When I read this morning that the legendary master of the blues guitar, Mr. B.B. King, had passed away overnight at the age of 89, I found myself trying to recall when and where I first became acquainted with his work. Not surprisingly, for me anyhow, it was in a movie.

Now, I had some familiarity with blues music by my early twenties. Like a lot of people — maybe even most people — of my general age, I was introduced to the form by John Belushi and Dan Ackroyd, first with their Blues Brothers sketches on Saturday Night Live, and then through the feature film spun off from those. And I’d had an epiphany at some point that much of the rock music I enjoyed was heavily rooted in the blues. (Led Zeppelin took on a whole new dimension for me once I understood that a huge chunk of the oeuvre was simply blues cranked up to 11.) But somehow I remained only vaguely aware of actual blues music.

And then in 1991, I bought the soundtrack for Thelma & Louise, the Susan Sarandon/Geena Davis buddy-adventure movie that had turned out to be an unexpected hit… and unexpectedly controversial. (I never did fully get the gender-based controversy surrounding that film, personally; in spite of what a lot of people were saying, I didn’t think it was hostile to men. On the contrary, I loved it… it remains one of my favorites from that era.) Whatever else you might think of that movie, though, it had a great soundtrack… and one of my favorite tracks on it was “Better Not Look Down” by the King of the Blues himself, B.B. King. I liked it so well, I started exploring the rest of B.B. King’s oeuvre, as well as the rest of the blues genre. And while rock will always be my first love, I soon learned the dividing line between the two is very thin, and there’s a lot of listening pleasure to be found in the blues as well.

This song isn’t what you probably imagine when you think of “the blues.” It’s upbeat and relentlessly optimistic in outlook, without any mention of cheatin’ women or hard times… but I soon learned that there’s a lot more to the blues than just those cliched cries of pain. It is possible to play “happy blues,” for lack of a better word. B.B. King could play both kinds — any kind — with equal grace and mastery.

This version of the song isn’t the exact one that appeared in the film, which I assume was an album track. Instead, this is a live performance from 1983, and while it doesn’t feature much in the way of guitar pyrotechnics, it does show how effortless B.B. made it look, and what a warm, gentlemanly presence he had on stage:

Anne and I had the privilege of seeing him perform live twice, both incredible concerts. Not the raucous, arena-rock spectacles I’m usually drawn to, more like old-fashioned road shows from an earlier time. We had a third opportunity to see him as well, but for reasons I no longer remember, we didn’t make it happen. It seems like there was something else around the same time competing for our attention or our dollars, and I said something brilliant like “We’ve seen him before, we can catch him another time…”