B.B. King And Lucille
B.B. King and Lucille were inseparable. Reuters

Any artist needs the perfect tool to create his masterpiece. For B.B. King, the legendary blues musician who passed away Thursday at the age of 89, it was a modified black Gibson ES-355. Named "Lucille," the guitar has its own incredible journey that includes being stolen and found in a Las Vegas pawn shop.

Before we get to how Lucille was stolen, we need to start at the beginning. As King tells it, he and his band were playing a small nightclub in 1949 when a fight broke out. Two men started a fire, and while everyone was scrambling for the exits, King realized he'd left his guitar inside. Luckily, he grabbed the guitar and later found out the fight was over a woman named Lucille. That's how a legend was born.

Lucille would still have her exalted place in the pantheon of guitars if she had been King's main instrument. In fact, throughout the years, there have been several guitars named Lucille, but one of them was stolen from King in 2009.

Gibson celebrated King's 80th birthday in 2005 with a custom line of Gibson ES-355s built to his specs -- from the fretboard to the strings down to the pickups -- and presented the first Lucille prototype model to King as a present. The guitar was stolen in 2009 and presumed lost.

Eric Dahl, an avid guitar collector from Nashville, found a slightly used 2005 Lucille model in a Las Vegas pawn shop. After some research, he realized it was the same Gibson guitar that was stolen from King. Dahl arranged a meeting with King and returned the guitar in November 2009. "He was one of the nicest people I've ever met in my life. He just kept shaking my hand and thanking me. He really thought he'd never see it again. His smile was a mile wide," Dahl said to the Associated Press.