BB King’s Comments About Elvis Are Changing How Fans See The King D

BB King got asked the same question about Elvis Presley for decades. Did he steal black music and ride it to the top? BB knew Elvis personally, played guitar with him in private at the Las Vegas Hilton and watched his career from the very beginning in Memphis. So when BB finally wrote it down in his autobiography, his answer surprised a lot of people.

He called Elvis a man of integrity and said he didn’t steal anything from anyone. But the full story behind that defense and what BB revealed about their late night sessions together changes the picture completely. Every time they cross paths at Sam Phillips’s recording studio in Memphis, Elvis called BB Be King sir. He was this shy, good-looking kid with a thick southern accent who barely said a word, but he never forgot his manners.

BBE remembered that detail clearly, even decades later. Back in the early 1950s, BBE was already a known name on Beiel Street. He worked at Memphis radio station WDIA as a singer and DJ and people around town called him the Bee Street Blues Boy which eventually got shortened to Blues Boy and then just BB Moa his record label had a standing deal with Sam Phillips at Sun Studio so he’d head out there regularly to record and that’s where he kept running into this teenager who showed up to practice all the time. BB admitted years later that he didn’t think much of Elvis’s singing or guitar playing in those early days. It was decent, he said, but nothing that jumped out. What Elvis did do, though, was pay close attention. BB noticed that Elvis rarely asked

questions, but he’d sit in the corner of Sam Phillips’s studio and study every musician in the room. He’d watch BB play, watch the other artists rehearse their parts, and just absorb everything going on around him without making a scene about it. BB had no idea that this polite kid, absorbing everything on Bee Street, was about to become the most famous entertainer alive.

By 1956, Elvis had left Sun Records for RCA, and his career was moving faster than anything Memphis had ever seen. He was on every television screen in America, on every radio station, and selling records so quickly, the pressing plants couldn’t keep up. BB King was watching all of it unfold from the same city where they’d first cross paths at that little recording studio.

And BB’s opinion of Elvis had changed completely. He later said Elvis had everything. The looks, the talent, the presence. He described looking at Elvis and thinking, “This guy is tall. He’s handsome. He can sing. He can play.” BB wasn’t shy about admitting that Elvis turned heads, including his own.

But BB’s perspective carried more weight than almost anyone else’s during that era because he wasn’t just commenting from a distance or watching Elvis on a screen. He’d actually known the guy before any of it started. That matters, especially because of what happened at a charity concert in Memphis that December. The WDIA Goodwill Review was one of the biggest annual events in Memphis.

WDIA had been groundbreaking as the first radio station in America with an all black format playing gospel and rhythm and blues for a huge audience across the city. Their annual concert at Ellis Auditorium raised money for black children in need and the entire community turned out for it. BB King performed at these shows regularly and later described them as genuinely important nights where the DJs ran skits and presented incredible music with artists like Ray Charles headlining.

Elvis wasn’t on the bill. He ended up at the concert because his friend George Klene, a Memphis radio DJ, told him about it at the last minute. According to Klene, Elvis’s biggest worry on the way to Ellis Auditorium was that he didn’t want to steal attention from the scheduled performers.

He wanted to sit in the back and enjoy the show. That plan lasted about 5 minutes. Backstage, entertainer Rufus Thomas asked Elvis if he’d like to perform. Elvis turned him down. So Rufus pulled Elvis out onto the stage in front of the crowd with no warning at all and introduced him to the audience. The entire auditorium erupted.

Klene later said the place went crazy the second people spotted him. BB King reflected on that night years later and made a point that most people overlook. He said that for a young white man to show up at an all black event during the 1950s in the American South took real guts. He believed Elvis was showing his roots and that he seemed genuinely proud of those roots after the concert.

Elvis stood with BB for photographs and treated him like royalty. He told people that BB was one of his musical influences. BB admitted later he wasn’t entirely sure that was true, but he appreciated hearing Elvis give Memphis credit for shaping his sound. That mattered to Baby. Everything BB witnessed that night at Ellis Auditorium would shape the way he defended Elvis for the rest of his life.

