Riley B. King, born in Berclair in 1925, spent many of his formative years in Kilmichael in the 1930s and 1940s before becoming B.B. King. After his parents, Albert and Nora Ella, separated when he was four, he and his mother moved to Kilmichael, where he mostly lived with his grandmother Elnora Farr, a sharecropper on Edwayne Henderson’s farm, and where he also picked cotton. In Kilmichael he first decided to pursue music, first heard the blues through the unaccompanied singing of agricultural workers and his uncle Big Jack Bennett, and absorbed important influences from blues records owned by his Aunt Mima and from her pump organ, where he first learned about chords. He also met Booker "Bukka" White as a child and later lived with him during his first stay in Memphis. His most important musical influence there was the Reverend Archie Fair of Austin Chapel Sanctified Church, whose guitar playing and singing captivated him; during a visit to King’s home, Fair let him hold his guitar and showed him three basic chords, becoming his first guitar mentor. King first performed as a singer and formed the Elkhorn Jubilee Singers with his cousin Birkett Davis, named for the Elkhorn Primitive Baptist Church that operated the one-room school he attended, where teacher Luther Henson instilled dignity, independence, and hope. His years in Kilmichael were also marked by hardship: his mother died when he was nine, his grandmother when he was fourteen, and after living alone for a time and then with Jack and Nevada Bennett, he moved to Lexington to live with his father but felt out of place and rode his bicycle back to Kilmichael. There he lived and worked on the farm of Flake Cartledge, who insisted he stay in school and helped him buy his first real guitar, a red Stella, which he played with the Elkhorn Jubilee Singers. In 1943 he followed Birkett Davis to the Indianola area, where they formed the Famous Saint John's Gospel Singers, and he later began playing blues in Indianola.
