Legendary Blues guitarist BB King has died at age 89.  His attorney Brent Bryson says he passed away peacefully in his sleep at his home in Las Vegas on Thursday night after a lengthy struggle with complications from diabetes.

Born Riley B. King in 1925, he was a farmhand on a Mississippi plantation early on, before he joined a select cadre in his generation to electrify the music of hard working and downtrodden African Americans in America’s deep south.  He took it from the Mississippi Delta to the Juke Joints of Memphis’ Beale Street and on to the world, influencing musicians including Eric Clapton.

“BB King taps into something universal,” Clapton told the Los Angeles Times in 2005.  “He can’t be confined to any one genre.  That's why I’ve called him a ‘global musician.’”

King sold millions of records worldwide and was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  His best-known song is 1970’s “The Thrill is Gone”, one of the only Blues songs to achieve hit record status.  He continued his chart success in the decade with songs like “To Know You is to Love You” and “I Like to Live the Love”.

“BB King was one of the few classic blues artists to have songs on mainstream radio,” said Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry.  “Because I was able to hear his guitar playing on the ‘The Thrill is Gone’, it showed that given the right song you could sneak some great guitar sounds into top 40 radio.”

King famously named his guitar “Lucille”, and of course there’s a story to that.  It didn’t just apply to just one instrument.

In 1949, King played at a dance hall in Twist, Arkansas, when two men started to fight.  They knocked over a lantern, sending burning fuel across the wooden floor.  After everyone had evacuated, King realized his guitar was still inside, so he rather unwisely ran in to retrieve it.  Later, he learned the two men were fighting over a woman named Lucille, so he applied the same moniker to his guitars over the years – to remind him never to do anything so dangerous ever again.

Eventually, Gibson Guitars gave the Lucille name to BB’s favorite model, as a tribute to the brand’s greatest ambassador.