William Shatner said he called BB King’s daughter while making The Blues, and she answered with a line he did not forget: “You’re a gift from God!” The exchange came as he was looking for information about BB King and trying to shape the 2020 record around the right material to cover.
The Thrill Is Gone on The Blues
Shatner’s cover of “The Thrill Is Gone” appeared on The Blues in 2020, tying the project directly to BB King’s legacy. He has said King changed his life more than any other artist, a useful clue to why this was not just another guest-listen exercise but a search for permission, context, and the right tone before he cut the song.
That search had a practical side. Shatner said he recruited Ritchie Blackmore to help record the cover, which shows he was assembling musicians around a specific interpretive goal rather than treating the track as a novelty. For readers tracking how legacy material gets handled, that pairing matters: the song choice, the collaborator, and the family call all point to a deliberate attempt to stay close to the source material.
BB King’s seven decades
BB King’s career stretched across seven decades, from the 1940s until his death in 2015, and Shatner framed him as an artist whose reach went beyond one era. He described King as having a “guttural, heartfelt, soulful voice” and added, “And I loved his ability to be an entertainer for so long.”
Shatner also said, “I wanted to make a documentary on this search for the right blues songs to cover.” That adds friction to the story: he was thinking in documentary terms, but the available record only shows the finished 2020 cover, not whether that film ever materialized. The result is a project that feels part tribute, part research log, with the family call serving as the emotional proof point.
For anyone following Shatner’s music output, the takeaway is simple: he was not just borrowing a classic song, he was testing it against BB King’s own circle before releasing it. The unresolved question is the one he left hanging in the call itself: what, exactly, did BB King’s daughter tell him about him?
