When B.B. King died in May 2015 at the age of 89, his Variety obituary hailed him as “the ‘King of the Blues,’ who helped define his genre’s electrified postwar sound and became the music’s best-known international ambassador.” That’s a far cry from his first appearance in these pages on June 2, 1954, a review of his New York debut at Harlem’s Apollo Theater the previous week that described him as a “rhythm & blues disker” who “twangs a guitar to accompany his modest vocalizing.”

Today, as the world marks what would’ve been King’s 100th birthday on Sept. 16, it seems ludicrous that anyone would call his powerful vocals “modest” or his wailing guitar twangy. But while he’d already notched three No. 1 hits on the Billboard R&B charts at that point in 1954 (including the classic “3 O’C

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