Roger Phenix on B.B. King

In the wake of B.B. King's death, sound mixer Roger Phenix, who has worked on a number of documentary projects involving King, was kind enough to share some of his thoughts and experiences.

Header photo by Tom Baetz. Used under CC-BY-2.0.

"Nightline" ABC broadcast:

Ted Koppel: "Good evening.  Tonight we have a special guest, blues musician
B. B. King."

King: "Thank you for having me."

Koppel: "Mr. King, let me start off with a personal question: Is it true that every day you have the blues?"

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Early today, the news of B. B. King's death arrived.  During past weeks, this news has passed through the internet repeatedly, only to turn out to be a hoax.  But this time it's the truth.

Working on documentary films, I have come into B.B. King's presence a few times.  The first time was a Thanksgiving concert played on the stage at Ossining Correctional Facility (Sing Sing) in 1972.  The film is partially available online now [B.B. King's performance starts around the 40 minute mark - Ed.]

In the week leading up to the Sing Sing concert, three documentary crews and a prison documentary film workshop followed daily prison activities and interviewed staff and inmates.  Anticipation was high.  King shared the bill with Joan Baez and her sister Mimi and Voices of East Harlem. 

The warden was not in the prison when the concert occurred, possibly to distance himself from whatever might be said or whatever unfortunate thing might happen in the excitement.

Once the performance started, my sound recording function ceased — a multitrack recording team recorded the musical event.

Standing in the wings on stage left and occasionally receiving requests from band members to turn their monitor speaker volume up or down, I could look across a crowd of several hundred prisoners' faces. It was a year after the Attica Correctional Facility uprising which resulted in 43 deaths.  The sense of potential danger at Sing Sing, as always in a prison, was present.  Nobody was complacent about what might happen. A concert of this kind had not been held here previously.  The master of ceremonies was Jimmy J.J. Walker.  With the first opening act, emotional intensity, like incendiary lightning, swept through the crowd.  Later, when King and the full band took the stage, King's deep care and compassion for the people in the room overwhelmed the crowd. His single-note, virtuosic guitarwork, the physicality of his presence (he was not a heavy man at the time), and his reverent and serious words enveloped everyone.  As he sang "Someone really cares," the audience sank into tearful introspection.  The Thanksgiving concert seemed to be everything that one could have hoped it would be.  Strong words were spoken to camera, inmates had a deep searing voice in the film.

But it was only a concert and it was still a prison at the end of the day.

After the stage had been broken down, the musicians loaded into their bus, and sat on the bus waiting with visible impatience near the gate, ready to be out and on their way.  The prison guards were inside the buildings counting the inmates in their cells... and the tally came out wrong every time. The band was told that several years earlier at a smaller event, two inmates had exited with a group of visitors. There was no way anybody, our film crew included, would be leaving until the last missing person was found, which finally happened some time after midnight.

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Once in the 1980's, working in Texas on a network project about homicide, our hotel parking lot was occupied by a bus with B. B. King's name on the side.  Somebody got the crew tickets to a sold-out concert.  It was a chance to sit in a respectable balcony theater seat and listen for more than an hour to King's music played, to an appreciating mostly middle-class audience. When he introduced the band, King made reference to the lead horn player's previous job in Texas, which had been as an inmate serving ten (?) years in the Texas Penitentiary.  The care and love King had for his band was palpable.  They were people he depended on ("without that bass line, I'm lost"), people he wanted to be with year after year on the road, and evidently people who in one way or another cared for him.  I had been behind King at Sing Sing.  This time, I could watch his face as he sang, as he expressed the depression of deep loss, anticipation of being reunited with a lost love, or care for an estranged child.

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In the nineties, working with a journalist following a trail of recent jailhouse hangings in Mississippi, we spent time with Medgar Evers' brother Charles, the mayor of Fayette, Mississippi.  Every year on the anniversary of Evers's June 12, 1963 assassination, Charles rented a boat and he and his friends spent time on the Ross Barnett reservoir near Jackson.  Barnett had been the segregationist Governor of Mississippi during a time of protest in which JFK had called the national guard to occupy the white University of Mississipi. B. B. King, born in Indianola, was on tour and travelling through Mississippi that day, and Evers invited him onto the boat to celebrate the memory of his fallen brother and to curse the legacy of the man in whose name the artificial lake had been built.  On the boat ride, King told us that his next stop was the women's prison in Mississippi, one of two prisons which had denied us access to film. B. B. King offered an invitation to be part of his support crew when the band went into the prison.

The next morning, our van passed through the prison gates following the King bus.  It wasn't clear what would happen next, but we entered the prison cafeteria / auditorium and filmed the setup and watched as the inmates filed in to sit on the floor for the concert.  The assistant warden told us not to film any of the inmates, and invited us to take a tour of the facility after the concert, thinking that we were part of King's group.

B.B. King had made sure we knew that although he might be able to get us in to this facility, he would be powerless to help get us out if anything went wrong.

The music was so intense, and as King started to sing "Someone Cares For You, and that someone is me," that room filled with silent tears.  I remember thinking that it was a pandemonium of deep emotion.  King was twenty years older and in the prime of his stardom--he seemed to be everyone's father, expressing the true meaning of love with his song and simultaneously explaining that he understood and knew how important that love was especially to these prisoners in this part of the country. The room was filled with young and old women, black and white, less segregated than the Sing Sing audience had been in New York twenty years earlier.

It was a scene which our camera team could not resist, and as they began to film, and as the guards watched, our director came out of his own fog and pulled on the rein. He passed the word out to us in whispers to let us know that he wanted very badly to film the tour with the warden -- and to leave the prison when it was over. 

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Five months ago, I spent long days working on a PBS special about healthcare in the poorest region of the poorest state in the nation.  Our camera drone had been a target of rifle fire in one rural area being filmed.  As our documentary team headed toward Jackson, Mississipi from the Delta, at night, we passed a small sign on the highway pointing to the business district of Indianola.  I remarked that this was the town of Riley B. King's birth. Just then another larger sign showed in the headlights, proclaiming, "Indianola -- B.B. King birthplace".

Having been in his presence, what was it like to talk with him, perhaps to put Mr. Koppel's question in another way?

As a verite sound person, one is there to put down on tape what is happening, but not to become an active part of it.  As a long time student of the music and of the part of the country from which he came, it was a revelation to be there in the same place at the same time with someone I had read about for years, whose history and recorded music were on the bookshelf at home.  We each had our job to do and were intent on doing it as well as possible.  Nothing could have been better than that.

Roger Phenix
May 2015