AFTER the recent sad death of John Lee Hooker, the mighty B.B. King, the ''king of the blues'', surely now reigns supreme as the archetypal worldwide blues ambassador.

Even though B.B. will be 76 in a couple of months time, he still plays constantly - although not quite the 340 shows a year he used to play - and has received dozens, if not hundreds, of honours of all sorts from all over the world.

BB King is a genuinely inspirational figure, a black man born into farm labour during the Great Depression who has risen to become one of the most famous, popular and personally well-liked figures in modern popular music.

When he tallies his years in showbusiness, BB (born Riley B. King, incidentally) generally begins counting at 1946, by which time he'd learned singing in church back in Mississippi and guitar from a minister uncle, performing regularly in a gospel quartet when he wasn't working 12 hour days out in the fields, mostly walking farm implements behind a mule.

When World War II hit the United States, farm workers were excused from military service if they were paid more than the five dollars and 15 cents a month that King had previously received as a hired hand. He was therefore able to take public buses to Mississippi cities like Jackson and Greenville and play the blues on street corners where, he subsequently recalled, he was ''making more money on a weekend than I could in a week.''

At the end of the war BB moved north to Memphis, living for a while with his cousin, the bluesman Bukka White, and got his first professional break with a 10-minute daily program on a local radio station, playing the blues then extolling the decidedly dubious virtues of a mostly-alcohol cure-all tincture called Peptikon Tonic.

Popularity

By 1954, though, he'd decided to make touring his principal activity.

''I noticed that my popularity and income would be better if I started moving about. I'd been to New York by then and a lot of the major cities and I came over pretty well,'' BB recalls.

Even so, his audience, certainly for his live shows, was almost exclusively black and so it came as something of a surprise for BB when he was invited to headline one of his concerts by Bill Graham. Graham was something of a legend in the late sixties for founding the concert hall known as the Fillmore West, where the psychedelic music revolution represented by the likes of the Grateful Dead and Quicksilver Messenger Service was in full swing.

The white audience had, largely unknown to BB, been turned onto his electric blues by the likes of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers and Eric Clapton.

''When we used to play the Fillmore before Bill Graham bought it,'' BB recalls, ''it used to be about a 95 percent black audience. This time it seemed like about 98 percent white, so I thought maybe we had gone to the wrong place!

''I was kind of frightened because I was considering whether people would like me this time. Bill himself introduced me and then everyone stood up. It was the first standing ovation I ever had in my life. I cried because I'd never had it happen before.''

Since then, of course, BB has continued ignoring barriers, making albums that gleefully ignore so-called musical boundaries between the blues and other sorts of music. He may infuriate purists but pretty much everyone else loves him, especially anyone who's ever experienced one of his live shows.

''I'm supposed to be the entertainer, the guy who goes out there to make the audience feel good, to make them enjoy what I have to present,'' observes this profoundly humble man. ''You get out and you work as hard as you can. You try to play as many tunes as you can with as much care in doing it as possible.''

BB King, supported by Keb Mo, performs at the Bridgewater Hall, Lower Mosley Street. 7.30pm. £24.50-£39.50.

Tweet