Where Scientology and Ancient Mesopotamia Meet: What I Learned from the B.B. King Interview
This week, the HistoryMakers Student Brand Ambassadors were tasked with watching the following YouTube video, which features a 2003 HistoryMakers interview with famed blues musician Riley B. King—better known as B.B. King. His interviewer was Isaac Hayes, another notable musician. B.B., who passed away in 2015, was known for his hits “3 O’Clock Blues,” “The Thrill Is Gone,” and “Sweet Little Angel.” Then we were told to research the names mentioned in the video for several hours and then write a blog post here about what we learned.
Honestly, this assignment is pretty difficult for me to complete. With this sort of thing, you come across so much information that it’s pretty difficult to synthesize it into something coherent that isn’t a 12-page research paper or something. However, the instructions for the assignment fortunately included these thought questions to consider when writing the blog post: What did you learn? What surprised you? What research rabbit-holes did you go down in the database? Since I’m not sure how better to organize this post, I’m going to endeavor to answer those questions as best as I can. Watching the interview and then researching some of what they talked about on it led me to many different websites and several stories in the digital archive, so this really might be the best way to do this.
B.B. King playing the guitar. Photo by Scott Harrison via Getty.
What did you learn?
In 2015, Rolling Stone magazine rated B.B. King the sixth-greatest guitarist of all time, right above Chuck Berry and right below someone named Jeff Beck. (Number one was Jimi Hendrix. Black excellence.)
This list led me to want to learn a bit more about the history of the guitar. I found this informative article from the Musicians Institute. It says that the guitar has ancestral roots in two instruments: the oud and the lute, both of which are older than recorded history. The earliest depiction of an instrument that eventually developed into a lute dates to between 3500 and 3200 BCE and was found in modern-day Iraq. Consequently this area is known as Mesopotamia and is known as the “cradle of civilization”—that is, the first place on Earth where humans are known to have developed the agricultural practices that allowed for the creation of large-scale settlements.
But back to B.B. King. Apparently, even though he did commercials for Wendy’s and McDonald’s, the man himself was a vegetarian. Like me!
Thanks to his name being mentioned in the YouTube video, I learned about Maynard Jackson, who I had not heard of before. Jackson was the first Black mayor of Atlanta, or of any major city in the American South. His wife, Valerie Richardson Jackson, has an interview in the Digital Archive.
A plaque from ancient Mesopotamia depicting a person playing a lute. The photograph was taken in the Oriental Institute Museum at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois. (Source: Wikimedia Commons)
What surprised you?
In the “An Evening With B.B. King Video,” B.B. mentions off-handedly that he met the pope, but doesn’t say which pope it was. I did a little bit of digging and determined that the pope in question was John Paul II, who was pope from 1978-2005. When they met, B.B. apparently gave the pope one of his famous Lucille guitars, according to this Catholic website. This was surprising since, of course, jazz and blues were thought to be the “devil’s music” for much of the earlier part of the twentieth century.
I was also surprised that B.B. King was so wildly popular that he toured in Europe! That might just be my age showing. I’m 24.
I was surprised that Isaac Hayes had gone from a Christian who thought the nickname “Black Moses” was too sacrilegious to someone extolling the merits of Scientology. I’m one of those people who has done enough research to come to the conclusion that Scientology is a cult made up by a science fiction author, but I recognize that not everyone has to agree with me.
In a similar vein, I was surprised to learn that Hayes voiced the character of Chef on South Park, an adult cartoon I never really watched but am nevertheless familiar with due to its outsized influence on pop culture (especially when I was in middle school). To be honest, I just never expected something like South Park to come up in the digital archive. Like, ever.
Lastly, I was surprised that Isaac Hayes was crowned an honorary king of a region of Ghana for his philanthropic work there. No, really.
Chef, the South Park character that Isaac Hayes voiced from 1997 to 2006.
What research rabbit-holes did you go down in the database?
I briefly spent some time looking up other musicians.
With regard to Isaac Hayes’s Scientology, I learned from researching outside of the digital archive that Hayes stopped working on South Park because of his religion. He apparently quit the show after an episode parodying Scientology. But, his son said that someone made him quit—which doesn’t help me change my opinion that Scientology is shady.
Thinking of Isaac Hayes’s involvement with South Park made me think of the Broadway musical The Book of Mormon, which parodies the religious text of the same name that is considered holy to members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints—better known as the Mormons. I decided to search for a bit in the archive about the Mormon religion. I was surprised to find more than a few clips talking about Mormonism, which I didn’t expect.
The Book of Mormon is also mentioned offhand in one interview with Imam Vernon Fareed, a former member of the Nation of Islam. (It should be noted that the Nation of Islam is considered to practice an unorthodox branch of the religion.) In the clip, Fareed talks about a part of Nation of Islam theology that claims white people were created by a supergenius Black scientist named Yakub. I didn’t know about this before, and it’s kind of a lot to process. Um, just google it. Fareed is also from my home area of Hampton Roads, so that was cool to see.
Screenshot from The HistoryMakers Digital Archive interview with Imam Vernon Fareed in which he explains how people used to believe the story of Yakub.
Well, that’s just some of the most interesting tidbits I found while researching this past week. There’s more to include, but I can anticipate this blog post becoming ridiculously long. So, I’ll stop here.
Things at school are going all right. My HistoryMakers outreach efforts are slow but going. I have more meetings slated for the upcoming week.
Until next time!