According to his 1996 autobiography Blues All Around Me, co-written with David Ritz, blues guitar legend B. B. King may have led less than an exemplary life and been something other than a role model as a family man. OK, given. I work for an outfit whose first high-profile spokesman denied the founder three times and whose most effective marketer spent his early years trying to kill the company he'd later work for. That same marketer mentioned that everyone's got flaws, so B. B.'s don't freak me out.
Even if they did, when I think of a world that didn't have "The Thrill Is Gone," "How Blue Can You Get," "Nobody Loves Me but My Mother," "When Love Came to Town," or heck, even "Into the Night," I think of a grayer and shallower place. That would be a universe significantly short-changed in the ol' "many-worlds hypothesis" sweepstakes, and one whose people would be justified in skedaddling for another reality as soon as possible.
And when they come to this world, one in which a woman named Lucille can weep silver tears that are not seen but heard, in every note, and one in which a King can roar as loud as the lion that shares his name and fill it with pain and regret and defiance and triumph every time, I imagine them stunned to their knees as they infuse a flood of the joy and sorrow of life all at once.
They have seen love conquer the great divide.
Requiescat in Pace, Rex Caerulei
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