low-slung fields to Itta Bena. The season is waning now: just north of here around Clarksdale, capital of the blues, little clouds of cotton have burst forth "like popcorn", as John Steinbeck once remarked; here the white puffs remain closed in their pods. When he was a boy, BB King used to drive his mule through those fields while his Uncle Jack, up front, sung "the holler", the descendant of the slave chants and responses, wherein the blues began. "I remember the holler," says BB. "Holding the reins of a mule pulling a hoe through them cotton fields." The field holler, he explains, was a lament sung on a minor scale by a single voice. It also functioned as a communication to alert others in the field that the boss was coming, or that water was needed. "Yeah, the holler is where it all started. I think it's in all of us." Riley B King was born on 16 September 1925, great-grandson of a slave. He moved soon after with his mother to Kilmichael, in Hill Country, to work as a farmhand and listen to his aunt's Blind Lemon Jefferson records. His uncle, the great bluesman Bukka White, would visit from Memphis -- play and sing. First BB's mother died, then the grandmother in whose care he had been placed. "The blues," he would later write, "was bleeding the same blood as me." Picking cotton for 75 cents a day, BB had coveted the local preacher's guitar and was even