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I used to live in Lake Tahoe and BB was playing in the cabaret lounge at Harrahs. (I don't know why he wasn't playing the big room, but so be it.)
I was knocking about with a friend and though as locals we didn't spend much time in casinos, we planned to see his show. I forgot what time of year it was, but there was a weather disruption and for some reason there were only about 8 or 10 people in the lounge and we sat at a table only a couple of feet away from him while he played. It almost turned conversational as people made comments and asked questions or requested different tunes.
Someone asked him why his guitar was named Lucille. He said a fight caused a fire in a bar he was playing in and after running out, he remembered the guitar and foolishly went back to get it. He could have died. The papers said the fire started by two men fighting over a woman named Lucille and he named the guitar that to remind himself to never do anything as stupid as run into a burning building or fight over a women.
I used to live in Lake Tahoe and BB was playing in the cabaret lounge at Harrahs. (I don't know why he wasn't playing the big room, but so be it.)Here's the title track of his 1968 album Lucille:I was knocking about with a friend and though as locals we didn't spend much time in casinos, we planned to see his show. I forgot what time of year it was, but there was a weather disruption and for some reason there were only about 8 or 10 people in the lounge and we sat at a table only a couple of feet away from him while he played. It almost turned conversational as people made comments and asked questions or requested different tunes.
Someone asked him why his guitar was named Lucille. He said a fight caused a fire in a bar he was playing in and after running out, he remembered the guitar and foolishly went back to get it. He could have died. The papers said the fire started by two men fighting over a woman named Lucille and he named the guitar that to remind himself to never do anything as stupid as run into a burning building or fight over a women.
The "Lucille" King rescued in that fire was a Gibson L-30, a small-body, non-cutaway instrument, a model discontinued in 1943 but one which King picked up in 1949. From there, Lucille has been all Gibson, all the time, including:
An ES-5. (Big single-cutaway archtop with three P90 pickups, the same model used by T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, and for a short while---until he switched to the humbucker version---Chuck Berry.)
An ES-125. (No cutaway, single P90 pickup---King used this guitar to cut the record that launched him in earnest, his version of Fulson's "Three O'Clock Blues.")
A Byrdland, in the late '50s/very early '60s.
ES-175. (Single florentine cutaway, two humbucking pickups; he's seen with this guitar on the jacket art of some of his Kent/Crown albums of the early 1960s.)
ES-335. (Either a tobacco sunburst model or a cherry red model; he used this guitar for Live at the Regal and many of his early ABC-Paramount recordings starting in 1963.)
ES-345. (He played this for a time in the mid-1960s; he's shown with it on the back jacket of Live & Well.)
ES-355. (He picked this one up for the first time in late 1968 and it's been his model ever since; the special-edition Lucilles Gibson has made for him since 1980---the no-F hole feature was his idea, after having stuffed the ES-355 F holes for years with rags to cut down the feedback---is based on the ES-355.)