In 1969, Fleetwood Mac had the privilege to tour England with B. B. King and his band. We covered the major cities and venues, including the Royal Albert Hall. How his band appreciated the beautiful countryside impressed me; they were whooping and hollering and snapping away on their cameras. It seemed the grass was greener on the other side of their fence, but it takes all that English rain to make it so.

Anyway, I also had the privilege to sit beside B. B. on the coach during a long trip into Devon and Cornwall, but I’m afraid that I may have worn him out with questions about Elmore James! He was very courteous, though, having been an Elmore admirer himself. (B. B.’s bio “Blues All Around Me”, is a must-read, by the way.) At one point in the conversation, after my grilling him about his opinion on Albert and Freddy King, Albert Collins, Otis Rush and Buddy Guy etc., he calmly said, “They’re good, but you know what? They’re all copying me.”

He wasn’t being flashy; he was stating the truth.

Sometime later, backstage at a concert, B. B. drew me aside and sat down with Lucille on his knee plugged into a small Fender Champ. He said something like, “You know what? I tried to play slide like that and I couldn’t get the hang, so I learned to make the sound with my fingers like this…” and, playing the intro to Elmore’s ‘The Sky is Crying”, he demonstrated how he would bend the string and “trill” it (as he referred to finger vibrato) to emulate a slide guitar.

Now, having seen the black fellows mentioned above, (Jimi included) and many British blues guitarists at the time employing the same technique, including Peter, I realized that B. B. was its actual innovator. Yet here he was, like a child at Christmas, humbly showing me as though he had only just discovered it! An unforgettable moment.