During a ceremony in the White House East Room in Washington DC, B.B. King was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush, who lauded King for overcoming his hardscrabble childhood in the South to become one of the world’s greatest blues guitarists and singers. King was living alone by the time he was 9 and picked cotton for 35 cents a day, Bush recalled. “It has been said that when John Lennon was asked to name his great ambition, he said, ‘to play the guitar like B.B. King,”‘ Bush said. “Many musicians have had that same goal but nobody has ever been able to match the skill, or copy the sound of the King of the Blues.”
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