The Thrill is Gone (1970)

Performer: B.B. King                                             Writer: Roy Hawkins & Rick Darnell
Highest US Chart Position: #15                            Label: ABC Records
Musicians: B.B. King, Hugh McCracken, Paul Harris, Gerald Jemmott and Herbie Lovelle

By the time “The Thrill is Gone” became a chart hit for blues star B.B. King, it was already nearly twenty years old. The song had originally been composed in 1951 by Los Angeles blues singer Roy Hawkins, who released the song on Modern Records and saw it become a hit, going all the way to number six on the rhythm and blues charts. The song featured Hawkins’ piano playing, and his singing in a Charles Brown style, along with the saxophone of the great West Coast tenor Maxwell Davis. But Roy Hawkins saw himself become the Erskine Hawkins of rhythm and blues. In the same way that Erskine had his hits co-opted by jazz bands like Glenn Miller and Benny Goodman, Roy found his songs covered by the likes of Ray Charles, James Brown and, of course, B.B. King. King’s version most likely became a hit because of the departure of the sound from the tradition Memphis blues style he had been playing in since the late fifties. Producer Bill Szymczyk had been working as an engineer in the mid-sixties and took a pay cut to work for ABC Records in order to become a producer. He wanted to update King’s sound to appeal to a wider audience by adding strings and a more polished sound. He succeeded in producing the artist’s first ever, top 100 album as well as the biggest hit of his career, and one that would remain his signature song for the rest of his career.

The song begins just like any other ballad from the late sixties, with drums and electric piano. Herbie Lovelle plays a pickup on the drums that hits on the and of two, rests on three, and on the and of three plays sixteenth notes into the downbeat where B.B. King hits a ringing, single-string note. Underneath King’s unique blues playing, Paul Harris adds some licks of his own on the Fender Rhodes. King continues to play through a complete verse with some interesting chromatic runs, supported by Harris and the guitar of until Hugh McCracken, until the first vocal verse comes around. Bill Szymczyk managed to get some incredible separation on the production because all of the instruments, including Gerald Jemmott’s bass, can be heard very clearly as they work together. The progression is a straight, twelve-bar blues, but the minor key makes the turnaround feel as if it’s more unique than it actually is. On the second verse a small string section playing sustained chords is suddenly pushed up into the mix behind the vocals. When King’s solo section begins, the strings are pushed up even louder, this time playing quarter-note phrases that comprise something of a counter melody, all while the guitar’s vocal emulations strain to be heard over the top. A third verse is followed by a fourth with the instrumentation--especially the drums and a low McCracken guitar part--building in intensity to match King’s vocals. Then the song finally fades out across two verses of King’s guitar solo and the string countermelody.

There’s no chorus in the song. Instead the title line is sung at the beginning of each verse, with the rest of the verse explaining why the narrator no longer has the feelings he once had for his lover. The album version is slightly longer than the single, adding an extra minute and a half of King soloing over a vamp on the tonic and a much slower fadeout. The song entered the charts in 1969, a couple of days after Christmas, at the very bottom in spot number one hundred. A month later, at the end of January, it was halfway up the chart, and in another month it reached its peak position of fifteen on February 21st, where it stayed for another week. The B-side is “You’re Mean,” another song pulled from King’s album, Completely Well. The tune is a medium tempo number with King doing some blues shouting about his woman. Like the flip side, Paul Harris’s electric piano is prominent in the mix. I was too young to have heard the song on the radio, but I did have the pleasure of playing it in a blues band I joined in the mid-eighties. After playing pop and rock for years, I left music for a while to go back to school, but then I saw an advertisement in a music store looking for a sax player. Thrilled with the idea of not having to play guitar and keyboards and instead focusing on my first instrument, I joined the band shortly after and they were the best group of musicians I have ever played with. I may have been vaguely familiar with the song before, but B.B. King’s version of “The Thrill is Gone” would forever after hold a permanent place in my memory thereafter.