LYCOS RETRIEVER 
B.B. King: Itta Bena
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The seeds of King's enduring talent were sown deep in the bluesrich Mississippi Delta. That's where Riley B. King was sired, in Itta Bena, to be exact. By no means was his childhood easy. Young King was shuttled between his mother's home and his grandmother's residence. The youth put in long days working as a sharecropper and devoutly sang the Lord's praises at church before moving to Indianola another town located in the very heart of the Delta in 1943.
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Riley B. King was born to a family of poor sharecroppers on a plantation near the small town of Itta Bena in the Mississippi Delta. King's parents separated when he was only five and his mother took him to live in the nearby hill country in Kilmichael, Mississippi. By age seven he was doing the work of a grown man in the field. He was only nine when his mother died.
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Born on September 16, 1925, on a plantation near Itta Bena, Mississippi, King was one of five children. His parents separated when he was four, and he moved with his mother to the hill country town of Kilmichael, Mississippi. Her death in 1935 forced Riley to move in with his maternal grandmother, who taught him to sharecrop. An aunt with a Victrola gave him an early introduction to records by blues greats Lonnie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson.
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Born in Itta Bena, Mississippi, King spent much of his childhood sharing time living with his mother and his grandmother and working as a sharecropper. King has said he was paid 35 cents for each 100 pounds (45 kg) of cotton he picked before discovering his other talents. At an early age, King developed a love for blues guitarists like T-Bone Walker and Lonnie Johnson and jazz artists like Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. Soon King was cultivating his own musical skills singing Gospel music in church.
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Born in Itta Bena, on September 16, 1925, Riley B. King certainly learned what the blues were all about early in life; spending much of his childhood working as a sharecropper. A rather hardspent childhood prevented King from concentrating on the guitar until he was in his very late teens.
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