“The strings were heavy as hell”: Lee Ritenour on the time he played B.B. King’s prized guitar Lucille

B.B. King had more than one Lucille throughout his illustrious career. Yet, the Gibson ES-330 and ES-355 models not only accompanied King across countless performances, but under the umbrella name Lucille, have also been the subject of many anecdotes. Prolific jazz guitarist Lee Ritenour now adds his own story to Lucille's lore.

“I was at a festival with him. I had performed with my band and opened for him. I forget where this was,” recalls Ritenour in a new interview with MusicRadar.

“After my performance, he went on, and he was on his encore, and he put his guitar down on the stand and he was just singing. He saw me standing by the curtain there, offstage, and he shouts, ‘Lee, come on out!’ And he says to the audience, ‘Lee Ritenour! Come on out!’ [Laughs] I said, ‘I can’t, B.B. – my guitar’s all packed up. I don’t have my stuff.’ He said, ‘That’s okay, play mine.’"

Stunned, Ritenour went on stage and grabbed King's famed Lucille.

“First of all, I put the strap on and the guitar was down to my knees, right!? He was a big guy. So then I adjusted that, and then I tried to play his guitar… His guitar!

“The strings were off his Gibson guitar, like, I have never experienced anything like that. It was like piano strings, and it was so far off the neck, so high off the neck, and then there was all this built-in grease. It was B.B. King grease on the guitar that had been baked on there for years and the strings were heavy as hell.”

He continues, “I couldn’t physically play the guitar! And I tell this story because I was so blown away. He was so strong, and he had that vibrato.

“That’s why I remember this story, ‘cos he had this vibrato that is hard to do when you are playing a guitar like mine, that’s normally strung up. But on his guitar? He was something else. He was very special, and he loved sharing the stage with all the guitar players. He was just something else.”

This wasn't Ritenour's only encounter with King. He was one of King's session guitarists, playing rhythm guitar on the 1997 album King Size. When speaking about these sessions, Ritenour remembers that “B.B. was incredibly strong on guitar. He had this incredible vibrato that nobody on the entire planet could play vibrato on the guitar like he did.”

In 1997, King gifted Pope John Paul II one of his Lucilles, which was later given as a prize during one of the Vatican's charity fundraising events. This particular Lucille was recently up for auction, selling for $45,000 ($48,773).