CHICAGO — "Live in Cook County Jail" is one of B.B. King's top records — it was number one for three weeks on the soul album charts and was ranked on Rolling Stone magazine's list of top 500 albums of all time. The story of how the record, made at the jail in 1970, started in Mister Kelley's, a nightclub at 1028 N. Rush Street.
King, who died Thursday, said in his autobiography "Blues All Around Me" that he was performing at the Rush Street club when he was asked by the recently-appointed head of the jail, Winston Moore, to come and play for the inmates.
"I thought it over. Thought how the inmates could use the blues in a good way — as something to get positive about, a way to show them the outside world cares," King wrote.
When he got there, "I'd come to entertain the men and I couldn't help but feel the oppression."
"My heart was heavy with feeling for the guys behind bars. It's not that I don't feel for the victims and it's not that I don't believe in personal responsibility. I do. But I worry about the correctional facilities and their capacity to help rebuild souls rather than destroy them," he said.
His manager decided it should be recorded. King said at the start of the concert the inmates booed him. "But once I warmed up and got my groove going, the men were warm and gracious." (On the album, one can indeed hear inmates booing but at the start when the Cook County sheriff is introduced as "our own beloved" and the chief judge is described as "another dear friend of all of yours out there.")
A 1970 report in Jet magazine of the jail visit described how King performed on a concrete stage in a grassy yard. "King hummed, cajoled, wailed; he moaned of betrayed love, do-wrong, two-timing women, flirtatious 'big leg' girls, [and] boozing, skirt-chasing dudes all in a mixture of wry, insightful humor," the magazine said.
The inmates "whooped, hollered, whistled, stomped and clapped their hands."
Moore was quoted as saying, "It was the best show we have ever had." King told the crowd: "This is the first time I have ever given a concert free."
King also wrote the recording led to more publicity surrounding conditions at the jail and helped lead to a change in sentencing that allowed judges to credit inmates with time served in doling out punishment.
King would play almost 50 more penal institutions over his career, he wrote.
Rolling Stone describes the jail album this way: "If you want to hear everything a B.B. King guitar performance can be, you may as well start here. After whipping through his customary show-opener, 'Every Day I Have the Blues,' with breakneck impatience, King lays into 'How Blue Can You Get?' As befits the show's jailhouse setting, King's guitar is occasionally at its most abrasive. To begin '3 O'Clock Blues,' he cuts off his conversational patter with a sharp, percussive, violent chord. And he turns in a definitive live version of 'The Thrill Is Gone' that's both searing and soaring."
Photos of the concert can be found here.
King's "Live at the Regal" was also recorded in Chicago in 1964. It was his first charting LP and "inspired the blues-rock scene that was forming in the United Kingdom," according to Rolling Stone.
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