But while BB was seeing one side of Elvis up close, a very different story was starting to spread. At the height of Elvis’s fame, a damaging rumor started circulating through parts of the black community. The claim was that Elvis had said the only thing black people could do for him was buy his records and shine his shoes.

The quote spread fast and caused real anger across the country. The problem was that nobody could actually trace the statement back to a verified source. In 1957, Jet magazine decided to settle it. Reporter Lewis Robinson went directly to Elvis and asked him point blank about the quote. Elvis didn’t hesitate. He said he’d never said anything like that and that people who actually knew him would know he’d never say it.

Jet didn’t just take his word for it. They spoke with black musicians who’d worked alongside him, including pianist Dudley Brooks, who’d recently collaborated with Elvis on movie soundtracks in Los Angeles. Brooks said he couldn’t imagine Elvis making a statement like that. Knowing him the way he did, Elvis used the Jet Magazine interview to say something that a lot of his critics have either forgotten or never heard.

He talked about where rock and roll actually came from. He said a lot of people seem to think he’d started the whole thing. But the music existed long before he ever showed up. He said flat out that nobody could sing that kind of music the way black artists could. And he named Fats Domino specifically as someone he could never match.

Oh, he also talked about attending black churches in Memphis as a kid. um including Reverend Brewster’s church, absorbing the music that would eventually shape his entire sound. By the end of the article, Jet concluded that the rumor simply wasn’t supported by the facts. And BB King agreed. He pushed back hard against the whole idea that Elvis stole anything.

And his reasoning was simple. He said that once music has been put out into the world, anyone can add to it or take from it. Elvis was just so great, so popular, and so hot that anything he played became a hit. In BB’s view, that wasn’t theft. That was just what happened when someone with that kind of presence connected with an audience.

But the story between BB King and Elvis didn’t end with public statements and magazine articles. What happened behind closed doors at a Las Vegas hotel tells you even more. In a 2010 interview, BB revealed that back in 1972, Elvis personally helped him land a gig at the Las Vegas Hilton. Elvis was already headlining the main showroom and he made a phone call to get BB booked into the hotel lounge.

BB played to standing room only crowds every single night. After the shows wrapped up, BB would grab his guitar, Lucille, and head upstairs to Elvis’s suite at the Hilton. The two of them would sit together and play. Sometimes BB sang while Elvis listened. Sometimes they traded songs back and forth.

Elvis used those late night sessions to unwind after his own performances. And BB said the music between them just flared. BB laughed about it later and said he’d let people in on a secret. He said the two of them were the original Blues Brothers because Elvis knew more blues songs than almost anyone in the entire business.

Some nights, BB said it honestly felt like they’d played through every blues song ever written. Picture that for a second. Elvis Presley, the most famous entertainer on earth, sitting in his Las Vegas hotel suite well past midnight with BB King with no cameras in the room, no press, and no audience watching.

just two musicians playing blues guitar together because they genuinely loved the music. Nobody was there to document it or spin it into a story. It was private and that’s exactly why it means so much. Those weren’t the actions of someone who took another culture’s music and felt nothing for the people behind it.

BB King knew that better than anyone. When BB King finally sat down to write his autobiography, he didn’t hedge and he didn’t qualify. He wrote that Elvis didn’t steal any music from anyone. Elvis simply had his own way of interpreting the music he’d grown up on, the same way every musician does. And then B added something that carries more weight than almost anything else written about Elvis by someone who actually knew him. He said Elvis had integrity.

Those words came from BB King. And you have to understand the weight they carry. This was a man who lived through segregation in the American South and built his entire career from nothing on Beiel Street in Memphis. He watched Elvis’s rise from the very first day at Sam Phillips Studio performed alongside him at Ellis Auditorium.

played guitar with him behind closed doors at the Las Vegas Hilton and knew him personally for over two decades. He wasn’t guessing and he wasn’t being polite. He was telling people exactly what he’d witnessed and his verdict was clear. The next time someone argues that Elvis took everything and gave nothing back, it’s worth asking what BB King thought about that because BB was there from the beginning and he called it Integri.

There’s more to the story of Elvis and the musicians who shaped him.