Good News Network: 'On January 21, 1982, B.B. King donated his record collection
to the University of Mississippi...'
https://www.goodnewsnetwork.org/events070121/
>40 years ago today, B.B. King donated a personal collection of, depending on who’s reporting, anywhere from 7,000 to 20,000 blues records to the University of Mississippi to helped establish The Blues Archive at their Center for the Study of Southern Culture. The U-Miss Blues Archive is the largest of its kind in the country, and one of the largest in the world, having since grown to hold 70,000 blues, jazz and other southern music records. B.B. King’s collection is a solid item amid the shimmering mass of vinyl and CDs, includes thousands of posters, images, and other pieces of memorabilia, and is occasional pulled out for a radio special.
“You can tell a lot about a man by his record collection. While working on the radio show ‘Highway 61’ with Bill Ferris (first director of Southern studies and the Blues Archive), I was able to look and pull from B.B.’s collection. It featured thousands of LPs. I felt I learned more about him looking through his collection; I could figure out what kind of music excited and influenced him,” said Brett Bonner who worked at the archive.
Bonner said he found foreign language books in the collection so King could speak simple phrases to international audiences, but also different guitar techniques books, and even a pilot’s guide, as the man could fly a plane.
7,000 items in his collection were kept from King’s days as a disc jokey at WDIA in Memphis during the 1950s. Others are head-scratchingly rare albums recorded in the dawn of blues by artists so unknown they don’t even have a Wikipedia page. The entire archive is available on the Ole’ Miss.edu website.<
I enjoy listening to and performing The Blues. I've studied the lives of many of the
Blues Musicians, including B.B. King. There's not much more text but some photos
at the link.
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