It came from 1996.

"This enigmatic one-hit wonder from 1996 sampled the chorus of B.B. King's 'How Blue Can You Get.'"

What a cool, evocative song. "Standing Outside A Broken Phone Booth With Money In My Hand." Perhaps the 1996 recording sounds lame to most people now — YouTube automatically served up "Fade Into You" when it ended — but I remember how much it was loved at the time. "Fade Into You" was loved too. Two decades ago... in the strange land that was 1996. Do you remember the Trappist Martyrs of Atlas, the creation of copernicium, the wreck of the Sea Empress, the Brothers to the Rescue, the Ozone Disco Club fire, the Freemen of Jordan, Montana, the Hoover Institution's report on global warming (saying it will probably benefit the United States), Hurricane Bertha, the Centennial Olympic Park bombing, Osama bin Laden's "Declaration of Jihad on the Americans Occupying the Country of the Two Sacred Places," the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, the re-election of Bill Clinton, and the demise of "Calvin and Hobbes"?

As for the recently departed B.B. King — you can listen to "How Blue Can You Get" at the top link — that transcends time.

"B. B. stood for Blues Boy, a name he took with his first taste of fame in the 1940s.... But he was born a King, albeit in a sharecropper’s shack..."

"He began in juke joints, country dance halls and ghetto nightclubs, playing 342 one-night stands in 1956 and 200 to 300 shows a year for a half-century thereafter, rising to concert halls, casino main stages and international acclaim. He was embraced by rock ’n’ roll fans of the 1960s and ’70s.... Mr. King considered a 1968 performance at the Fillmore West, the San Francisco rock palace, to have been the moment of his commercial breakthrough, he told a public-television interviewer in 2003. A few years earlier, he recalled, an M.C. in an elegant Chicago club had introduced him thus: 'O.K., folks, time to pull out your chitlins and your collard greens, your pigs’ feet and your watermelons, because here is B. B. King.'... When he saw 'long-haired white people' lining up outside the Fillmore, he said, he told his road manager, 'I think they booked us in the wrong place.' Then the promoter Bill Graham introduced him to the sold-out crowd: '“Ladies and gentlemen, I bring you the chairman of the board, B. B. King.'"

B. B. King has died. He was 89.

Goodbye to Ruth Garland-Dewson, the San Francisco milliner.

"Mrs. Dewson owned a celebrated shop on upper Fillmore Street called Mrs. Dewson's Hats for more than 37 years. Among her customers were former Mayor Willie Brown, Bruce Springsteen, Samuel L. Jackson, B.B. King and Sharon Stone. Brown called her "the milliner to high society." Mrs. Dewson designed a hat for him, which she called the Willie Brown Snap Brim. 'It fit my personality,' Brown wrote in his autobiography, 'Basic Brown."

When I was in San Francisco back in 2007, I had a chance encounter with her. I blogged this:

I was traipsing about San Francisco yesterday, and, snapping dozens of pictures, I made my way over to Fillmore Street for a little window shopping. I saw this...



.. and was struggling against the glare and reflections to frame my shot — and also, idiotically, talking on my iPhone — when a woman — who I now understand to be Ruth Garland-Dewson — swept out of the store and flung herself between me and the picture of Barack Obama.

"Are you trying to take a picture of my man?" she said dramatically.

But she wasn't what I for a second thought she was: one of those shopkeepers who are touchy about having their place photographed. She wanted to come out and talk — about Barack Obama and other things as well. I got off my phone conversation and complimented her on the great shop and asked if she had extra large hats. I love women's hats, but since I need a men's extra-large size, I can never find a woman's hat — aside from something stretchy — that fits. She found me what might have been her largest hat, and it almost fit. You know, I should have bought it! It was ocher-colored with a dark purple spiral — a felt hat with a large brim. I think I would have bought it if she'd tried to talk me into it (as so many sales people have nudged me beyond my initial resistance — it's not very hard).

But she wanted to talk about Barack Obama. Do I like him? Yes! I think he's a good man, and that he would be able to do a lot of good. I added, "But I kind of like Giuliani." That was okay with her, it seemed — so long as I don't like Hillary.

I'm sad to read that she's died, and I'm sorry I didn't buy that hat. She was so sociable and nice to me that day. She seemed like she was ready to launch into a conversation with me just because I was the one person who happened to be around just then.

Can you see the printed text in my photograph, above? That's her line, "I would say, 'Go, Obama, you're black enough for me,'" which ended a letter that she had printed in the San Francisco Chronicle on March 1, 2007, reacting to what was then a hot dispute: whether Obama was "black enough."