Photo: B.B. King collage | From The Black American Record: A Mississippi farm owner wrote down every cent a teenage boy owed. The boy was Riley King, fourteen years old, and the world would come to call him B.B. King. Nobody ever put the day he was born on paper, but his debts got recorded all the way down to a fifty-cent wrench. He spent the next thirty years paying off bill after bill, so who ended up owing him?
The owing started on January 10, 1940. That was the day King’s grandmother, Elnora Farr, died after a short illness. She had raised him since his mother died around 1935, blind and wasted at about thirty-one. Nobody even filed a death certificate for his mother.
So what did the farm’s books say when the grandmother died? They said she owed $21.75.
The two of them had been sharecroppers. That meant working another man’s land for a share of the crop. You lived on his credit all year and settled up at harvest.
By the farm’s own figures, her debt came to more than five months of what it advanced her to live on. People called that monthly advance the furnish.
The landowner made her grandson an offer. The boy could keep the cabin and raise cotton on one acre of ground, for an allowance of $2.50 a month.
He was alone in the world, and the land came with a bill already running.
That farm record survived, and his biographer, Charles Sawyer, has published what it says. It charged the boy 8 percent interest, added every three months. It charged him forty cents for three yards of cotton sack.
On his side of the page there is one credit, a single dollar, marked “by work.” At settlement time, the cotton he raised by himself brought in $4.18.
He owed $7.54.
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[Finally a law was passed to stop people from adding their names to songwriters’ credits. These “ghost writers” stole a huge portion of royalties from the real songwriters – millions of dollars. The big reason why Elvis Presley never recorded Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You” is because she refused Colonel Parker’s request to put Elvis’ name as a co-writer. ~ Barb]
Photo: BB King collage
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