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Blues Legend B.B. King Dies at 89, RIP

BLUES LEGEND BB KING DEAD AT AGE 89 … THE THRILL MAY BE GONE, BUT HIS MUSIC GENIUS WILL LAST FOREVER.

Blues just became even more and today as it has lost one of its greats. B.B. King passed away in Las Vegas at the age of 89. King had been hospitalized in April for a few days after suffering from dehydration related to Type 2 diabetes. In May he said in a Facebook post that he was in hospice care at his home. B.B. King will for ever be associated with his trademark black Gibson guitars, all of which he called Lucille.  King was one in a million. He won 15 Grammys and in 1987 received a lifetime award. B.B. King was  inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. King was among the recipients of the Kennedy Center Honors in 1995 and was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006. Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time ranked King at No. 3, behind only Jimi Hendrix and Duane Allman.

BB King.com

B.B. King: September 16, 1925 – May 14, 2015, RIP

Blues legend B.B. King, who took his music from rural juke joints to the mainstream and inspired a generation of guitarists from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan, has died in Las Vegas. He was 89.

News of King’s death, confirmed late Thursday on a Facebook page linked to the website of his daughter Claudette, triggered shockwaves across social media, with blues, rock and country music stars lining up to pay tribute.

King was hospitalized in April for a few days after suffering from dehydration related to Type 2 diabetes. In May he said in a Facebook post that he was in hospice care at his home.

Born on a plantation to sharecropper parents, he outlived his post-World War Two blues peers – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker – to see the rough music born in the cotton fields of the segregated South reach a new audience.

“Being a blues singer is like being black twice,” King wrote in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me,” of the lack of respect the music got compared with rock and jazz.

“The Thrill is Gone” – B.B King

B. B. King, Defining Bluesman for Generations, Dies at 89.

Mr. King married country blues to big-city rhythms and created a sound instantly recognizable to millions: a stinging guitar with a shimmering vibrato, notes that coiled and lept like an animal, and a voice that groaned and bent with the weight of lust, longing and lost love.

“I wanted to connect my guitar to human emotions,” Mr. King said in his autobiography, “Blues All Around Me” (1996), written with David Ritz.

In performances, his singing and his solos flowed into each other as he wrung notes from the neck of his guitar, vibrating his hand as if it were wounded, his face a mask of suffering. Many of the songs he sang — like his biggest hit, “The Thrill Is Gone” (“I’ll still live on/But so lonely I’ll be”) — were poems of pain and perseverance.

The music historian Peter Guralnick once noted that Mr. King helped expand the audience for the blues through “the urbanity of his playing, the absorption of a multiplicity of influences, not simply from the blues, along with a graciousness of manner and willingness to adapt to new audiences and give them something they were able to respond to.”

B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s. His peers were bluesmen like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, whose nicknames fit their hard-bitten lives. But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack surrounded by dirt-poor laborers and wealthy landowners.

But you can’t say Memphis Blues without saying BB King …  Beale Street Blues Boy.

He was a hit, and quickly became a popular disc jockey playing the blues on a Memphis radio station, WDIA. “Before Memphis,” he wrote in his autobiography, “I never even owned a record player. Now I was sitting in a room with a thousand records and the ability to play them whenever I wanted. I was the kid in the candy store, able to eat it all. I gorged myself.”

Memphis had heard five decades of the blues: country sounds from the Delta, barrelhouse boogie-woogie, jumps and shuffles and gospel shouts. He made it all his own. From records he absorbed the big-band sounds of Count Basie, the rollicking jump blues of Louis Jordan, the electric-guitar styles of the jazzman Charlie Christian and the bluesman T-Bone Walker.

On the air in Memphis, Mr. King was nicknamed the Beale Street Blues Boy. That became Blues Boy, which became B. B. In December 1951, two years after arriving in Memphis, Mr. King released a single, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which reached No. 1 on the rhythm-and-blues charts and stayed there for 15 weeks.

