“我对露西尔（Lucille）非常疯狂，露西尔（Lucille）把我从种植园带走。”Lucille。但是，尽管流行音乐的年鉴充满了吉他手与乐器形成精神纽带，但BB对Lucille的热爱似乎是特别的 - 两者确实是密不可分的。
And yet, the reality is that Lucille wasn’t a guitar… not one guitar, anyway. The first guitar to bear the name was a Gibson L-30 archtop that BB had bought for $30.As King was fond of retelling，吉他的名字来自酒吧里的一个事件，几乎使他丧命。
In 1949, a young King was playing in a bar in Twist, Arkansas in the dead of winter, and lacking anything better, the building was heated with a large drum of filled with burning kerosene. If you’re thinking that doesn’t sound particularly safe, you’d be right. King recalled that two patrons of the bar got into a fight over a woman, the drum was knocked over, and in short order the bar was ablaze.
King managed to make it out in one piece, but realising he’d left his guitar inside, he dashed back in to retrieve it, just making it out in time as the wooden building collapsed in flames around him.
In the aftermath, King learned that the name of the woman who sparked the fight was Lucille, and so he decided to christen his guitar likewise “to remind me never to do a thing like that again”.
名字叫什么？
So that L-30 was the first Lucille, but it certainly wasn’t the last. In truth, King gave the name to whatever guitar was his main squeeze at the time. “Fenders, Gretsches, Silvertones – you name them, I’ve probably had one,” he toldGuitar Playerback in 2007. “When I found that Gibson with the long neck, that did it. That’s like finding your wife forever.”
当然，那个“吉布森的吉布森”是标志性的吉布森ES模型，在接下来的几十年中，国王将演奏模型的几乎所有变体-335s，345s，355s，355s……所有这些都被称为露西尔（Lucille）。
It’s no surprise that eventually Gibson cottoned on to this fact and in 1980, launched a signature model that would bear his name – the Gibson Lucille. With its gloss black finish and tortoiseshell scratchplate, it might have looked like any other 335 from a distance, but the differences were important.
King had often stuffed the f-holes on his guitars to minimise feedback, so when it came to creating Lucille, he asked for them to be dispensed with altogether. Further differing from the norm, unlike practically every Gibson guitar, the neck is made of maple instead of mahogany.
In terms of electronics and hardware, the guitar owes much to the ES-355TD-SV model that had been his most recent Lucille, complete with stereo wiring and a Varitone switch, while the tailpiece swaps the standard stopbar in favour of a TP-6 Fine Tune model.
然后是珍珠中的床头柜，引人注目的皇冠和“ BB King”镶嵌物，完美地体现了吉他的毛绒黑色和金色美学。这是一位适合国王的吉他。
BB played various versions of the Gibson Lucille from 1980 until his death in 2015, but the guitar’s power endures. For 2019,吉布森（Gibson）已重新发行了露西尔（Lucille）– but dressed in Alpine White.
It might not be exactly the same Lucille that BB played for much of his later career, but given the guitar’s long and complex history, it’s also rather fitting.
Read our archived interview with BB King这里。