When B.B. King died in May 2015 at the age of 89, his Variety obituary hailed him as “the ‘King of the Blues,’ who helped define his genre’s electrified postwar sound and became the music’s best-known ...

In 1980, Gibson introduced its first B.B. King signature guitar, a black ES-355 Thinline Dual Pickup Stereo Varitone model with a TP-6 fine-tuner tailpiece and “Lucille” spelled out in script on the ...