24 Year Old Brittany Johnson Missing Since 5/9/15 in Albuquerque, NM (Update: Vehicle found Wednesday at Sandia Crest)(Update: Found Deceased)

24 year old Brittany Johnson has been missing since May 9, 2015 in  Albuquerque, New Mexico. Brittany Johnson was last seen in Albuquerque near Broadway and Mountain at a spa, The Bath House, around noon on Saturday, May 9. However, she didn’t show up to her grandparents for Mother’s Day, nor did she attend her friend’s graduation party over the weekend. Authorities believe she was driving a 2006 red Toyota Corolla with a co-exist sticker on the back window and New Mexico plates KMD-048. There has been no activity on her credit card, and her phone goes straight to voice mail.

Police say she has brown hair and blue eyes.

Officials say she may be at-risk based on other circumstances involved and her disappearance is very uncharacteristic of her. Her brother says, she didn’t attend events she planned on going to over the weekend and didn’t check in on mother’s day.

24-year-old Albuquerque woman vanishes without a trace.

Lt. Pete Golden with the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department said, “Her disappearance is highly unusual and is out of character for her normal pattern of behavior. Because it is so unusual and out of the norm is the reason we’re so concerned for her well being.”

The department issued an endangered missing person alert and described Johnson as “at-risk.”

“We don’t believe she is with anyone else who may be putting her at risk, but again, her behavior is out of the norm, and that is the reason for our concern,” he added.  “Because her pattern of behavior is so atypical from what her friends, her family and everyone else she interacts with have described, it is a reason we have such an elevated concern for her welfare,” he explained.

UPDATE I: Vehicle located, search continues for missing Brittany Johnson.

This does not sound good. As per KOAT-7, Carolyn Herrera, Johnson’s best friend said she has been dealing with a lot of personal problems lately and might have gone to the crest to clear her head. Herrera said the last time she heard from Johnson was through text messages on Saturday, just before she went missing. Herrera further went on to say, “She’s been kind of doing some soul-searching and kind of figuring out what she wants to do.” She hasn’t been talking to friends as much.”

Her car was found Wednesday at Sandia Crest.

Search and rescue teams have been searching that area ever since…but so far no sign of her.

Now deputies say they’ve learned a male hiker came into the gift shop at Sandia Crest after finding car keys on a nearby trail.

They discovered the keys belonged to Johnson’s vehicle, so they decided to leave them on top of the car for when she returned. She never did.

Deputies are focusing on the area south of the parking lot where the keys were found but that could change.

UPDATE II: The search for a missing woman near the Sandia Crest has turned up a different set of remains.

The search for a missing woman near the Sandia Crest has turned up a different set of remains. Deputies think they may belong to a woman who vanished last year.

While wrapping up their search for 24-year old Britney Johnson Thursday night the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Office said a crew found a skeleton in an open area south of the crest parking lot.

BCSO spent Friday morning recovering the remains and looking for clues around the skeleton which they believe has been there for about a year. Deputies say the remains were not buried and had no clothes, wallet or anything else that would identify the person.

Deputies did say it’s possible that the remains belong to a woman who was reported missing about a year ago. They are treating it as a crime scene.

Deputies say the medical investigator will confirm the identity next but that could take up to a couple weeks

Anyone with information is urged to call the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department at 505-886-1065 or 505-798-7000.

UPDATE II: Brittany Johnson, missing for days, found deceased. 

According to the Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department, Brittany Johnson who has been missing since Saturday May 9, 2015 was found deceased Friday at the base of a steep cliff in the Sandia Mountains at approximately 4:50 pm.

Rescue crews spotted her while scanning the western cliff face of the mountain just south of the Sandia Crest parking lot. Due to extreme weather conditions, her recovery took more than six hours.

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s Department believes her death to be accidental.  The Office of the Medical Investigator has conducted an autopsy but their final report of findings will take some time to be completed.

