts, as well as plenty of performances, the day promises to be a feast of knowledge and lore about the Delta’s homegrown musical legacy, most richly represented by King, who died in 2015.
Dr. Alphonso Sanders is the key organizer and host, through the B.B. King Recording Studio at Valley, partnering with the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola.
Sessions start at 9 a.m. and end at 3 p.m. at the W.A. Butts Social Science Building on the MVSU campus, with an evening performance at the museum to cap off the event.
The symposium at Valley will offer plenty of performances, including musical tributes to Otis Clay and Melvin Jackson; Charlton Johnson of Bobby “Blue” Bland’s band playing King’s guitar, Lucille; and an ensemble of former and current B.B. King band members playing “The Thrill is Gone.”
Miles Davis’ “All Blues” will be rendered by a sextet featuring trumpeter Burgess Gardner of Chicago, Sanders and others.
A panel on “Modern Day Blues: Its Musicians and Music” will be made up of contemporary blues musicians and singers from Vicksburg to the San Francisco Bay area.
Dallas marketing entrepreneur Brad Boa came last year to the inaugural B.B. King Day and collected eight hours of film footage he has condensed into a 10-minute “microdocumentary” to be shown on Thursday.
“I came last year to see and hear some of these people who knew B.B. King, and I realized you can’t talk about B.B. without talking about the blues, and you can’t talk about the blues without talking about the Delta,” Boa said.
This year Boa is bringing a crew with him, including a drone photographer, to document the event and to join the evening jam.
“I have a lot of friends from Italy, Japan, China, Hong Kong, from all over who probably hold King in more reverence than most Americans do,” Boa said.
He hopes the annual Valley event will continue to grow and prosper, extending its reach to the international realm of blues aficionados.
Bill Wax, who created the radio program “B.B. King’s Bluesville” for Sirius XM and produced the show until 2013, drawing some 3 million listeners to the genre, is coming to participate on a panel concerning “The Influence of Blues on Jazz History” and to give a brief talk about King’s thoughts on education.
“He was truly the most remarkable man I’ve ever been able to spend time with,” Wax said. “I’ve been in radio for 38 years, and I’ve interviewed politicians, congressmen, statesmen, and none of them comes close to the person B.B. King was.”
For “Bluesville,” Wax flew to Las Vegas for two days a month over a year to sit at the table with King and record his thoughts about music, life, the blues and everything King cared about, including education.
“It was one of his greatest disappointments in himself that he never finished high school and didn't go on to anything else,” Wax said. “B. was very self-deprecating anyway but honestly felt he missed something by not completing his education.”
King always made sure that those around him took advantage of the chance to pursue a good education, Wax said. Some of his greatest joy came from receiving honorary music degrees from Tougaloo College, Yale University, Berklee College of Music, Rhodes College in Memphis, Mississippi Valley State University and Brown University.
A panel on “African-American Music and the Struggle for Ownership” will feature, among other musicians and scholars, Joe Jennings of Atlanta. Jennings is a saxophonist and retired artist emeritus at Spelman College, where he developed the African-American Music curriculum and founded the Spelman College Jazz Ensemble.
"I will be discussing and doing a presentation that deals with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and their negligence in embracing jazz music and African-American music period as an academic discipline,” Jennings said.
“Blues is like the mother of African-American music, in a sense. It evolved at a very early period, and jazz evolved out of that,” he said.
Jennings sees symposia such as this as places to promote the connection of all African-American music “as being part of one evolution, one particular thing that comes out of the soul and spirit of the African-American community.”
On the panel with Jennings will be Dr. James Johnson of the Pittsburgh African-American Music Institute, Sanders and other scholar-musicians.
Bill Wax said he looks forward to hearing and meeting the newest practitioners of the form.
“I have a great deal of respect for Alphonso as a musician and as a teacher doing what he's doing down there,” he said. “If the last blues musicians were people like Buddy Guy and B.B. King, we’d be celebrating a dying form, but that’s not the case.
“Thankfully, there are always young, new musicians coming along to pick up the mantle and carry it along.”
The evening show will be in the B.B. King Museum’s restored cotton gin and will feature the long list of musicians participating in the Valley symposium.
• Contact Kathryn Eastburn at 581-7235 or keastburn@gwcommonwealth.com.
