Curtis Salgado doesn’t need ceremony to make a statement: his voice walks in ahead of him, steady, seasoned, and full of lived-in soul, with a range as wide as its depth is genuine. With Legacy Rewind: Live in ’25, his Nola Blue Records debut and first-ever live album release, Salgado turns that voice loose inside a 15-piece band at full throttle, captured in front of a packed house at The Triple Door in Seattle, WA on April 5, 2025.
Today, American Blues Scene is proud to premiere the third and final video leading up to album release day: “20 Years of B.B. King.” The performance arrives with added weight given its history and contemporary context. The studio version, co-written with Nashville songwriter David Duncan, was originally nominated for Song of the Year at the 30th Blues Music Awards in 2009. The song has lived onstage for years in Salgado’s setlists, evolving each time it’s played.
And the thread feels especially poignant now, as Forty Below Records recently released it as the lead single for the posthumous Mike Finnigan album. Finnigan, Salgado’s close friend, collaborator, and creative sounding board, was part of the song’s DNA from early on, helping mold its arrangement and musical nuances after Salgado and Duncan first sketched it out over the phone.
“20 Years of B.B. King” is anchored in a hook Duncan brought to Salgado: “I’ve learned more about the blues in two weeks from you than 20 years of B.B. King.” From there, the two shaped a narrative around it, layering in lyrical nods to B.B. King’s catalog, including “Sweet Little Angel,” which anchored the first verse, and expanding it into a tribute drawn from King’s broader songbook.
As Salgado recalls:
I thought it was a great hook and chorus, but knew we needed a storyline that sticks and makes the hook work. That’s songwriting 101. So, we started writing first-person lyrics over the music David was developing. He had the words “sweet little angel” in the first verse, which is one of B.B.’s first hit recordings from 1955!
So, we ran with it and started weaving in as many B.B. King songs as supported the narrative. And with that, the song just developed over the phone. We had such a great time writing it, and of course talking about all of the great songs of B.B. King. I then took the song to Michael Finnigan in Los Angeles, and he helped me with arrangement ideas and cool little nuances.
We wrote it twenty-five years ago, but I still play this song every night on stage.
This version on the live album really captures the special energy of playing it with a 15 piece band in front of a full house. It never would have happened without David Duncan or Mike Finnigan. We are all very proud of the song, and it is especially meaningful to me that it is part of Mike’s posthumous album.
The set finds Salgado revisiting key moments from a career that spans R&B, funk, soul, and rock ’n’ roll, but reimagined through new arrangements designed for scale: four-part horns, three backing vocalists, and a rhythm section that moves like a single organism.
Ten of the thirteen tracks come from Salgado’s Blues Music Award-nominated and award-winning catalog, including “Nobody But You” and “A Woman or The Blues” from Soul Shot (Alligator Records, 2012), “My Girlfriend” from The Beautiful Lowdown (Alligator Records, 2016), and the title track from Fine By Me (Little Village, 2024).
In his early years, Salgado met John Belushi, forming a friendship that offered a front-row view of Belushi’s improvisational brilliance long before The Blues Brothers made him a household name.
