We don’t usually support kings at Above the Crowds.
But B.B. gets a pass.
B.B. King recorded Live in Cook County Jail on September 10, 1970, in the yard of Chicago’s Cook County Jail, in front of 2,117 prisoners. Most of them were young Black men, with the civil rights movement still very close in the rear-view mirror and the prison system becoming one of the places where race, poverty and power were impossible to ignore.
Nice history lesson, dude. But to understand the album, the context matters. Here’s why.
This is not Live at the Regal, with the crowd already leaning towards him. It’s a prison yard in early seventies America.
Actually, the first thing we hear is the inmates booing the prison administration with their lungs out. Tough crowd, but fair enough.
From there, we get B.B. King playing, talking, joking, stretching songs, letting the crowd answer him. On Worry, Worry, Worry, especially, he turns the performance into something closer to a conversation.
And that conversation is the whole point.
Because for those minutes, much like in The Shawshank Redemption, the inmates are not inmates anymore. They are regular fans at a B.B. King concert. And maybe that’s what makes Live in Cook County Jail special fifty years later.
Or maybe it’s that we can hear the blues doing what it is supposed to do. No matter who you are, or where you are.
Even in Cook County Jail. Or especially there.
