By JIM BEAUGEZ • Photos courtesy of Hammons & Associates
During his 100th birthday celebration, B.B. King will once again grace the stage at Club Ebony a decade after his passing
For the first time in more than a decade, B.B. King will appear onstage at Club Ebony, the Indianola juke joint where he performed regularly for years and which he eventually purchased outright.
Although his final concert there in 2014 was billed as his last homecoming performance, that claim now may come with an asterisk. While it’s true King won’t be there in the flesh on September 13 as his family, friends, and fans celebrate his 100th birthday ten years after he passed, his voice, music, and lifelike image will be the stars of the show—only in hologram form.
“My grandfather, being who he is, if I want to hear his voice, all I have to do is go to YouTube or pull out a CD,” says Krystal Young-King, one of King’s granddaughters who will attend the event. “But I haven’t seen him in concert now in ten years, so to be able to see a concert where he’s doing a majority of his songs that made him who he is? I’m excited and emotional.”
Caretakers of King’s legacy at the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, where the blues legend was laid to rest, worked with developers to create the hologrammed King from concert footage, candid imagery, and music from his six-decade recording career. The hope is to recreate some of the laid-back magic of his annual homecoming concerts for those who experienced them as well as younger fans who didn’t have the opportunity.
“We want people to feel like they’re at a B.B. King show,” says Robert Terrell, deputy director of the museum, “so when people walk in, it’ll be kind of like stepping into time.”
The King hologram was created with help from artificial intelligence to dial in his mannerisms and voice. “It’s all in service of creating this experience for people to feel like they are part of the memory that he is reliving in a way on that stage, as well as creating new memories for them with this experience,” says Ari Palitz, a virtual-reality expert and experiential creator whose firm developed the hologram.
“The AI isn’t just trying to replicate what he looks like, but also who he was and what made him unique in his personality, in his gestures, and in his movements,” Palitz continues. “It’s not just him on stage performing. It is him talking, speaking to the audience, and telling them stories about his life.”
Even the most subtle touches enhance the realism of the hologram. “I’ve never seen one that’s this good,” Terrell says. “You’ve got a hologram that can also project a shadow on the wall. If you raise his hand, the shadow raises. It’s going to be pretty interesting.”
King, whose career took him from humble beginnings in the Delta to stages around the world, was born Riley B. King in 1925 in the Berclair community and spent his childhood in and around towns like Kilmichael and Indianola. He took his burgeoning musical talents to Memphis, where he adopted the moniker “Blues Boy,” later shortened to “B.B.,” as a radio DJ and performer on Beale Street.
By the early 1950s, he had recorded his first national hit, “Three O’Clock Blues,” and was performing in juke joints across the South. When King’s 1970 tune “The Thrill Is Gone” broke through to mainstream audiences, he became a global ambassador for the blues as a growing base of rock and roll fans embraced the blues artist’s music.
In his later years, as he continued to play homecoming concerts in Indianola, he began making preparations for the B.B. King Museum and Delta Interpretive Center, which paints a picture not just of King’s rise to fame, but of the context that shaped him—a world of segregation, inequality, and resilience.
As visitors to the museum move from exhibits on his early Delta upbringing to displays that chart his decades of touring and recording, artifacts offer a grounded look at the reality of being a Black musician in the mid-20th-century South. Tour ledgers, handwritten notes, and even practical items like a travel mess kit tell stories of road life under Jim Crow, when meals and lodgings weren’t always guaranteed. One of King’s actual tour buses is parked at the end of the exhibit, a statement on the lengths he traveled to perform his music.
King died in May 2015, just months shy of his 90th birthday, and his passing drew thousands of admirers who lined Beale Street and Highway 61 to mark his final journey home. He was laid to rest on the museum grounds, just steps from the cotton gin where he once worked.
Malika Polk-Lee, executive director of the B.B. King Museum, says the hologram is a creative way to help sustain his memory and the museum he envisioned.
“We’re doing this in the form of a fundraiser for the museum, because we are a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and that means we live off donations and grants,” she says. “We’ve had to be creative in figuring out how we continue to raise funds to sustain this museum to share Mr. King’s legacy with the world, and this hologram gives us the ability to share his great talent and contributions to American music in a new and relevant way.”
The museum has planned a slate of events to coincide with King’s centennial birthday, declaring September 4 as B.B. King Day and hosting a community festival on September 6 with live music and vendors. A family parade will march down Beale Street on September 14, while two days later, on his actual birthday, the museum will serve birthday cake to visitors and the Indianola community. But for some, the night of September 13 at Club Ebony, King’s home away from the road located two blocks from the museum, will be an otherworldly highlight.
“Club Ebony was this kind of safe place where he could relax,” Palitz says. “He didn’t have to put on the tuxedo, and he could just play and speak with the audience, tell stories, and communicate with them, in an intimate way. He had a deep gratitude and appreciation for the space and the memories he had in that space, and our approach with this was to relive those memories, to celebrate those memories, and to invite the audience into those memories.”
While eager to celebrate her grandfather’s birthday and legacy, Young-King is also moved by the music world’s continued embrace of King, his music, and what he represented.
“When I think about him, I think about the fact that people still care that much even ten years after his death,” she says. “Not only coming from his family and friends, but to see the world still care, it’s hard to put into words. I’m so grateful.”
