B.B. King

Why choose this over the 500 other B.B. King collections? Well, first of all it's got a great cover. Secondly, Original Greatest Hits includes the earliest of his recordings, when everything was still a bit messy-sounding and the tinniness of modern blues was a ways off. King's playing is as precise and soulful as ever, which is the other good reason to check this out.

In 1969, after twenty years of making records, singer-guitarist B.B. King -- a tractor driver's
son, born into the crushing poverty and labor of sharecropping life in Itta Bena, Mississippi
-- achieved household-name fame with the howling despair and stinging guitar of his Top
Twenty pop single "The Thrill Is Gone." But the forty recordings in this two-CD set were the
foundation of that breakthrough. A nonstop run of R&B-chart hits for the RPM/Mod... More >