This always bothered me about blues artists. Muddy Waters was big into it as were John Lee Hooker, Buddy Guy, and T-bone Walker to a lesser extent.

Some of the biggest, baddest, most talented and revered blues artists in the world, and all you ever hear them talk about is how Vaughan, Ford, Clapton, Richards, Gallagher, Mayall, Winter, and other white blues musicians came along and “stole” their work and made millions on it while they were still stuck playing smokey bars in Chicago for drinks and tips.

To be a great black blues guitarist this is almost a required mantra.

And frankly, I don’t buy it. No one can deny that Clapton took inspiration from B.B. and others [he acknowledges as much freely himself in his Robert Johnson materials], but Clapton’s career has been so much more than that. As have the others.

And what’s more, B.B. has marketed himself quite successfully over the years. He has little to be blue about, I suspect.

I mean, someday for sure we’ll all be called to account for having purchased Gary Moore albums thinking they were real blues, but still, anyone who has listened to Peter Green play knows that it ain’t about the color of your skin. These guys can make real, meaningful, beautiful music, in some cases even while in the midst of severe mental illness, and it is sad, deep, inspiring, and lonely all at the same time. In short, it is the blues. And it doesn’t matter one damn bit who came up with the riff first.

B.B. King will always be the King for sure, but it’s wrong for him or any of the other great ones to dismiss the imitators as mere copycats. Imitation is the most sincere form of flattery, and in that respect B.B. is not just the king, he’s a god.