I Like To Live The Love

B.B. King's Pop Crossover and the Recording of "I Like To Live The Love"

The early 1970s found B.B. King in a position that few blues artists of his generation had ever occupied: he was famous. After decades of relentless touring, of playing hundreds of dates a year across the African American entertainment circuit known as the Chitlin' Circuit, of recording for labels that reached primarily Black audiences, King had crossed over into the broader American mainstream through a combination of the blues revival's intervention, his 1969 breakthrough with "The Thrill Is Gone," and the enthusiastic embrace of younger white rock audiences who had discovered the blues through the British Invasion artists who had studied it so devotedly. By the turn of the decade, B.B. King was not merely a great blues musician but a recognized American cultural figure.

This mainstream recognition created both new opportunities and new pressures. The commercial logic of crossover success suggested the possibility of reaching even broader audiences through recordings that moved somewhat away from the blues idiom's core conventions and toward the sounds of contemporary pop, soul, and funk. King was not resistant to this logic; he had always been a commercially minded artist who understood the necessity of reaching audiences in the terms they were prepared to accept, and his curiosity about music beyond the blues was genuine rather than merely strategic. He had long admired the jazz tradition and had absorbed much of its harmonic sophistication into his guitar playing.

"I Like To Live The Love" was released in 1973 on ABC Records, the label to which King had moved from Bluesway in 1962 and which had been his commercial home during the period of his mainstream breakthrough. The record represented a deliberate movement toward the contemporary soul and pop idiom that was dominating American radio in the early 1970s, drawing on the lush orchestral arrangements and the warm, funk-influenced rhythm section sounds that characterized the best commercial soul production of the era. The production gave King's guitar a somewhat different role than it occupied in pure blues contexts, placing it within a denser sonic environment where it functioned as one element among many rather than as the dominant expressive vehicle.

The record reached number twenty-eight on the Billboard Hot 100, King's highest pop chart placement in many years and a demonstration that the crossover audience was genuinely receptive to his particular combination of blues authenticity and contemporary production values. On the rhythm-and-blues chart, where King had been a presence since the late 1940s, the performance was similarly strong. The record's commercial success validated the approach and suggested the viability of a strategy that positioned King as a figure who could move between blues authenticity and contemporary soul without compromising either.

The tension between maintaining blues credibility and pursuing mainstream pop success was one that King navigated throughout this phase of his career with characteristic pragmatism. He was not the first blues artist to face this challenge, nor would he be the last, but his particular position as the most widely recognized living blues musician gave the negotiation unusual public visibility. Blues purists occasionally expressed discomfort with his more commercially oriented recordings, while King himself consistently maintained that the blues was a living tradition that had always absorbed and adapted to contemporary influences rather than a museum artifact to be preserved in amber.

The guitar playing that King brought to "I Like To Live The Love," even within the more commercial production context, remained unmistakably his. The vibrato technique he had developed, his particular way of bending strings and sustaining notes, the conversational quality of his phrasing, these were characteristics so deeply individual that no production context could neutralize them. His voice on the record carried the same qualities: the warmth, the expressiveness, the sense of a man singing from genuine feeling rather than technical calculation.

King's career after the early 1970s crossover period continued to evolve through collaborations with artists across multiple genres, including celebrated recordings with Bobby "Blue" Bland, a Grammy-winning collaboration with Eric Clapton in 2000, and sustained touring that maintained his profile as an active and vital performer until shortly before his death in May 2015. "I Like To Live The Love" stands as a document of a particular moment in his trajectory, when the possibility of genuine mainstream pop success seemed both real and worth pursuing, and when his particular brand of blues-inflected soul found its largest pop audience.