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B.B. King Sings the Blues Evra Day, Evra Day

Michael Lydon, The New York Times, 27 October 1968

A COOL breeze blew in the night outside, across the Mississippi and the cane fields that press against the town of Port Allen, La. Inside the Club Streamline, a bare cinder-block box crowded with cafeteria tables, it was noisy, stifling and rank with sweat. B.B. King was an hour late coming from Mobile, where he had played the night before, and the customers — field workers in collarless shirts, city dudes from Baton Rouge, orange-haired beauticians, oil refinery workers with their wives — were grumbling. "We want B.B." shouted a lady with a heavy sprinkling of gold teeth. "'Deed we do," answered someone, but Sonny Freeman and the Unusuals, King's touring bank, kept rolling through 'Eleanor Rigby'. Then from a side door B.B.'s valet carried in a big red guitar, plugged it into a waiting amplifier and left it gleaming on a chair in the dim yellow light.

Total word count of piece: 4701

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