Long live the King in modern music

Rachel Sauer — Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:51:19 +0000

Long live the King in modern music Rachel Sauer Tue, 09/30/2025 - 18:51

Rachel Sauer

In what would have been B.B. King’s 100^th birthday month, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder music scholar Shawn O’Neal considers how the legends of blues can be heard in even the fizziest pop of 2025

B.B. King was born to sharecroppers on a cotton plantation in Leflore County, Mississippi, and began his musical career in the church choir, teaching himself to play guitar while listening to the “King Biscuit Time” radio show.

Sabrina Carpenter was born in Quakertown, Pennsylvania, and began posting videos of herself singing Adele and Christina Aguilera songs on YouTube around age 10. As a teenager, she starred in the Disney Channel series “Girl Meets World.”

Culturally and musically, they’re about as different as two artists can be. But if the roots of rock ‘n’ roll and even pop grow from blues—which they do—then it should be possible to hear B.B. King and other legends of blues in the sly pop confections of Sabrina Carpenter.

Shawn O'Neal is a �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies and Center for African and African American Studies executive committee member.

So, Shawn O’Neal, a �鶹��Ѱ�� musicologist and assistant teaching professor of ethnic studies, cues up Carpenter’s song “Manchild,” currently No. 6 on the Billboard Top 100: “Right away, the first thing I hear is that call and response of where she’s singing something and then answering her own question or statement back to herself,” he notes. “Call and response is such a foundation of blues music—whether Sabrina Carpenter knows that or thinks about it, or even has to, she got that from somewhere.”

Further, he asks, who were some of the first to sing about taking care of business—working all day, making a home at night—while a no-good partner is off catting around? The women of blues.

“They were the first to talk about sexuality, to talk about the issues they were having with their partners, even sometimes to talk about the fact that they were having love interests of the same sex,” O’Neal says. “All of those tropes are very defined in (Carpenter’s) music, and then there’s just that drumbeat, that very four-on-the-floor beat that’s a hallmark of blues. I think you could take that Sabrina Carpenter song and turn it into a blues song very easily.”

And it’s not just Carpenter. Even on current Top 40 lists that seem to owe more to computers and electronics than to the sawdust floors of Delta juke joints, blues touchpoints are audible. B.B. King, who died in May 2015 but would have turned 100 this month, and other legends of blues live in the music of 2025.

“B.B. King, Robert Johnson, Ma Rainey—I hear them in all this pop music,” O’Neal says. “I can’t not hear it, because it’s there; it’s in the DNA.”

‘What they call rock ‘n’ roll’

In 1957, a Hearst interviewer asked rock ‘n’ roll pioneer Fats Domino, “Fats, how did this rock ‘n’ roll all get started, anyway?” and Domino replied, “Well, what they call rock ’n’ roll now is rhythm and blues. I’ve been playing it for 15 years in New Orleans.”

It was an acknowledgment that what felt revolutionary and sonically groundbreaking was actually a long time coming—the latest brick in a long- and well-established foundation.

It’s a direct lineage, O’Neal says: Pop grew from rock ‘n’ roll; rock grew from blues, jazz and gospel; which grew from spirituals and field hollers; and those were first-generation descendants of African musical and narrative traditions brought to North America by enslaved people.

“Spirituals were sung in the cotton fields on the plantations,” O’Neal explains. “People were creating this music as subliminal communication, and the enslavement masters didn’t understand what they were talking about. They had to create a new language, and so much of it was speaking to spirituality—save us, help us, let me find some solace. It comes from pain and struggle and being completely removed from who you are, and we can sugarcoat it and syrup it up, but foundationally that’s where American music is coming from.”

Though the roots of American music are twisting and complex—and also woven of European folk and classical traditions—there’s a through line of African American musical tradition, O’Neal says. Gospel evolved from spirituals and give birth to its lyrically secular offspring of blues, which birthed jazz, rock and pop, as well as the direct descendants that are rap and hip-hop.

�鶹��Ѱ��Boulder music scholar Shawn O'Neal notes that blues legends like B.B. King stood on the shoulders of musical giants such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (pictured above), Lead Belly and Robert Johnson. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

The earliest blues artists began developing a distinctive sound that became known for 12-bar chord progressions—a form based on the I, IV and V chords in a musical key—that are fundamental to the blues genre and are prominent in rock ‘n’ roll, O’Neal says. Classic blues music also followed a pattern of one line being repeated four times in a verse, which 20th-century artists evolved the AAB pattern that became the blues standard: a three-line verse structure in blues music where the first line (A) is repeated, and the third line (B) offers a conclusion or response, often using a "question-question-answer" pattern within a 12-bar blues progression.

Blues legends like B.B. King, who stood on the shoulders of musical giants such as Lead Belly and Robert Johnson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, experimented with the foundational elements of blues, which also included the “walking bass” rhythms and pitch-flattened “blue notes,” and broadened the sound and scope of the genre. Rock and pop, as well as myriad blues subgenres, were natural progressions, O’Neal says.

Drenched in the blues

Even now, as cross-pollinated and subdivided as music is, O’Neal says, listeners hear the blues regardless of whether they recognize it: “For example, when you think about the foundations of electronic music or EDM, we’re talking about house music, and those DJs were originally playing rhythm and blues records. And in pop, you hear that foundation of disco, and they were also playing soul and rhythm and blues in the clubs.

“None of this music being played today was conjured out of thin air; it’s based on musical traditions that go back 100, 200 years.”

He adds that in hip-hop culture, B.B. King has been sampled from the earliest days of the genre “because those were the records in our parents’ record collections. And obviously it’s never been just Black artists who’ve sampled and built on the blues. If you start at a place like Led Zeppelin, they obviously were heavily influenced by B.B. King and just drenched in blues, Jimmy Page especially. You take songs like ‘Since I’ve Been Loving You’ or ‘The Song Remains the Same’ and slow them down to that really draggy riff—that’s blues.”

When O’Neal has taught students to hear these influences in Reiland Rabaka's Introduction to Hip Hop Studies classes and Critical Survey of African American music, “they come up to me after almost every class saying, ‘I never knew that was in there.’”

The challenge, he says, is respecting the artistic quest for newness and innovation while acknowledging and honoring the foundation on which it lives.

“As an artist, you have to understand that even if you want to think it’s your own original song, it’s still based off things that already happened,” says O’Neal, who also is a renowned DJ and musician. “Taylor Swift? Well, that’s Motown, that’s what she’s doing—three chords, simple progressions, prominent melodies, emotional lyrics. Whether artists now want to acknowledge it or not, the sounds they’re playing started a long time ago.”

Did you enjoy this article? Subscribe to our newsletter. Passionate about ethnic studies? Show your support.

In what would have been B.B. King’s 100th birthday month, �鶹��Ѱ��Boulder music scholar Shawn O’Neal considers how the legends of blues can be heard in even the fizziest pop of 2025.

Traditional

White

Top image: B.B. King playing at the University of Hamburg in November 1971. (Photo: Heinrich Klaffs/Wikimedia Commons)

Laboratory for Ritual Arts and Pedagogy

Long live the King in modern music

Related Articles