B.B. King & Eric Clapton "Riding With The King"

Riding with the King is a blues album by Eric Clapton and B.B. King that was released in 2000. It was their first collaborative album and won the 2000 Grammy Award for Best Traditional Blues Album. The album reached number one on Billboard's Top Blues Albums and was certified 2× Multi-Platinum in the United States. Riding with the King was also released on a DVD-Audio in higher resolution and with a 5.1 surround sound mix in 2000.

The album was generally well received by reviewers, although some felt that it could have been better, and that the sound on the CD was too polished for a blues album.

Riding with the King was the first collaborative album by Eric Clapton and B.B. King. They performed together for the first time at Cafe Au Go Go in New York City in 1967 when Clapton was 22 and a member of Cream, but did not record together until 1997 when King collaborated with Clapton on the song "Rock Me Baby" for his duets album, Deuces Wild. Clapton looked up to King and had always wanted to make an album with him. King said they had discussed the project often, and added: "I admire the man. I think he's No. 1 in rock 'n' roll as a guitarist and No. 1 as a great person." At the time of recording Riding with the King, Clapton was 55 and King 74.

Clapton initiated the recording sessions for Riding with the King and included some of his regular session musicians on the album. He also chose the songs and co-produced the album with Simon Climie, who had previously worked on several of Clapton's albums. While this would appear to be a Clapton album recorded with King, Clapton gave center-stage to King, who took the lead on many of the songs with his singing and his solos.

The album contains five "vintage" King songs from the 1950s and 1960s: "Ten Long Years", "Three O'Clock Blues", "Help the Poor", "Days of Old" and "When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer". Other standards include the Big Bill Broonzy-penned "Key to the Highway" (which Clapton had recorded in the early 1970s with Derek and the Dominos), Chicago pianist Maceo Merriweather's "Worried Life Blues", a cover of Isaac Hayes's composition "Hold On, I'm Comin'" originally a 1966 single for Sam & Dave, and "Come Rain or Come Shine" from the 1946 musical St. Louis Woman. The album's title track, "Riding with the King", is a John Hiatt composition that came about when producer Scott Mathews recounted to Hiatt a strange and abstract dream he had of flying on an airplane with Elvis Presley. It is also the title track of Hiatt's 1983 album of the same name that Mathews co-produced. The balance of the tracks were written especially for the album.

The tracks are a mixture of acoustic ("Worried Life Blues") and electric songs ("Three O'Clock Blues"), and vary from slow numbers ("Ten Long Years") to "mid-tempo stomps" ("Help the Poor").

Track listing

1. "Riding with the King" John Hiatt 4:23
2. "Ten Long Years" Jules Taub, B.B. King 4:40
3. "Key to the Highway" Big Bill Broonzy, Charlie Segar 3:39
4. "Marry You" Doyle Bramhall II, Susannah Melvoin, Craig Ross 4:59
5. "Three O'Clock Blues" Lowell Fulson 8:36
6. "Help the Poor" Charles Singleton 5:06
7. "I Wanna Be" Doyle Bramhall II, Charlie Sexton 4:45
8. "Worried Life Blues" Sam Hopkins, Big Maceo Merriweather 4:25
9. "Days of Old" Jules Taub, B.B. King 3:00
10. "When My Heart Beats Like a Hammer" B.B. King, Jules Taub 7:09
11. "Hold On, I'm Comin'" Isaac Hayes, David Porter 6:20
12. "Come Rain or Come Shine" Harold Arlen, Johnny Mercer 4:11