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A funeral procession will take King’s body from the airport
in Memphis, Tennessee next Wednesday to Handy Park in Memphis,
where King first achieved widespread fame, before continuing
down U.S. Route 61 — often dubbed “The Blues Highway” — to his
hometown of Indianola.
A public viewing will be held on Friday, May 29 at the B.B. King
Museum and Delta Interpretive Center in Indianola. The funeral
service will be held at the nearby Bell Grove Missionary Baptist
Church, followed by a private burial on the grounds of the
museum that evening.
The 15-time Grammy winner and member of the Rock and Roll Hall
of Fame was born Riley B. King to sharecroppers about 20 miles
(32 km) from Indianola in the tiny Delta community of Berclair,
Mississippi, on Sept. 16, 1925.
After his parents split up, he was raised by his grandmother in
the hill country town of Kilmichael.
He moved to Indianola when he was 17 and spent many of his
formative years there, driving a tractor on a plantation and
playing gospel and blues music in churches and clubs, on street
corners and the radio, before moving to Memphis in 1948.
King kept a home in Las Vegas, where he died last week at the
age of 89, but spent much of his life on the road. He played an
annual homecoming concert in Indianola, which he called his
hometown, every year since 1980.
He was ranked by Rolling Stone Magazine as No. 6 on its 2011
list of the 100 greatest guitarists, and considered a major
influence on other blues and rock guitarists.
The 35th annual B.B. King Homecoming Festival, now a tribute
concert "to the King," will take place outside the museum on
Sunday, May 24.
(Editing by David Adams and Eric Walsh)
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