Lucille – Bonafide Joe | B.B. King & the Twist, Arkansas Fire Blues (Official Lyric Video)

"Lucille" is an original blues song by Bonafide Joe about the night B.B. King ran back into a burning dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, to save his guitar, and how that guitar, and every one after it, came to be called Lucille. THE STORY, AS B.B. KING TOLD IT This is King's own account, which he told many times in interviews over the decades. In the winter of 1949 he was playing a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, a small community in Cross County. To heat the wooden building on cold nights, the owners set a barrel half-filled with burning kerosene in the middle of the dance floor. That night two men started fighting, and the barrel was knocked over, spilling burning fuel across the floor. Everyone, King included, ran outside. Then he realized he had left his guitar inside, and he went back in for it as the building burned and began to collapse around him. He got out with the guitar. The next morning he learned that the two men had been fighting over a woman named Lucille, and that two people had died in the fire. King said he named the guitar Lucille to remind himself never to do anything like that again: never run into a burning building, and never fight over a woman. He gave the same name to every main guitar he played afterward. THE MAN B.B. King was born Riley B. King on September 16, 1925, on a cotton plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, the son of sharecroppers. He grew up in the Mississippi hill country around Kilmichael, then moved in his late teens to the Delta near Indianola, which he called his hometown, working farm jobs, singing gospel and playing blues on street corners. He went to Memphis in 1946, returned to Mississippi, and came back to the Memphis area around 1948–49. He landed a spot on radio station WDIA as a performer and disc jockey, where he was billed as the "Beale Street Blues Boy," later shortened to "Blues Boy" and finally "B.B." His 1952 hit "3 O'Clock Blues" launched a touring career that took him around the world. He died on May 14, 2015, in Las Vegas. THE GUITAR The guitar he saved in 1949 is usually described as an inexpensive Gibson acoustic archtop, often said to be a small Gibson L-30; the exact model is disputed. The "thirty-dollar" price in the song comes from King's own telling. In later decades his Lucilles were Gibson electric hollow-body and semi-hollow guitars, especially the ES-355, and Gibson eventually produced a signature model named Lucille. ABOUT THE LYRICS The song moves between telling the story about B.B. King in the third person and singing it in his voice in the first person. Those first-person lines are Bonafide Joe's words, not quotes from King. The song also compresses events: the Twist fire, the Indianola fields, Beale Street, and later fame happened over many years. LYRICS The full lyrics appear on screen and in the English captions (CC). CHAPTERS 0:00 Spoken Intro – He named her Lucille 0:25 Verse 1 – Twist, Arkansas, winter of '49 1:15 Verse 2 – The fire found its way 1:49 Chorus – Lucille, Lucille 2:25 Verse 3 – Back into the burning building 3:01 Bridge – So I named her Lucille 3:32 Verse 4 – From Indianola to Beale Street 3:49 Final Chorus – You made a sharecropper a king 4:26 Outro – Some things are worth saving CREDITS Original song by Bonafide Joe Visuals: AI-assisted cinematic illustrations of a smoky 1949 Delta juke joint lit by firelight and kerosene, cotton fields, the Indianola fields and a blurred Beale Street neon glow, with slow parallax motion and no strobing. Figures are shown only from behind, in silhouette or at a distance. No real person's likeness, no logos, and no depiction of anyone injured. #BonafideJoe #BBKing #Lucille #Blues #LyricVideo