8th Victim Pulled from Amtrak Train Crash … Identified as Missing 45 Year Old Bob Gildersleeve Husband and Father of Two

The search is over for missing Bob Gildersleeve …

An 8th victim has been pulled from the of Amtrak 188 crash sight on Thursday. Bob Gildersleeve was thought to be aboard the train when it crashed Tuesday night in Philadelphia, however, remained missing. His family gathered in Philadelphia after the accident and passed out fliers with his photo. Sadly, what many had suspected came true. A body was discovered on Thursday by a cadaver dog in the wreckage and was identified as 45 year old Bob Gildersleeve, a husband and a father of two. Our hearts and prayers go out to the family of Bob Gildersleeve and the other families who lost loved ones in this terrible train crash.

The NTSB announced earlier that the train had been traveling 106 mph heading into a turn where the speed limit was 50 mph. The engineer claims he does not remember anything.

45 year old Bob Gildersleeve,  RIP

Bob Gildersleeve, a 45-year-old husband and father of two, was the latest victim identified in the crash.

Gildersleeve’s family gathered in Philadelphia after the accident, passing out fliers with his photo and identifying him as missing as recently as Wednesday.

With the discovery of the body by the cadaver dog Thursday, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter said officials had accounted for all 238 passengers and five crew members who were believed to be aboard the train, which started in Washington and passed through Maryland on its way toward New York.

By Thursday evening, officials said, all eight of the dead had been identified.

Gildersleeve’s death was confirmed by Doug Baker, chairman and CEO of Ecolab. Gildersleeve had worked at the Minnesota-based water, hygiene and technologies company for 22 years, most recently as vice president of corporate accounts for institutional business in North America out of offices in Towson.

The other seven who were among the dead aboard Amtrak 188 are as follows, 8 total have died:

1. Jim Gaines, an award-winning AP video software architect and a father of two
2. Justin Zemser. a Naval Academy midshipman from New York City
3. Abid Gilani. a senior vice president in Wells Fargo’s commercial real estate division in New York
4. Rachel Jacobs, who was commuting home to New York from her new job as CEO of the Philadelphia educational software startup ApprenNet
5. Laura Finamore, a New York City resident who worked in commercial real estate
6. Giuseppe Piras, an Italian businessman  from Sardinia who worked in the wine and olive oil business.
7. Derrick Griffith, 42, dean of students at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn. A statement from the college described Griffith as “a pillar in the community” who had just been granted a Doctorate of Philosophy by the City University of New York.

Abram Wade “Pete” Franklin, Fifth Person Arrested in Connection With Shooting Deaths of Mississippi Officers Benjamin Deen & Liquori Tate

5TH DIRTBAG ARRESTED IN THE SHOOTING DEATHS OF HATTIESBURG POLICE OFFICERS BENJAMIN DEAN AND LIQUORI TATE …

29 year old Abram Wade “Pete” Franklin of 507 North 38th Avenue in Hattiesburg  has been arrested and becomes the 5th suspect charged in connection with the shooting deaths of Hattiesburg police officers Benjamin Deen & Liquori Tate. Franklin has been charged with obstruction of justice in the murders of Deen and Liquori. Franklin is being held in the Forrest County Jail.

Others arrested in the two officers murders are 28 year old Cornelius Clark has been charged with obstruction of justice, Marvin Banks, 29, and Joanie Calloway, 22, were each charged with two counts of capital murder and Curtis Banks, 26.

Abram Wade “Pete” Franklin, 29, was charged with obstruction of justice

Authorities in Mississippi said late Wednesday that they had arrested a fifth person in connection with the murder of two Hattiesburg police officers over the weekend.

Abram Wade “Pete” Franklin, 29, was arrested by Mississippi Bureau of Investigation agents and charged with obstruction of justice. He was being held in the Forrest County Jail pending an initial bond hearing. MBI spokesman Warren Strain declined to say what Franklin did to merit the charge.

Four others have already been charged in the Saturday shootings of Hattiesburg officers Benjamin Deen and Liquori Tate and remain in jail. Marvin Banks, 29, is jailed without bond on two capital murder charges. His 22-year-old girlfriend, Joanie Calloway, and 26-year-old brother, Curtis Banks, are charged as accessories after the fact. A friend, 28-year-old Cornelius Clark, is charged with obstruction of justice.