William Shatner says the most revealing part of making The Blues was not the recording booth but a phone call. While preparing his 2020 cover of BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone, the actor and singer reached out to King’s daughter for help understanding the man behind the song.
That detail lands with weight because Shatner did not come to the project as a blues insider. He was working on a cover for a record built around the genre, and he wanted more than a song list. He wanted a sense of the right material, and he said the exchange gave him exactly that when King’s daughter told him, “You’re a gift from God!”
Shatner said the call mattered to him because he was trying to make “a documentary on this search for the right blues songs to cover.” He added that the response from King’s daughter was “very meaningful,” which turns the story from a routine tribute into something more personal: a search for permission, context and family approval before he sang one of the blues’ most closely associated songs.
That also explains why The Thrill Is Gone sits at the center of the story. Shatner said he had called while making The Blues to see whether King’s daughter could give him information about her father, even though King was no longer alive. The point was not nostalgia for its own sake. It was guidance from the family of a musician whose voice, Shatner said, was “such a guttural, heartfelt, soulful voice.”
Shatner also said he loved King’s ability to remain an entertainer for so long, a comment that fits the respect running through his music work. His career began toward the tail-end of the 1960s with The Transformed Man, and he later returned to covers in 2011 with Bohemian Rhapsody on Seeking Major Tom. By the time The Blues arrived in 2020, he had already built a catalogue that mixed spoken-word performance with unexpected song choices.
He was not alone on the track. Ritchie Blackmore helped record Shatner’s version of The Thrill Is Gone, which gave the cover another layer of musical pedigree. But the sharpest detail remains the same: Shatner did not just borrow a blues classic, he called into King’s family circle to ask how to approach it.
That leaves one question open: what, exactly, did King’s daughter tell him about BB King beyond the blessing that clearly stayed with him? Shatner has made the call sound like the heart of the project, and that makes the missing details about their conversation the part readers still want most.
