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B. B. King - The Thrill Is Gone (Live at Montreux, 1993)

The composers are Roy Hawkins and Rick Darnell.

If Muddy Waters led the way in developing the saltiest-sounding blues, his contemporary B. B. King, from Memphis Tennessee, did the same for the sweetest. King favored the rich, relatively clean bell-like tone of a hollowbody Gibson formuch of his career (model ES-335, contrasting with Muddy Waters’ hardbody Fender telecaster), and he tried, as he noted more than once, to “make it sing like the human voice” – in particular his own voice, which is celebrated for its warm timbre, fine vibrato, and sincere depth of expression.

He also favored toned-down themes for his lyrics, emphasizing love, desire, and loss, but steering clear of misogyny, violence, and other darker themes.

No B. B. King song is better known than The Thrill Is Gone, a popular hit recorded at the time of his comeback in the late 1960s.

The song combines the solid foundation of King’s signature style with the influence of contemporary rock and soul music, including a tremolo-laden electric piano, booming electric bass, orchestral string section, and straight (rather than swing) rhythm. The formis twelve-bar verse blues,with a twist: it is in a minor key,which lends an element of pathos to the song (as it did also in the third stanza of “St. Louis Blues”), matching the lyrics, which express almost unrelieved sadness and loss. King uses his voice and his guitar with equal skill to delve into this mood.

The vocal melody is pentatonic, and based on a classic motive, falling from the blue fifth through the blue third to the tonic; there has been a variant of it in every song I’ve analyzed, with or without an arch shape, and it is basic to his style.

As we might expect, he repeats the melody for the second line. For the third, he rises up to a climax on the blue seventh (“you know you done me wrong”) before returning to a variant of the falling-fifth motive as a conclusion. Each stanza repeats this melody, but he renders each stanza, and indeed each line, in a different way.

King’s lyrics do not tell a linear story so much as circle around a simple theme, namely the singer’s mournfully telling his lover that the relationship, and its magic, are over.

His delivery almost never falls where one would expect, but instead hinges on offbeats, the offbeats of offbeats, or in the mysterious, ambiguous crevices between rhythmic pulses. The first phrase of the first stanza, for example, if speaking were a guide, would be rendered as “The thrill is gone,” with emphases on the italicized words.

King does sing the phrase that way; but he counterbalances that emphasis, too, by beginning the phrase after rather than on the downbeat, and then placing “is” on the beat while the stronger syllables “thrill” and “gone” fall in the cracks on either side. This placement is so subtle that we don’t even notice it unless we listen closely. It is typical of King’s deep sense of swing; but it also serves to bring out the special meaningfulness of each word at this specific moment in the song. The same treatment is applied to all the words of the stanza, which avoid emphasis on beats and never fall on downbeats. Only at the very end, on “day,” is there an unequivocal arrival of a strong word squarely on a strong beat (although here, too, it is not the downbeat, but the weaker third beat of the bar). King’s guitar style in this song is also as remarkable for what it does not do as for what it does. It engages, for example, in almost no call and response with his voice (that is left, to some extent, to the backup guitar and piano). Instead, he uses unhurried solos to frame the sung stanzas. These solos are in his signature single-note style, making frequent use of bent notes and relying extensively on the tonic, as well as the blue third and fifth above it (akin to his vocal lines). They include a couple of recurring phrases, but he does not build to any strong climax, nor does he emphasize some other form of expressive development through the song. Like his singing, his guitar solos help establish a mood, and then dwell in it. In the middle of his concluding solo he rises to repeated notes on the high octave for amoment, after which the solo very gradually melts away. A string orchestra is added to the recording, in a popular style typical of the era. It enters with the second stanza, in slow notes, then becomes more active behind the following guitar solowith a slowviolin melody. During the third stanza the strings play low in their range; during the fourth, the cellos become active and the violins rise to a higher level. The long concluding guitar solo section is particularly atmospheric. The violins return to the slow melody of the first solo for one chorus, then settle on a single chord that is held for the rest of the solo while the cellos return to the melody they played in the fourth stanza.

There are no more chord changes from this point on: the music simply floats forward to its fade-out ending.

The lyrics:

The thrill is gone

The thrill is gone away

The thrill is gone baby

The thrill is gone away

You know you done me wrong baby

And you'll be sorry someday

The thrill is gone

It's gone away from me

The thrill is gone baby

The thrill is gone away from me

Although I'll still live on

But so lonely I'll be

The thrill is gone

It's gone away for good

Oh, the thrill is gone baby

Baby its gone away for good

Someday I know I'll be over it all baby

Just like I know a man should

You know I'm free, free now baby

I'm free from your spell

I'm free, free now

I'm free from your spell

And now that it's over

All I can do is wish you well