Toyota Pitchman Riley B. King Passes Away at 89

Riley B. King, a blues musician who starred in a commercial launching the 2015 Toyota Corolla last year, passed away at the age of 89 last week in Las Vegas.

Wouldn’t it be terrible if that’s the way car enthusiasts looked at the world, solely through headlight shaped lenses, with things outside the automotive sphere only mattering when they interact somehow with cars?

Riley King was of course better known as B.B. King, a foundational player in the pantheon of electric guitarists, one of the “three kings” of the blues, along with Freddie and Albert. A star on the blues circuit since 1950s “3 O’Clock Blues”, King was an indefatigable performer, performing hundreds of gigs a year. He dressed the blues up in a suit and, after Michael Bloomfield encouraged rock impresario Bill Graham to book his mentor King and other black bluesmasters into his Fillmore auditoriums in the late 1960s, B.B.’s music was exposed to a new and much larger audience. That led to his huge crossover hit “The Thrill Is Gone” (producer Bill Szymczyk‘s shimmering strings added to King’s uptown version of the blues). Regularly performing well into his 80s, the suit eventually became a tuxedo and he became the ambassador to the world for America’s indigenous art form.

As it happens, King’s last public appearance was the Toyota commercial that started airing last October after King withdrew from what turned out to be his final tour that month due to exhaustion and dehydration. The ad, part of the ’15 Camry launch’s ‘One Bold Choice Leads to Another’ ad campaign, was titled “Guitar”. It portrayed a young woman who took a risk at a storage auction and ended up with one of King’s famous “Lucille” Gibson semi-hollowbody electric guitars. The ad shows her driving her Camry to meet King backstage, where he was supposedly reunited with his guitar, which he autographed for her.

Also, as it happens, just a short while ago I was actually planning on writing about the B.B. King Camry commercial. At the Chicago Auto Show in February, Toyota’s stand had a display case devoted to that commercial, complete with a Gibson “Lucille” and the brocade tuxedo jacket King wore in the commercial. I think guitars are pretty cool, so I took a few photos as best as I could (I don’t have a polarized filter so it was tough avoiding reflections from the display case glass). I was kind of surprised the guitar in the display wasn’t the actual guitar from the commercial. That guitar had a “burst” finish, while the one in the display case was a production black Gibson 65th Anniversary edition ES-355 Lucille in black. The plaque on the case said it was “B.B. King’s Gibson Guitar, Lucille”, but I’m at least a little bit skeptical it was ever Mr. King’s personal instrument. More likely it was loaned from Gibson. The brocade tuxedo jacket in the display, however, was the actual one King wore in the commercial, similar to the one he was buried in, a signature element to his later stage appearances.