B.B. King: There Is Always One More Time
David McGee.
Backbeat Books

With so much biographical material about American blues guitar legend B.B. King already on the market, yet another chronicle, released to coincide with the star's 80th birthday this fall, seems at the outset redundant or gratuitous, perhaps both.

So there might appear little need for veteran music journalist and Rolling Stone contributor David McGee's B.B. King: There Is Always One More Time, particularly since its base material is a single interview McGee conducted with King in 1998. Yet the tireless King, who still performs and records at a rate that would exhaust artists less than half his age, overshadows all other major blues figures — particularly in the collective mind of the MTV generation, where the names of King's unwitting mentors, Charlie Christian, Lonnie Johnson, Jimmie Rodgers, Bukka White and T-Bone Walker, will likely never bubble up. Maybe that's enough reason.

In a celebrity-dominated age, B.B. King is the blues.

And McGee, who wrote the definitive Carl Perkins appreciation, Go Cat Go: The Life and Times of Carl Perkins, The King of Rockabilly, and has developed a reputation as a fastidious researcher, is the perfect choice to add to the King canon. His work here reads more like extended liner notes than a music biography. It's all back-up to an impressive deconstruction of every piece of music the guitarist, songwriter and singer ever committed to record.

McGee is a fan with an intuitive understanding of the power of vivid detail, turns of phrase, subtle or hidden meanings, and the social, political and cultural context in which King the artist operates. He's produced a terrific read.

McGee uses King's own words, selectively re-assembled for maximum effect, to create a compelling, personalized chronicle of the agony of entrenched racism.

King's rage, McGee points out, served his artistic life in a pivotal way, including his monster 1969 hit, "The Thrill is Gone." King reinvents an older, unreleased song about a marriage on the rocks as a howl of protest against the assassination of black civil rights leaders, and creates, McGee writes in a three-page, note-by-note critique of the song, a historic moment in American musical history.

McGee uses his musical smarts in ways other King biographers haven't. He tracks down producer Bill Szymczyk, who helmed the sessions on four King albums that pushed the bluesman's career into overdrive — Live & Well, Completely Well, Indianola Mississippi Seeds and Live in Cook County Jail.

Producer Stewart Levine revisits the drug- and booze-ridden sessions for the 1981 Grammy-winning album There Must Be a Better World Somewhere, and gives his reasons for bringing King and The Crusaders together for two jazzy albums that revitalized the music of Riley B. King — the name "Riley" was a tribute to King's father's plantation boss, O'Riley, abbreviated because the baby bluesman "didn't look Irish."

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Greg Quill is a Star entertainment writer.