Next up: B.B. the museum

LOS ANGELES -- B.B. King is a humble man.

Listen to what the blues master says about the $15 million museum bearing his name, slated to open Saturday in the Mississippi Delta town where he sweated for a few cents a day picking cotton nearly eight decades ago.

"When you're running track, they pass you -- I don't know what you call it ... -- the baton. I just picked up the baton and kept running with it. But guys like Robert Johnson, Jimmy Rogers, Memphis Slim, Roosevelt Sykes, and I could name you many, many more -- they are the ones that were the base," King said last week during a Los Angeles stop.

"They could have picked any one of them to name the museum after."

Not likely. Especially not in Indianola, Miss., where, perhaps more than anyplace else, the man born Riley B. King in 1925 will forever reign as King of the Blues.

So it's the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center that he christened in September, an opening timed, not coincidentally, near its namesake's 83rd birthday.

"I think I may have planted the seed," he said, seated in a thronelike chair, dressed in a dark suit, neatly pressed shirt and tie and polished black loafers.

"I don't live in my home state now, but I bought some land down there, and I was going to build me a house on it," he said. "After my demise, I wanted this to be open as a museum. ... But they said, 'Why wait till you die? We do it now, you could see it!' I like that idea."

The 18,000-square-foot museum -- financed with private and public funds, including sizable corporate donations -- is built around an old cotton gin mill where King worked as a boy. He has donated much of the memorabilia from his long career -- "much more than I wanted to," he said with an easy laugh. That includes the guitar he calls "Lucille's sister," that's much like the celebrated black Gibson he still plays on stage 100 to 125 nights a year.

"Like a fool, I let 'em come to my house, and I said, 'Anything you want, you get it.' And they took damn near everything except the house -- and me," he said, still chuckling. "But I'm glad to do it, because I love to share everything I've had, trying to learn to play blues and trying to do what I've done."

To King, it's less about seeing his life commemorated than keeping the blues flame alive for new generations, "to let people know about the origins of this music."

"There's a plantation that's been there since slavery, called the Dockery Plantation, and it's said all of us blues singers were born within 100 miles of it," King said. "For all this information to be out, publicly known, I think will be good not only for Mississippi, but for the world that likes blues music."

The Delta Interpretive Center component aims to be a comprehensive and authoritative resource on this indigenous American art form.

"When they start talking about the educational side of it, I happen to believe that education is going to be the answer to our problems," King said. "I didn't get much of an education -- I only went through the 10th grade. And I'm for everybody going as far as possible."

By the same token, he wants others to get their time with the baton he picked up so many years back.

"Now that I'm part of the over-the-hill gang, I don't think so much about myself," he said, "but what about these young guys? Keb' Mo', Jonny Lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd, Robert Cray: What about them? ... I'm hoping people will go to this museum and see where this is important to a lot of people."