Guess Who/Them Changes

Guess Who / Them Changes: B.B. King's Double-Sided Single and His Blues Royalty Status in 1972

By 1972, B.B. King occupied a position in American music that had been earned over more than two decades of relentless performance and recording, a position that combined genuine artistic mastery with a level of popular recognition that few blues musicians before him had achieved. His double-sided single pairing "Guess Who" with "Them Changes" represented the commercial packaging of an artist who had successfully crossed over from the specialized blues market to a broader rock and pop audience in the years following his landmark appearance at the Fillmore West and the associated live album that documented it.

"Guess Who" is a blues ballad that draws on the classic slow blues tradition in which King was unmatched. The song's structure and emotional content belonged to the world of heartache and loss that had defined the blues vocabulary for decades, but King's approach to that vocabulary was never merely formulaic. His guitar work, in particular, brought an emotional specificity to even the most familiar blues scenarios, each note on his beloved guitar Lucille carrying the accumulated weight of his experience and the precision of a master who had found the exact expressive language for what he wanted to say. King's vibrato technique, developed over decades of performance, was one of the most instantly recognizable sounds in popular music by the time "Guess Who" was released, a signature so distinctive that even non-specialist listeners could identify it immediately.

The pairing with "Them Changes" on the double-sided single was commercially astute, offering radio programmers and listeners two distinct aspects of King's range. "Them Changes" was a track more aligned with the uptempo, funkier end of the blues-soul spectrum that had helped King cross over to rock audiences in the early 1970s. The Buddy Miles composition had become a rock standard after Miles recorded it with his band and it received extensive rock radio exposure. B.B. King's version transformed the material through his own blues sensibility, giving it a depth and earthiness that the original, for all its energy, had not quite achieved.

The double-sided single was released by ABC Records in 1972, the label that had been home to King since the mid-1960s and that had provided the infrastructure for his crossover success. ABC had recognized King's commercial potential for a broader audience earlier than most labels might have, and the company's support had been instrumental in making possible the touring and recording activity that brought him to the attention of the rock and festival audience. By 1972 that crossover was fully established, and releases like this double-sided single operated in a market that included both King's core blues audience and the significantly larger rock audience he had acquired.

The sessions from which these tracks were drawn reflected King's working method of the period, typically involving a core band of accomplished session players who could provide the musical foundation for his guitar work and vocals without imposing their own stylistic preferences too heavily on the proceedings. King was always the center and focal point of his recordings, the arrangements designed to frame and support his guitar and voice rather than to create a collective sound in the manner of a rock band. The production approach at ABC during this period gave King's recordings a slightly slicker finish than his earlier recordings for the smaller blues labels, which was a source of some critical debate among blues purists who preferred the rawer sound of his earlier work but which served the crossover strategy effectively.

The critical reception to King's work in the early 1970s was overwhelmingly positive, with both the specialist blues press and the broader rock press acknowledging his mastery. Rolling Stone and other rock publications that might have ignored a blues artist a decade earlier were now treating King as a major figure deserving serious critical attention, and his recordings received the kind of coverage that reflected his elevated commercial and cultural status. Reviews of the double-sided single praised the quality of both tracks while noting the different emotional registers they occupied, the slow ache of the blues ballad on one side and the more energetic funk-blues on the other.

King's touring activity in 1972 kept him in constant public view and reinforced the commercial performance of his recordings. He was widely regarded as the reigning king of blues guitar at a moment when that title carried more popular cultural weight than it had for decades, thanks to the rock generation's enthusiastic embrace of the blues tradition and the elevation of King and a handful of his contemporaries to the status of living masters. The double-sided single participated in this cultural moment, offering listeners a compact demonstration of what made King's music essential: the combination of technical mastery, emotional depth, and the ineffable quality that came from a lifetime of dedicated practice in a tradition he genuinely loved and understood from the inside.

The song "Guess Who" in particular has endured as a representative example of King's ballad work, included in compilations and retrospective collections that trace the arc of his career from his earliest recordings through the late-career concerts that continued to demonstrate his command of the form he had done so much to define. Its simplicity of structure and directness of emotional expression, combined with King's guitar work, made it the kind of blues recording that could serve as an introduction to the form for uninitiated listeners while still satisfying the expectations of dedicated fans.